What does Anorexia even mean?

To me it really seems like most people are not even close to know what anorexia means.                                                                       For most it’s a mental illness, for many not even that, it’s more like being trendy enough to wear size 0.                                                          I’ll tell you, as one of the 85% that survive this illness what it really means. 

It means deciding every day, for the rest of your life, to die. Not like a suicidal person that, after years, comes to the point to kill themselves, or like a murderer to have a day where you finally hate someone so much from the bottom of your heart that you come to one weak point, where you finally decide to kill them. It means to never come to the point, but waking every day up to it. It means to not chose it after years, but living it for years. Choosing dead over life 60 seconds a minute, 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Years over years until its finally over. 

It’s not friends that see how you get skinnier, it’s like standing beside your own grave until the end, seeing every day one friend more that comes to finally say goodbye and comes to finally accept your death. 

It’s not a worrying family, it’s a mother that realizes one day that the moment she hugs you is the moment she hugs not more than a bit of skin and bones anymore, where she drags you to the scale to find not more than 95lbs left of what once were her daughter. 

The moment she finally has to realize that it’s not something you’ll get over, not just a diet, where she has to realize that you can’t lie no more to her and she can’t lie no more to herself. Begging you on her knees to stay because she doesn’t knows how to live without you, seeing in her eyes that she already knows that you are dead. Screaming at you that she loves you, she loved you since the first second she knew about you. 

It doesn’t means that your dad doesn’t gets it, it means that he screams at you, with tears in his eyes, that the family is splitting under the pressure of just not knowing what to do, aren’t able to do and seeing the whole family blaming each other and breaking for what you just aren’t able to do anymore. 

Eating. 

It’s not just not eating. 

It’s not being able to fall asleep, because the bones hurt and the skin got so thin, it seems and feels like in the next seconds your bones will cut right through. 

It means to have nothing left to live for, because you lost any logic about anything. 

It means that your thoughts spin around eating and working out every second you are even able to think, 

it means that every breath is just one away from a blackout, from passing out again. 

Because you don’t know how to live anymore, but you know exactly the amount of seconds from the first feeling of blur visibility to the time you’ll pass out, know exactly how much seconds you have left to go to an restroom, so no-one will realize. And with the last bit of energy that’s left the permanent voice in your head will make you count how much kcal you’ll burn by running while also reminding you of what a failure you are to not be strong enough to deal with it. 

Dealing with no food since 5 days, only a glass of water a day, 2 hours sleep per night since two weeks, getting up at 6, spending 10 hours in school and after that 3 hours in gym and after that 1 hour for homework. Plus the cold you have since an half year, that won’t go away because your body doesn’t got any energy left to fight it. Also your stress level is permanent on the level of being close to lose your job, your house, your family and your money at the same time to compare it to the feels of a normal person. And all this is caused by an self hate that makes you feel like you are in a fight with permanent drowning. 

Please imagine now how big this self hate has to be to cause all this. How much must it be able to hurt you, to make you come to an point where you do all this to yourself with a smile in your face.

Anorexia isn’t just losing weight. 

It’s losing everything. 

Yourself, your life, your friends, your family, your hobbies, your career, your character. It’s watching while you are doing this to yourself, causing the biggest trauma and watching it without being able to move, to fight. Just being able to go further. 

And at the end the death is a blessing, cause building all this up again is close to impossible.