You have no right, they said.
I stared at the screen, at the stream of comments on a year-old article written by a girl who was in recovery from an eating disorder. The article covered nothing particularly controversial; it was along the same lines of her previous pieces: just her personal perspective on what battling anorexia looked like as she tried to have the “normal” college experience.
I scrolled back to her first articles, the ones so raw and honest about the darkness of her mind when the depression was too strong to combat, the ones filled with the vulnerable words of a girl who was simultaneously completely broken and full of an unshakeable hope, who was afraid of the strength of the illness housed in her own mind but who refused to give up fighting against it.
The comments on these mirrored the spirit in her words, encouraging her to continue to open up and speak about her experiences, to continue to pursue a life in which she genuinely lived, not just survived as a hollow shell.
Love your words, they’d say.
Wish more were this real about what they go through, not hiding the ugly, dark parts. People need to see this side of recovery, too.
Don’t give up. Please, just don’t give up.
On and on these comments went, each article bringing more words of support, more people telling her to write additional pieces, to keep fighting to not only make others aware of eating disorders but also to help them see the person, to see the one who has to wage an internal war on a daily basis.
But then I could see an obvious shift.
Slowly, the positive comments began to be joined, and then overcome, by words of criticism, of judgment.
Oh, yeah, poor you. How hard it must be to have the young, thin body everyone wants.
Come talk to us when you are no longer a rich, white and cis female.
You are everything society tells us to be. How could you even think you struggle like we do?
As their voices, the voices of others battling eating disorders, those who didn’t necessarily fit the stereotypical persona of one with an eating disorder, who should best comprehend how eating disorders don’t care what someone looks like, where one comes from, or what sex or sexuality one is, continued to undermine the validity of her struggles at every turn, her voice became quieter.
The fire in her words seemed to dim, the accounts of her experiences becoming cleaner, tidier. The stories of her struggling, of her striving for recovery, faded in tandem with her hope.
I stared at the screen, my heart aching, wishing I could revive the girl within the words of the first articles.
I wanted to re-instill the drive she once had, the unwillingness to bow down to her disease.
I wanted to give her back the determination to achieve a better life, a free life.
I wanted her to remember who she was, who she was fighting for.
I wanted to be me again.
