By Michelle

Sitting in the coffee shop, talking over a shared low-fat blueberry muffin, she says, “You’d never know it by looking at me but I used to be thin.”

She shifts in her chair in the way that those who are almost painfully uncomfortable in their own skin do. She never looks directly at you the entire time she tells her story.

When she was very young she was a gymnast and a dancer but she was never good at either. She always felt as if her body was something she wore rather than something she was; it felt uncomfortable and unnatural and clumsy. She was always moving it this way and that, twisting and bending, leaping and flipping but it was as if she was working a marionette from the inside.

When she was about ten-years-old her mom started to comment on her figure and telling her that she needed to lose ten pounds. She had never thought of herself as fat but she immediately began to look at herself in a completely different way. No wonder she felt the way she did in her body. It was too much. So she started to diet and from that moment on she was perpetually trying to lose those ten pounds. She says she remembers always being fat but when she looks back at pictures she sees a perfectly healthy and normal girl until years later.

By sixth grade she learned to purge. By Junior High she’d mastered that and included restricting, chewing and spitting, and diet pills. It was the beginning a lifetime struggle with her weight because all those tricks she used to try to make herself thin just seemed to backfire and she would end up gaining weight. Then she’d starve it back off again and be thinner for awhile before gaining everything back and more. The highlight, she says, was a few years after college when she sat on a therapist’s couch and was told that if she weighed any less she would be hospitalized.

“Were you afraid?” You ask.

“I was thrilled.” She says. It meant that she was on her way to being thin. She said she pushed the therapist to say more because she wanted to hear the actual word “anorexia” applied to her. Instead of leaving that day concerned that maybe she was taking things too far, she left feeling like she’d really accomplished something because surely nobody would refer to a fat girl as anorexic.

You’re afraid to ask her if she wishes she could go back there again because you already know what the answer is.

Originally posted here.