This morning, as I was browsing some of the “freelice” and “truth blog” related tags, I came across this. It nearly made me want to cry, and my heart really goes out to this person.
I have been there. I know what it is to feel that way, and I understand all too well what drives a person to do that to themselves. I think that our culture as a whole places far, far too much emphasis on the body and its attractiveness, to the exclusion of all else. Look at magazines. Look at advertising. There is so much guilt associated with food and weight in advertising and media, and I think it creates this idea that if you aren’t “fit” or thin enough, it is a reflection of a personal weakness and lack of discipline that not only makes you sexually unattractive, but a bad or inferior person. It isn’t about being attractive, or feeling attractive, at least not in and of itself. It is about one’s sense of value and of goodness. It strikes to the heart of someone’s innermost self.
When you develop these eating-disordered attitudes and behaviors, as the obsessions and compulsions grow within you, you find yourself at a point when so much of yourself, of your self-worth, of your sense of accomplishment and personal value, becomes contingent on maintaining the appearance of your body. You feel that you need to do this, in order to make yourself whole, to redeem yourself and feel that you have worth.
These things eat your soul. They really do. What I mean by this, is that they become such a part of you, of who you are and of who you want to be, that in many ways your very self can become contingent on it. There comes to be so much guilt, so much self-loathing that comes if you gain a few pounds, or forget to work out—- you begin to really feel like you are an inferior person if your body maintenance falters.
THIS is what makes eating disorders so abhorrant, and such a devastating disease. Certainly, the behaviors that eating disordered individuals engage in are physically harmful, especially in the longer term—- but I do not even think that this is the worst part of it. The true evil here, is that it has to do with hating your self. Not just your body. It is a matter of your innermost sense of worth. To hate oneself is a terrible thing; perhaps one of the most terrible things for a person.
The truth is that you cannot, CANNOT, make the physical appearance and supposed attractiveness of your body, your principle locus of self-worth. You cannot put your center there, if you ever are to truly live or to truly be free. Eating disorders can be highly compartmentalized. When we fall into these kinds of behaviors and thought processes, there is always a part of us, I think, deep within our innermost Selves, that knows that this isn’t right. And yet it is so, so difficult to break out of these patterns of thinking once you become so deeply mired in them.
I want to make it clear that no individual with an eating disorder should EVER be derided for thinking this way. These things grow inside you slowly over time; they consume you bit by bit. An eating disorder is not born in a day, and it does not go away instantly. There’s no magic moment wherein one thinks, “Oh, wait, I have intrinsic value by virtue of being a person, and associating so much guilt and self-loathing with food and weight is learned and socially constructed bullshit! The hell was I thinking! I’ma go eat a sandwich now.” If only it were that easy to break out of these nigh-delusory ways of thinking about oneself. The truth is that these things are never, ever easy.
There is a misconception among some people, I think, that eating disorders are motivated merely by vanity. This is not the case. I do not think the young women who tend to be the ones to suffer from this illness, chose to place transfer their sense of their chance for self-worth onto their body’s appearance because they’re vain, or because they’re such dull or vapid people that looks are all they’ve got. These things are learned, and they are absorbed from the surrounding culture and social environment. So much of advertising and media projects this idea that if you lose weight, or get fit, you become a better person overall. Changing your body becomes a proxy for changing your whole self, and it is a mistaken transference.
Being thin, or fit, or attractive, will not make you whole. It won’t make you a good or “better” person. I find it so troubling that the general cultural climate regarding attitudes toward body shape and size, perpetuated all too often by advertisers trying to sell products or entertainment by preying on insecurity, so often leads people to think otherwise.
*ETA: Response to lunarskylar’s comment: Fake or not, that changes nothing of what I have said. I still feel that the attitude expressed by that person reflects much of how people who suffer from EDs view their body and their ED behaviors. This isn’t about this one person. I was using what they said as an example, and it was what motivated me to make this post. This goes far beyond any one person. This is a pervasive problem that is rooted, at least partly, on a social level. People learn things from the surrounding culture—- not only from parents, peers, and others they have contact with, but also from the media. Vicarious social learning by way of the media is not to be underestimated. It is a very real phenomenon, and much of it is absorbed in a way of which individuals are not always fully aware.
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