My Bones
Let me count the ways I love me.
I search for hardness.
Feeling it out with shaking fingers.
It will never be enough,
to stop the trembling.
Hardness is safety
when safety is gone.
Once I was soft.
Soft and Fragile.
And.
Then.
I.
Broke.
Let me count the ways I hate me.
copyright 2002 the Others
by Irac, aged 16, from the Dark Side
Technically, I am at a healthy weight. And although I KNOW it is a good thing, I sometimes still don't FEEL that it is a good thing. Knowing and feeling are two entirely different things. I am a feeling person: I base a lot of my actions on how I feel at a given time. I make my judgements based on feelings. The same goes for decisions I have to make. So when I don't feel something, it doesn't seem true. Hence, me being at a healthy weight doesn't feel right sometimes.
When I go to bed at night, every night, I feel for my own bones. I crave the hard feeling they provide. I long for it. I, illogically, always equated hardness with safety. You see, when I say that I broke when I was soft, I mean that I was soft, like any four year old, when I was raped for the first time. I was sexually abused and raped on a routine basis for four years of my life. When I was four, I lost possession of my body. It was no longer mine. It was somebody else's. It was being used for his purpose, and his purpose only. When I was in tenth grade, I was molested in the school hallway by another student. When I was in college, I was molested on an ongoing basis by an adult man that I had learned to trust. My body still wasn't mine. I thought that if I disappeared, everything would be okay. The more bones I could feel, the safer I felt.
Although I know that that is wrong, it is still so hard to believe it at times. I still search for my bones. I take comfort in them. I know that this is deceptive, and I can't base my security on them, but some nights when I am scared and lonely, I still seek them out.
I guess you could say that I am still searching for true self-definition. I have never had a real sense of who I am. Perhaps because there are just too many of me?
My Non-Life With an Eating Disorder
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