The number doesn’t matter. If I got down to 70.00, I’d want 65.00. If I weighed 10.0, I wouldn’t be happy until I got down to 5.00. The only number that would ever be enough would be 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point.

1
I would never speak to a child
the way I speak to myself.

2
There is nothing empowering about lessening yourself.
You are a vanishing act. Your body, the magic hat,
pulling out nothing. Your body is a clothing wrack,
your body is my favorite sweater shrunk in the drying.

3
Less is more less is more less I know
more less I know more or less how to love myself.

4
Hair loss is a side effect of bulimia.
If you are so hell-bent on losing your hair,
here are the scissors. Here is the razor.
Why don’t you shave it? Why don’t you
donate it? Why don’t you braid me a fucking scarf?

5
You beautiful martyr. You knuckle-kissing saint.
You are a mother bird and we are all your children
and we are all so hungry. We want to see a staircase
around your lungs. We want to hang ornaments
from your collarbone. We want nothing
to do with your softness.

6
They don’t show big girls in the magazines
like they are afraid to show men what childbirth looks like.
It is too real, it is too bloody.

7
Dear First World,
what a privilege it is to hate our bodies.

8
Ana, when your loved ones
carry your coffin, will they doubt
there is a body in there?
Like an empty suitcase.
A silent instrument.

9
I too have pulled at my torso.
I too have imagined hemming my body.
I suck it in. I suck it in. I turn off the light
before I let him love me.

10
Ana, imagine yourself as a little girl.
Tell her she is not good enough. Tell her
she is ugly. When she comes to you hungry,
do not feed her.

11
Your body is not a temple.
Your body is the house you grew up in.
How dare you try to burn it to the ground.
You are bigger than this.
You are bigger
than this.

12
Dear Ana,
you are swallowing yourself.
Your voice is so small.

Death becomes a way out. Can’t live forever with an eating disorder, can’t live without it. It becomes the question we will ponder for many, many years before having a definitive answer. Do I want to live? Why? Our reasons not to live may seem mundane to someone without an eating disorder. You can not feel our emptiness or understand our loneliness. We can’t share this world of silence we have made for ourselves. It is the thing that may have saved us in the past and might kill us in the future.

It has been argued that food and eating have replaced sex as our foremost cultural taboo. To some extent I agree with this but would point out that the taboo is not against food, or sex, or flesh, but against a loss of control. Our most hallowed virtue in modern society is self-control, personal “power” (also the most hallowed virtue in my own family). If you thumb through the cannon of philosophy, you find Augustine and Co. speaking of women with the same fear and virulence that we now use to speak of food, as something “sinful,” something that “tempts,” something that causes a loss of control. “The slimy desires of the flesh,” Augustine writes. Note: not the flesh itself, but its desires, arising from the flesh, dismantling our control.

But, as is always the case with bulimia, it is at once tempting, seductive, and terrifying. It divides the brain in half: you take in, you reject; you need, you do not need. It is not a comfortable split, even early on. But early on, its pros seem to outweigh its cons. You have a specific focus, your thoughts do not race as much. They stay in an orderly row: go home, eat, throw up. The problem in your life is your body. It is defined and has a beginning and an end. The problem will be solved by shrinking the body. Contain yourself.