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Anorexia Swallowed Me Whole While I Couldn’t Eat a Bite
It would try to destroy me for nearly a decade
It was a profoundly sobering moment, and one I will never forget. It’s as clear in my heart and mind as if it happened this very afternoon.
It was the terrible moment I heard that Karen Carpenter, brilliantly gifted singer and drummer, was dead at 32 years old. After years of battling anorexia, her badly damaged heart had finally given out.
This was the moment when the world first became aware of this deadly disease, and it happened when I was in the throes of my own dangerous dance with that particular devil.
At the time, I was in my early 20s, a divorced mum of two little girls and living in my parents’ basement. I had been thin my whole life, never giving any thought to my weight. But over the previous few years, something more than nature had been keeping me thin. Too thin, in fact.
A sequence of disturbing events had pushed me into a suffocating relationship with food. I was at war with it; food was The Enemy. It felt like a battle of wills: what food demanded of me versus what I wanted for myself. How I wished I never had to eat again. I hated food, hated that I was expected to force it down my throat, whether I wanted it or not — and I really did not.
I had become its hostage, my mind trapped in its death grip. And I had no idea that I was in danger.
Living with anorexia is a special kind of hell. Actually, I should say, “Dying with anorexia…” because that’s the truth of what’s happening every single tormented moment that this monster is chewing on your soul. It’s not only happening physically, but your damaged psyche entices — seduces — you into not allowing yourself the tiniest morsel. Self-denial becomes your superpower.
A soulless killer, anorexia has the highest mortality rate of all psychiatric disorders, including other eating disorders. The risk of death by suicide among anorexic women is “…as much as 57 times the expected rate of a healthy woman.” And anorexics often choose the most gruesome, lethal methods, leaving no doubt that it was “not simply a cry for help gone wrong” but that they were determined to die. Source
