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Nov. 30th, 2011 | 04:02 am
From:: nanoochka.livejournal.com
Sorry for taking so long to answer.
I don't think there's a single ana person out there who isn't also a control freak; at the end of the day, control is the only thing it comes down to. It wasn't so much that I was acting out, but I was always overweight as a kid and in high school; sometime in university I went on a diet and started losing weight, and I guess I got addicted to the feeling. Boys started to notice me, and I was addicted to that, too; I must have started to feel, deep down, that how I looked was the only valuable thing about me, because I put myself through a lot of really shitty relationship situations, including emotional and psychological abuse, cheating, and a miscarriage (as a result of my physical health because of the anorexia). But through it all I kept reminding myself how awesome and skinny I was. And it was something I could control, like you said, when everything else was an absolutely horrible mess. About six years later I started to lose that control because my body went into starvation mode; everything I ate, even a piece of gum it seemed, was making me gain weight. That was probably the worst period of anorexia for me and when I started experimenting with throwing up. Then my dad died and it... kind of saved me. I didn't have the emotional wherewithal to deal with that and also keep hurting myself, so I stopped. I still struggle every day with the need to go back to those ways, but so far I've been pretty good about resisting and trying to appreciate myself as I am. If anything, I take a lot less shit from people these days who aren't able to do the same.
I don't think there's a single ana person out there who isn't also a control freak; at the end of the day, control is the only thing it comes down to. It wasn't so much that I was acting out, but I was always overweight as a kid and in high school; sometime in university I went on a diet and started losing weight, and I guess I got addicted to the feeling. Boys started to notice me, and I was addicted to that, too; I must have started to feel, deep down, that how I looked was the only valuable thing about me, because I put myself through a lot of really shitty relationship situations, including emotional and psychological abuse, cheating, and a miscarriage (as a result of my physical health because of the anorexia). But through it all I kept reminding myself how awesome and skinny I was. And it was something I could control, like you said, when everything else was an absolutely horrible mess. About six years later I started to lose that control because my body went into starvation mode; everything I ate, even a piece of gum it seemed, was making me gain weight. That was probably the worst period of anorexia for me and when I started experimenting with throwing up. Then my dad died and it... kind of saved me. I didn't have the emotional wherewithal to deal with that and also keep hurting myself, so I stopped. I still struggle every day with the need to go back to those ways, but so far I've been pretty good about resisting and trying to appreciate myself as I am. If anything, I take a lot less shit from people these days who aren't able to do the same.