Anorexia was supposed to make me strong and beautiful

I could have sworn I wasn’t human anymore. I had just finished a high-intensity ballet workout with an empty stomach, but with all this energy running through me, I still felt stronger and more powerful than ever. Perhaps I was developing some kind of superpower.

Whenever I was having a bad day — or a “fat day”, which was the term I used — I only had to close my eyes and slide my hands up and down my torso. I smiled almost every time, because I could feel every single one of my ribs. Mirrors were the enemy, though; my eyes kept telling me that my waist wasn’t small enough and that my thighs were still too big.

Needless to say, I kept going. However, I was scared to death. It might not make much sense — then again, none of these issues really do — but I wanted to go as far as I could, for as long as I could, without dying.

I used to live by this Kate Moss quote, “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” Well, skinny hurts. A lot. Skinny made my skin pale and dry, it caused my hair to fall incessantly and my cheeks too become hollow. Skinny gave me the body of a 10 year-old, my butt was barely there and my boobs were nowhere to be found — but hey, at least I had a thigh gap, right?

Anorexia — or any sort of eating disorder for that matter — is not glamorous. It is not something anyone should want and it is not a diet we choose to follow, for the desire to be thin is not the disease, but only a symptom of it. An eating disorder is a severe mental illness that should in no way be diminished or taken lightly.

In other words, no, we can’t “just get over it”. Nevertheless, recovery is possible. It’s probably the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make, because the only thing more terrifying than getting rid of my anorexia was the thought of having to live with it for the rest of my life.

I used to think I was so tough, with an outstanding self-discipline that allowed me to starve myself. I was wrong. I had never known real strength until I chose to recover. That same willpower that was killing me was the one that saved me. This might be a life-long battle, and I still struggle with these demons, but I wouldn’t have it any other way, for I am tired of merely existing. I want to live.

And by the way, a lot of things taste better than skinny feels.

When does love happen?

Is love the result of the first night spent in the same bed? Or maybe that night is a result of the love. Perhaps it happens the first time you meet their parents – maybe you fall in love with them first, sort of as a prerequisite to falling in love with the one you’re really with.

I guess one could argue that it happens all at once, in one moment. That maybe you go to bed after a night of binge watching Marvel movies and wake up the next morning completely overwhelmed with this feeling. And there was no exchange of words or sex or cupcakes to explain this sudden, extreme change of heart. Maybe it was just a really good night’s rest. Maybe it happens during your late-night X-Men session. When their eyes are glued to the screen with their mouth open slightly and they reach to grab a handful of popcorn, and it takes three tries until their hand finally finds the bowl and not your pant leg. Maybe this is the moment that the lightning strikes.

Maybe there is no lightning, but a steady flow of sunbeams that have always been present. Maybe there are only triggers, and that overwhelming feeling, that panic attack-esque feeling of being in love for the first time, is really us just realizing we’ve been in love all along. Maybe there is no one moment we fall in love, or we just don’t feel it anyway, but we feel the moment that we realize we’ve been feeling the way we have because we’re in love.

I tend to believe that love is similar to grief, and happens in stages without our knowledge. And it happens at different paces for different people – for some it may only take a few days, for some, weeks or months, in some rare cases it may even take years.

Maybe the stages are the same as grief; maybe in the beginning we are in total and complete denial that we are in love, and we try to convince ourselves otherwise. Maybe it’s denial because this feeling is too great, and this person really knows how to tell a story, and they clean up too nice, and their hair is too perfect, and they’re too kind to others, and they are asking you too many questions about your job, and your major, and your feelings, and your family, and your passions for you to actually be in love with, let alone for them to actually be in love with you.

Maybe by the end, we do really learn acceptance – maybe in the sense that we accept them for the little things; leaving the volume on the TV a little too high, the occasional hair on the soap bar, the fact that they don’t wait until the commercials to start telling you about their day, and by the time the commercials do come on, the story is over, it was anti-climactic, and now you have no idea who the true monsters turned out to be or how the Doctor managed to save the day.

But maybe we learn acceptance on an even deeper level. Maybe they’re not the ones we really need to accept. Yeah, they do clean up nice. But that bow tie wasn’t straight when he first put it on. And maybe they are a really captivating storyteller. But it’s charming the way you take a year to tell a story, needing to tell every detail, stuttering and tripping over words, getting so animated, and ultimately forgetting where you’re even going with it, and by the time you get to the end, you’ve either lost everyone or they’re completely underwhelmed and it wasn’t really worth the effort it took to tell, or listen to. Maybe he knows how to entertain an entire room of people while I sit in the corner and talk with one or two of his friends and manage to win them over but fail when faced with the crowd. Maybe he can run a 5K and barely break a sweat, but I can sit in a coffee shop and write a novel about his kiss when he walks in the door from his run.

So maybe love doesn’t happen the first time you wake next to each other, or when you admit to them how old you were when you had your first kiss, or when they finally have your friends’ stamp of approval, or when your father tells them over dinner how much you cried over your first heartbreak and he vowed to never let that happen from another boy but when we finally accept about ourselves the things we try so hard to force upon others to accept. When we’re finally in love with ourselves – that’s when love happens.