a scale, a mirror, and those indifferent clocks

As a child i struggled with eating in school. Every day, starting in kindergarten, I would throw away my uneaten lunch in the cafeteria room trash. I would go the whole day without eating.I had this deep feeling that being seen eaten was shameful. I felt embarrassed at the meer fact of having a body. Early trauma left this deep sense of shame and worthlessness inside of me and I didn't have the words to explain to anyone.

My Anorexia didn't begin with wanting to lose weight or with dieting. It started out as a voice whispering in my ear, "You don't deserve to eat." It seemed to appear just overnight one day, but I know now it had been building for a long time.

I was silent in school as a child. My kindergarten teacher called my mother and was concerned that I never smiled. I hid my body in boys' clothes, and learned how to become invisible, a ghost girl, left alone.

When I was first in treatment for my cutting I was left with the inability to being myself back to myself. How to make pain visible then but to become bones instead of secret scars? I wanted to be as small as possible, new bones popping,  protruding to the surface that I could count. The day my mother said, and I savored the fear in her voice, "I can see your spine through your t-shirt. Children's clothes and stepping on the scale every morning to determine my day.

There was a lot of treatment and feeding tubes but as my anorexia advanced it had nothing to do with how I looked but became to be a way to die. While I was sectioned to the state hospital I gave up, laying in bed starving, everyone commenting on my disappearance. I lost the urge to live and I wanted control in how I left.

I'm still not in recovery now in my 30s, though I had vowed as a teen I wouldn't be one of those "older" people with an eating disorder. But time has taken over. My anorexia is still a silent protet song, a higher strike against my life, against living and forgetting. I want my body to be a memorial built to the atrocities committed here. I won't let anyone forget. It is my slow death lullaby. There is no hope here. I've already outlasted my own life, I think. Anorexia grasps it's fingers around my wrist and refuses to let go and sometimes I am comforted by the fact that it will take me down with it.


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