“You’re not eating?”
I can’t even count the number of times I heard that question during my first few years of high school. And I dreaded answering it—mostly because it was difficult to explain just how hard the simple task of eating had become for me.
At some point in my early teens, I’d become unhappy with the girl I saw in the mirror. I couldn’t bear the idea of going to school, where I was surrounded by individuals I’d labeled as having “perfect” bodies, or whom I envied for the beauty I did not feel I possessed. I thought losing weight was the answer, the thing that would fix everything. So I began to starve myself. Soon, I developed a debilitating eating disorder.
