Those in the medical community will tell you that anorexia nervosa is characterized by depression, a negative self-image, and appearing underweight. I can tell you that there is a paralyzing fear of gaining weight, where you restrict yourself to only 500 calories a day, counting every single one. I can tell you that you won’t let too much water pass your lips because you are so terrified that it would make you bloated and look fat. Depression? That can’t even begin to describe the horrible, crushing loneliness of crying yourself to sleep every night.
When I was in high school, I was anorexic.
I used to hate myself. I hated how I looked, I hated how I had no self-esteem and that I felt out of place. I felt like I didn’t belong, because I wasn’t pretty enough to belong. Today, now, I am happy. I love myself, I love my body, and the only things that can get me down are midterms. But it wasn’t always so, and I still feel the impacts from my past disease.
Starving myself wrecked my body. I was weak and perpetually dizzy. I can’t even remember how many times I almost fainted just walking up a flight of stairs. I didn’t have my period for half a year, which my gynecologist says might mean it’ll be harder for me to have kids. That was the extent of my symptoms, but others who have had eating disorders can have permanent organ damage, crippling psychological impacts linked to depression, and, in some cases, die.
You see, those aren’t things that you’re thinking about when all you’re trying to do is be thinner. You don’t think about the physical effects, the psychological scars. I, and others like me, never thought about those possibilities, because it never seemed weird that it was happening. I thought it was normal to be so sad, to hate myself and my body because I didn’t think I was attractive. It’s not. It is not normal, and it is not alright.
There is this ethos that women should look a certain way, a certain skinny way. Some will scoff that there’s any outside pressure to be thin, but those who scoff aren’t young women. Whether it’s the horribly destructive ‘thinspirational’ Tumblrs, the pages of magazines, or the legions of students trekking up to Yates, there is pressure even here at Georgetown to not just be fit, but thin.
Don’t get me wrong, being healthy and working out is fine, really good even. But working out for hours and burning thousands of calories, only to go home and binge is bad. Pretending to eat by pushing around a Sweetgreen salad and then saying you’re full is not okay. We are surrounded by a paradigm that we must conform to a conception of being beautiful that hinges upon the need to be thin, and as a society we created that paradigm.
Simply placing the blame for this ethos on magazines that have stick-thin models, or some glorification of Hollywood, is naïve and incomplete. I refuse to believe that the debilitating anxiety to be thinner is dictated by Anna Wintour deciding to put a size double zero model on the cover of Vogue. They probably don’t help, but it’s so much more than that. Something has to change, and soon, because we can’t keep strolling along ignoring that there is a significant portion of society, even at Georgetown, that needs help.
It’s up to us as a society to change. It’s up to us to make sure that every single person who is walking around this campus is aware that they are wonderful and beautiful just how they are. It’s up to us to make sure that our fellow Hoyas understand that having a destructive relationship with eating, or working out, or their bodies are bad. It’s up to us to talk about eating disorders.
I might be happy now, but underneath my newfound confidence, there are still the remnants of a broken teenage girl crying out for attention. Look into the eyes of your fellow students and tell me you don’t see it reflected in some of them, too. Georgetown is not immune to the pervasive, destructive influence of the need to be thinner, always to be thinner. That’s wrong, and it’s about time it stopped. It’s about time we stopped creating this pressure to be thin. And it’s about damn time we talked about eating disorders.
Really good article! Your honesty pulsed throughout the piece. Thanks for this.