A recent study found that every sixty-two minutes,
someone dies as a direct result of an
eating disorder. When the hand keeps ticking and the scales
keep tipping we’re left with the fact that eating disorders
have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.
Tell me this is a phase.
Tell me this isn’t a big deal.
Tell me an hour
of high school health class is enough
to teach us the reality behind the Lifetime movies.
Enough to tell a diet from
a death wish.
We idolize the results of pain but shame the pain itself.
We see headlines
Lacey Smarr, 15 dies from heart attack
Catharine Nuno, 18 dies from cardiac arrhythmia
Sarah Siskin, 19 dies from cardiac arrhythmia
Max Briles, 26 dies from heart damage
but we don’t see the part where they
asked for help.
Where they did everything right.
Forty percent of people with eating disorders
who have received treatment do not recover. Now
what the fuck are the people who
don’t even get that chance supposed to do?
I am twenty years old;
older than Sarah but younger than Max
and maybe this is why I thought we needed another
eating disorder poem.
Or maybe I’m tired of seeing fifteen-year-olds die.
Maybe I’m tired of seeing a person
become a problem
that everyone is too afraid to solve.
A problem we’re still afraid to talk about
because it’s not like this is a big deal.
It’s not like a classroom worth of people will
be dead by end of day. It’s not like
this is something we can prevent.
This is what it looks like to see a fifteen-year-old
die of a heart attack. This is what
it looks like to be
named epidemic and then forgotten.
This is what it looks like to
become a headline.
This is a call to arms
to help us put our weapons down.
To please
help us make it another hour.
To please
look at this
as something worth talking about.
To please
at least
talk about us
once we’re dead.
