Member-only story
I Forgive You For Being a Woman Too.
or how my family supported my eating disorder
***This text might be triggering to someone with an eating disorder***
Select the most vulnerable group of humans on Earth by gender and age. The answer is easy: teenage girls. These gentle, unprotected creatures, not yet ready to discover the amount of standards and expectations this world will dump on them the next minute they turn “…teen.”
I was one of them. And oh, the horror — I was unbelievably average in every way. Average height (I stood closer to the end when we lined up for PT lessons at school), average face (brown eyes, brown hair, although excessively curly for the standard), and most horribly, as it turned out — average weight.
A society cannot forgive women their weight. Even at that age. Look, she’s a little woman already!
So I became one at the gentle age of 13, when I first put myself on a diet.
Oh, to be a teenage girl on the Internet
Belonging to the group of kids born around the new millennium, I invited Internet into my life way too early. We were one of the last generations who knew life without it. Only later to be absorbed by its immediacy and vastness, stumbling in its darkness, without any adults guiding us on the way.
Oh, these adults had no idea.
In 5th grade, all of my classmates started creating accounts in then-popular social network in Ukraine — Vkontakte. Think a Russian-sponsored replica of Facebook, that’s what it was. You could add friends, message them, listen to music, but most of your time you’d spend in groups. These were little oasis of belonging in the endless content space. Groups were a way of identifying yourself — your tastes, your interests, your personality.
I followed many, but one of them crawled up to the first-visited page fairly soon: Typical Anorexic. Photos of extremely skinny, always sophisticated girls. Quotes about self-improvement and willpower. Streams of comments: “I want to be like her.” Mocking the photos of normal female bodies. Countless diet marathons for any weight and taste (or rather, its absence).
