I don't Measure Up

Ironically, I thought anorexia was like a friend that helped me keep my sanity. I wanted to starve myself to the point where my brain couldn't infiltrate my daily life with its madness. I thought it was working to keep the racing thoughts and depressing mantras at bay. I thought I was in control.

Holy shit, was I wrong.

This "friend" wasn't helping me at all. Instead of giving me back the control I needed, the anorexia was taking over my brain to kill my body while constantly lying to me. Even though I would watch the numbers on my scale drop and had to wear clothes from the children's department, I somehow believed I was getting fatter. I was constantly cold, passed out on a regular basis, started losing hair, and developed a heart condition, but refused to accept that this was anorexia's fault. 

No amount of therapy appointments or visits to the doctor or regaining consciousness on the floor could convince me that the anorexia I needed  to calm my mind was killing me. But a two minute friendly battle during a girl's night could.

The details leading up to the life-changing moment are fuzzy. I think we were arguing about who would look better in a certain dress or skirt. She told me she would totally wear it, if she didn't have such thunder thighs. I told her she was crazy and that I would kill for legs like hers. Mine were too squishy. Her mouth dropped. She grabbed a tape measure, and proved to me once and for all that my legs were thinner than hers. By a lot. 

For her, that was the end. She won the argument, and we went back to whatever trivial thing we had been doing that got us on the topic of dresses in the first place.

It was far from over. I put on a good show for the rest of the evening, acting like I wasn't completely distracted and scared out of my fucking mind. When I was alone again, all hell broke loose. I grabbed the measuring tape and went wild. 

The microwave is smaller than the stove, right? Yes. 

Is my cat bigger than the pillow? No, I didn't think so. 

My toothbrush is skinnier than my hairbrush. Yup, I knew that.

Is my arm bigger than the table leg? What the fuck.

Full on panic. Why was I able to see everything else for what it really was, but I couldn't do the same for my own body?! I spent hours measuring and recording results and remeasuring and crying in a ball on the floor and redoing the experiments with another tape measure. I couldn't make sense of what was happening without admitting that I was crazy. I was determined to prove that I wasn't wrong, that the anorexia hadn't betrayed me. But she had.

I realized, with anger, fear, resentment, and defeat, I couldn't trust my brain anymore. If I was going to get better, if I was going to stay alive and actually start living, I needed to learn to trust other people to tell me what was best. More importantly, I needed them to tell me what was real.

Even after this epiphany, I didn't go down easily. I dropped out of treatment, I relapsed, I skipped meals and lied to loved ones. But eventually,  I learned I had to stand up for myself against anorexia. And I needed help  from sources stronger than me to do that.

I still have days that I cry because I think I'm fat. I won't wear certain types of clothes because I don't think they flatter my "strange" shape. Some of that is just being a self-conscious girl. A little part of it is the anorexia that still lives in the back of my mind, buried under coping mechanisms, years of healing, acceptance, and desire to move forward.