I hate being weighed. That is the worst part of my day. I do the blind weights, where I turn backward, but I'm getting to where I can hear the clicks, and I'm afraid to hear that second click at a hundred. My total fear every morning is to hear it slide all the way over. Every morning, I'm waiting to hear that sound.

When I was twelve years old, I started developing, and I was just horrified. No one ever taught me how to deal with the attention I would get with that body, so when I started getting it, it scared me. I would tape my breasts and the inside of my thighs, because I wanted to keep the boyish, preadolescent figure. It got worse in high school, because I was going through a lot of sexual abuse. I wanted my body to be unattractive to people. Plus I had a chaotic house and a controlling dad. [My body] was the one thing in my life that was mine, and nobody could take it away.

It started with a diet. I was a cheerleader and wanted to look good in my uniform. And it just got way out of control. I would lose five pounds, and it wasn't good enough. Then I'd lose five more, and it still wasn't good enough. To torture myself, I would hang pictures of models on my walls and say, “Until I can see the bones I see on her, I'm not thin enough.”My mom saw the pictures, but she never questioned it. In fact, when I started losing weight, she told me how good I looked, and that was like, Wow, OK. If I look good now, I should lose more.

The thinner I got, the happier I felt. It becomes illogical. You're sixty pounds, and you think you're still fat. I passed out in high school because my blood sugar levels were [so low]. But it was euphoric. Every day, if I wasn't a pound lighter, I would beat myself up. My mom started yelling at me all the time to make me eat. The more she tried to make me eat, the more I would say, “No way,” because I wasn't going to let anyone make me do anything.

As a cheerleader, your body is out there to be critiqued by everybody. So if you're a little overweight, you're going to hear the yelling. Everyone wanted to be light enough to be thrown in the air. People were always competing for that spot. It was constant. Whenever we were together, my friends and I would go in the bathroom and weigh ourselves to see who weighed the least.

It gets competitive between eating-disorder girls. I'll see someone that weighs less than me and think, I'm not sick enough yet. But I'm just bones. Competition between girls is not necessarily for the attention of boys, either. Society pits girls against each other, saying, “You're not beautiful unless you have this.” And it manifests itself in the separation of girls. We haven't learned that being united would make us stronger.

When I graduated high school, I lost a lot of weight really fast and went to the hospital and was tube-fed. I went to a psychiatric hospital, gained some weight, and came out. I looked better, but I knew I wasn't better yet. I kept telling people that, but they didn't get it. I've been hospitalized seven or eight times to get tube feeding. Once, I was tube-fed at home for four months because I wanted to go to school and keep on with my busy life.

My lowest weight was sixty-two. People tried to scare me into getting better by telling me what was going to happen to my body. They talked about kidney failure. They talked about heart problems, because when you're bulimic, you can just have a major, fatal heart attack on the spot. That didn't scare me. That wasn't enough. I was purging in the hospital with my tube. I would cheat and take it out. I was proud I cheated death once again.

[Yesterday,] I woke up in the morning and was feeling so fat that I found a pair of pants that I came in with-double zeros-and I put them on and they didn't fit, and that threw off my entire day. My eating disorder is like, “If you can't fit into them, you're
failing.” Why did I even try them on? It's so I can punish myself for eating. My anorexic voice is saying, “You're not supposed to be eating. You can't fit into these pants anymore.”

One of the hardest parts for me is that I'm known for my eating disorder. It's my identity. I'm the anorexic girl. I'm the little girl. I'm the skinny girl. My nickname is Itty-Bitty, so what am I going to be without it? It's what makes me special. So I would just be ordinary without it. And for me, that's hard to admit.

In college, I would go into the bathroom to purge, and someone would come out who just did, and [we would] look at each other and just know. We call it “the underground.” Your eyes kind of meet and then look away. People don't talk about it. The disorder is so full of secrecy and shame.

The more I do what's good for me, the louder my eating-disorder voice gets. Trying to push that aside and eat and do therapy all at the same time is really hard. Sometimes that voice just gets to me. Like at lunch, I was crying after I ate. That voice was telling me, “You shouldn't have done that. You don't deserve that. You're gonna get fat.” It's a constant torment, all the time. It's been that way twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for ten years. So while I feel I'm making progress, it's just screaming at me.

Every time I go in the bathroom, I look in the mirror and I see fat, but I also see tiredness. You know, it just takes its toll. You just look worn out. I obsess over every inch of my body. I can't find one spot I like. Whether it's the media or people at school, there are so many people telling you that you need to be a certain way to fit in. It's a lot of pressure.

Before I came here, I walked past my senior portrait hanging in my house, and then I walked past a mirror and saw myself, and I just cried. Because even though I was still sick then, I was healthier, and I could've stopped it. Part of me wanted her back. I can't even talk about myself like it's really me. She looks so alive, and her eyes look alive, and I just remember all the stuff I could do that I can't do anymore. I used to play sports and dance. Now I can't carry my backpack up the stairs, so I miss class. I have had seizures when I tried to exert myself. There are times my friends have to dress me in the morning.

Cutting has the same effect as purging. I started cutting when I was fifteen. I had all this stuff bottled up that I couldn't tell anybody, so I would cut for a release. I carved “DIE” on my arm. Last month, I was trying to eat like I was supposed to and not purge, so I started cutting again. It just kind of snowballed after that. Once you start, you can't stop, because it's almost euphoric. You're just so stuck with all these emotions you can't get out; you have to hurt yourself to feel.

Most of my cuts are on my lower belly. It took me a long time to figure out why. First of all, I could hide them. Secondly, I just hated being a woman. It brought me nothing but pain. Everything that represents being a woman is in your pelvic area. It's where your uterus is. So I didn't feel sorry for making scars on it, because it was just like bringing the scars to the outside. Now they're visible.

I feel I've wasted the ten years I've had my eating disorder. I went to proms and stuff, but I was always scoping out the bathroom or obsessing about what I was wearing. Especially the last six or seven years, just being in and out of hospitals, dropping out of school, losing friends, losing jobs, losing money, because insurance isn't always up on it. [An eating disorder] is like a best friend that stabs you in the back. All it does is take from you.

Women aren't taught to use their voices. So they use their bodies instead. Many girls are not taught that it's special to be a woman, and a lot of girls find out that it hurts to be a woman. That's what I know. It's not a vanity issue. We don't all want to be supermodels. It's a distortion. And it's something that is tormenting and frustrating and sad, and it's a struggle to come back. If you can come back.

Greenfield, L. (2002). Girl Culture. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, p. 102, 105. Retrieved April 21, 2005 from http://dizzy.library.arizona.edu/branches/ccp/education/girlculturefacultyguide/.