Welcome to life.after.anorexia

I am a MFA student at a low-residency grad school in Los Angeles. For the next four months I will be writing here daily about my experience dealing with and recovering from anorexia. I am not the skeleton I used to be. I ate three meals today. They were small meals, but I ate without puking or crying or spitting the majority of my food into the wastebasket. I don't have to panic anymore. I don't have to deny myself one of the most basic human rights. I don't have to trick my body into thinking hunger is good, emptiness is good, starvation is sacred. I don't need to constantly know I am thin anymore. I don't have to weigh myself ten times a day anymore. I don't obsess over it anymore. You shouldn't have to either.

Three years ago, I would have never believed anyone who told me I could be "better". I didn't believe in becoming "healthy" and I never wanted to. But I can honestly say, without feeling fraudulent or melodramatic, that I'm glad I began the recovery process. There was a time when I wanted to die, when I ate so little it seems somehow unreal that I managed not to die. It wasn't all that long ago I was abusing laxatives, diet pills, enemas--anything to get the food out. Fat scared me more than death. What does fat mean to you?

Through this project I hope to foster a sense of reclamation of the body. We don’t have to be ashamed or afraid of ourselves despite the rigid beauty restraints put in place by society. I want to show the importance of loving our bodies, not only for ourselves, but for the young girls and boys who are growing up with the poisoned assumptions that a woman’s body is only allowed to be one shape: thin.