I can feel it

The weight of every cell

conspiring against me

Pulling me down

Excess

Flesh

How will I ever get to where I want to be

Like this?

It was never about weight."

|Circles|

The best way to describe the next four years of your life is unending circles. Admission, discharge, readmission. Weight gain, weight loss, each time more severe. Sitting in the same therapy room, going over the same one-sided conversation.

"Food is fuel. A car can't run without fuel; neither can your body."

"Food is medicine. If you don't take it, you can't get better…"

Being in inpatient treatment for an eating disorder is like being stuck in time, re-living the same fears multiple times a day. Ordinary things like school and boyfriends and family become secondary. They mattered so much that you needed a way to make them stop being significant. Now things that you know are realistically trivial have become more important, like who can eat the slowest or who can leave the most food on their plate without hospital staff noticing.

Days go by in fits of clock watching. It may be ticking forwards, but you're not. Time has stopped for you, but for everyone else, it continues. Mairu's learning to live without her sister. Izaya's working incessantly. Your parents keep travelling, keep telling themselves that you'll get over it. The city doesn't sleep.

The more you sink into the cold comfort of the illness, the further your connections with others are damaged. If they were troubled before, they're a tangled knot of disorder now. There isn't space in your mind for the messiness that comes with being a daughter, or a sister. A student. A teenage girl. They're all things that you aren't very good at.

What you've come to discover is that starving yourself is something you can do. You're good at losing weight, and at following the rules, most of the time. Not the hospital's rules. The ones that you, or the illness, have constructed for yourself. It can be hard to keep up when the goalposts keep moving, but at least you're trying. You know every corner of your room from pacing. It's easier to walk in circles for hours than to sit with feelings of laziness, even if it is the middle of the night. Sitting down is forbidden. It's a clear-cut rule. There aren't the same rules for relationships.

Mairu's the one who understands those things naturally. When she laughs, she laughs freely. People gravitate towards her without her even trying. You...
your connections with people are based on something so tenuous, their fragility is the only guarantee. You desperately crave true, tangible connections, yet over time you've become increasingly pessimistic about the possibility.

Iza-nii visits every other week. He doesn't want to be there, taking time out of his busy schedule to see you. You don't want to be there either. There's nothing wrong with you, why can't you just go home? You aren't thin enough to be anorexic. Izaya snaps at you impatiently.

"Do you want to die? Is that what this is about?"

How are you supposed to answer a question like that? Yes, no. You want the old you to die, but you can't envision a new you. You're all malformed parts. Any way they're put together will be dysfunctional. You don't really believe that by not eating, you're killing yourself. He's being ridiculous.

"Human life is precious." He says finally. "That's why I can't stand people who just throw it away."

|Stasis|

When you were first admitted, Mairu didn't see you for a whole month. When she visits for the first time, she wraps her arms around you and hugs you, hard. Your insides coil with shame. Your sister, your other half - the hands that hold you together when you come close to breaking...you can't stand them touching you.

Your mum comes once a fortnight, on alternate weeks to Izaya. Your dad far less often. You don't have much to say to her when you're allowed to walk two loops around the building together. She tries to keep the conversation light, but it's forced. She's nervous around you.

You spend six months in the hospital. When you go back to school, nobody asks you questions, but they stare and whisper. Mairu has become your protector. She snaps fiercely at anyone who dares look in your direction for too long. She cooks for you at home and includes you in her social plans. She tries so hard for you. You try too, you really do, but it isn't long before you're losing weight again. You're at war with yourself, and the only way to overcome it is to wage a war with the voice.

They say to recover from anorexia, you must do the opposite of what the voice tells you. Sit with the discomfort, and keep sitting with it, until eventually, it lessens to the point that you can live a normal life. The thing is, it feels impossible to separate the voice from your own.

"Please Kuru-nee, it's our birthday."

The cake that Iza-nii has chosen used to be your favourite. You want to have some, you want to take part, but the idea is repulsive. It would be excessive, greedy. Even looking at it makes you feel sick. Mairu looks crushed when you shake your head.

"One piece won't kill your Kuru-nee."

She takes it back into the kitchen without slicing it or blowing out the candles. Iza-nii. looks at you.

"It won't. Your eating problem could, though."

You were eighteen when they asked: "Who are you without the eating disorder?"

It was a simple enough question, but one that you couldn't answer. You spent your teenage years fingering at your ribcage, pulling apart your structure until there was nothing left of you. Your desperation to achieve some semblance of likeability was so heightened that you let your values be eradicated. "Smile", and you would. "Jump", and you would. "Eat"... now that was something you couldn't do.

It's no surprise then, that after years of letting your personality be so grossly contorted you have no idea who you are without the eating disorder.

And still, all this time later, your whole body aches with the wish to be in someone else's skin.

Against the odds, you make it to university. You're at the point where you eat too little to maintain a healthy weight, but enough to stay out of hospital. You're getting on with life, in all appearances, but you feel like a caricature of a normal person. You're more independent now, less of a burden. Mairu does her own thing and you do yours. You're not happy this way, but you're...well, it's better to fill your time than to stop and think about it. Always having something to do is vital. You're not really moving forwards, not really moving backwards. You're static, trapped.

|Severance|

Recovery isn't a linear process. Sometimes, you have to go in circles and get stuck before you can move forwards. You can have all the support in the world and remain stuck if you don't actively challenge the voice. Doing so is exhausting, and uncomfortable. You will feel futile and lonely, that it's easier to give in and stay sick. But amidst the darkness, moments of brightness will unveil themselves. You'll be able to feel joy and uncertainty and boredom in all their vibrance. You'll be able to participate instead of watching from the sidelines. You'll learn to measure your value in other ways than how much your fingers touch when you close them around your bicep.

There wasn't a lightbulb moment. Recovery is taking the risk to do the opposite and realising that even though it feels like your world is falling apart, you're creating a new world for yourself. One where you can be somebody separate from the anorexia. One where you can laugh spontaneously without thinking that you don't deserve to.

It doesn't leave fully, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it's an absence that you can feel. Others, a whisper. Sometimes a reminder when things become difficult that you are resilient. It's more of a ghost beside you than a voice within you.

You can pay attention to the voices of others now, and your own. And when it's your birthday and Mairu wants to celebrate, you can join in.

You think you're starting to know who you are without it.