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Trigger Warning: This blog contains descriptions of thoughts and feelings around restriction and disordered eating behaviors which could potentially be triggering or distressing for some individuals.

Neglecting my dietary needs replaced the neglect of the needs that I couldn’t see, and it all became my comforting regime.

My alleged growth meant that I was becoming so much better at hiding how I was feeling.

Able to switch off the existence of negative emotions in an instance

and painting the widest smile you’ve ever seen.

Picking up the knife and fork and finishing off all the crumbs in front of you so that you don’t

suspect a thing.

Because even with my alleged changed “look” which I did not believe, you still cannot see how much I “bleed”.

I was in an illusion of control of the now non-controlled motion of living whereby the thing I fall apart over is what food I will finish the day with. What’s the plans then? Is there a restaurant involved today too?

Disgust entered my oesophagus after any meal.

Family functions: can’t escape them. Can’t excuse the invites anymore.

The control is normal at this point.

And no one’s happy where you’re at.

If it’s all too much, too overwhelming to think of, the food is just another thing I got to prioritise to fulfil my life goals and dreams- so if I could survive without its aggressive roar perhaps, I did not even need to have it at all.

Not needing such a need, silenced the storms in my tumultuous mind.

made me hyper aware of all actions

and unlocked my mind’s new door…which hid all the secrecy and sin by making my existence null and where I could flourish and be who I wanted to be but merely for survival, never truly for any wins.

It became disturbingly addictive when I couldn’t crave my needs anymore.

I thought I was in control

because I’m usually at breaking point, hopeless and alone.

Yet now I was at a groundbreaking point where it didn’t matter anymore.

Not sick enough to care.

Not well enough to stop.

No one around noticed anyway.

And whenever they ever do my ears freeze and my mind hears: “no point in trying to fathom recovery, just keep going till you truly cease to be”

because thin was the label I could get away with.

thin was the label I would never get called out for- for not fitting in.

for if the box to fit in was just too small, too niche too narrow, I would be smaller than it.

thin was the replacement for the misidentification I faced every day. no sense of alignment with the conformities of everyday reality.

thin was what no one could ever speak ill of me for, because even in denial being ill meant being well.

being well enough.

being good enough.

being pure enough.

purity is conformity.

fatigue is for the weak.

and I thought that you all wanted me to be strong, right?

and not be rendered miserable by all this defeat?

Then, I began to stop feeling literal hunger.

and more so a lightness – a relief.

everything felt less stressful.

everything felt less uncertain

nothing felt like anything. nothing felt empty.

nothing was a comfort blanket embroidered with painkillers.

I let the days pass, not experiencing the same joy as others or what I once used to.

just a constant absence of feeling.

but it was a comfort because before everything was being felt all too much.

too much.

too much impurity.

too little empty.

burning calories and being hungry was easier to navigate through than the burning fire in my mind.

sitting there, and not being surprised when my thoughts were empty.

so inexplicably hollow.

silenced by the shakes and loudness of my head like a broken record.

suffocated beneath the trepidation, I’d sleep the days away without realising-

because it was easier to be suffocated by the entrapment of my non-reality filled nightmares than to face the demons worse off in my daily life…