The problem with body image issues isn’t that you can’t look in the mirror. It’s that you can’t stop. You spend hours staring at yourself and pinching and squeezing, sucking in and grabbing fingerfuls or handfuls of skin.
Some days you look at yourself and you notice the bones and wonder if you’re actually not fat. And then you turn or the lighting shifts and you realize that you were foolish to think such a thing.
You stare at yourself so much that you no longer can see beyond the bumps and folds. You grow three sizes in three seconds as you notice a new pudge, a new edge.
Fat, loser, worthless, you think one day. And suddenly those words become the song to your steps.
You push away a meal and deal with the headache. Scarf down a burger and force it back up because no matter what you do, you will never become smaller.
“Too thin” your mother tells you. But she herself is the thing that you’re afraid of becoming. So you fast more, and more. Until you can survive on a 200 calorie per day diet. Until the spots in your vision become normal.
And then, one day, you fall into a moment of weakness. Take the food your parents give you and nibble at the edges until it’s gone. Too relieved with the mass in your stomach, too lazy and tired to think of the toilet.
You fall asleep and wake to your stomach groaning and aching. So you eat something in the morning. Lunch. Dinner.
Again, and again.
You wince at the carbs on your plate, but eat anyway, because you feel everything around you becoming sharper, faster. Your father tells you that you look happier, and asks what you’ve done. You shrug, guiltiness swimming with a growing pride.
And you eat, and your thighs shrink, and your stomach evens out, and the hips that you once loathed look a little more normal.
You love being able to hate your face, because for once, it’s not the rest of you that makes you weep. You can accept compliments without tossing them aside like lies.
Sometimes you stumble—skip lunch or pinch your stomach in annoyance. Step on the scale and fall asleep with pain in your heart. But in the end, you know to cover the mirror, ignore the voices in your head. To take pictures of yourself smiling, laughing. Spend time with friends who eat twice as much as you and couldn’t be happier. Because happiness, after all, is a much kinder emotion that hate.