‘Why did you stop eating?’ my aunt once asked me, ‘Did you look in the mirror and see someone fat?’
Inside, I sigh. I am reminded of an advertisement for anorexia, featuring a young girl looking at herself in the mirror. She pinches and pulls the skin on her stomach and thighs. The camera zooms out. The girl standing in front of the mirror is emaciated, she has no excess skin to pull. The girl in the mirror is her reflection, her perception of herself.
The advertisement is emotive, no doubt, and to a certain extent, accurate. I have spent hours “reconfiguring” my body in the mirror: tearing off my double chin, slicing off my stomach rolls, squeezing my gigantic thighs. And yet, the advertisement also perpetuates a stereotype of what anorexia is and who it affects. If we are to believe this advertisement, we are to believe that anorexia is the plight of white teenage girls who look in the mirror and see a fat girl staring back at them. Whilst I did “reconstruct” myself in the mirror, that was not my anorexia; it was a brush stroke in a far greater, more intricate painting.
That is what I told my aunt.
Lifestyle choice
But I do not blame my aunt for the way she thinks. Six years ago, I too held many misconceptions about anorexia: it was a question of vanity, an attention-seeking quest, a lifestyle choice. It was a woman’s issue.
Admittingly there was an element of vanity and attention-seeking in the beginning of my ‘dieting’, a desire to be noticed.
‘You look great,’ people told me at my graduation ‘You’re so fit now.’
I hadn’t eaten that day.
But what started off as a call for compliments quickly spiralled into a cry for help; so quickly that I cannot pinpoint the moment when healthy eating transformed into deprivation and casual exercise warped into obsession.
At first, people assumed my weight loss was healthy; part of a new diet and exercise regime. Then, they assumed it was a symptom of stress; I had just started university. Days grew into weeks and months, and my frame shrunk into flesh and bones.
Nobody mentioned anorexia.
But why should they? I was just being healthy, slimming down, toning up. Besides, anorexia is the lifestyle choice of female models and young Caucasian girls.
Crisis point
One evening I came home from town carrying shopping bags brimming with new clothes. I was so excited to show my mum that I did a model shoot in the kitchen. I tried on the first top, her reaction was subdued. I tried on the second top, another muted response.
‘It wouldn’t matter what you wore,’ she blurted ‘You’re too thin.’
My reaction was apoplectic. I lashed out like a wounded animal. I was healthy, I told her. People said I looked great.
‘You’re not eating carbs,’ she retorted.
I told her I had just eaten a bag of popcorn: 15g of carbohydrate! Didn’t she know that? I was livid and stormed out of the kitchen.
We didn’t speak again that evening.
The next morning I stood in the bathroom, staring at my naked body in the mirror. I ran my hands over my protruding hip bones, my jutting collarbones, the skin under my neck. Tears flooded down my hallowed cheeks. I ran into my mum’s bedroom, a towel around my waist.
‘Mum, I have a problem and I don’t know what it is.’
I am a man
The day the doctor told me I had ‘anorexia’ was a shock. It was a shock because I thought that anorexia was a lifestyle choice. I did not choose this life, at least not consciously. It was a shock because I thought that anorexia was a woman’s issue. I am a man.
Undergoing treatment broadened my understanding of anorexia, breaking my misconceptions. However, I still believe that there is an overarching “anorexia narrative” in mainstream media: the young girl in the mirror who chooses to be thin. And yet, for all its faults, anorexia is non-discriminatory. It is an illness that seeks out the young and the old, that ambushes Caucasian and Black, that preys on women and men.
I was not a young teenage girl, I was a 19-year-old man.
I did not chose to be anorexic, it chose me.
Support information:
- BodyWhys Ireland
- The Samaritans – Tel: 116 123 or email: jo@samaritans.org
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