There was a version of my mind that spoke with absolute certainty. Not in whispers, not in questions, but in commands that felt like truth.
You are too much. You are disgusting. You are enormous. You should disappear.
It didn't matter what the mirror showed. It didn't matter what others said. The anorexic mind doesn't negotiate; it dictates. And in that space, I wasn't a person. I was a problem to be reduced, a body to be erased, a burden to be made smaller and smaller until there was nothing left to criticise.
I remember believing it so completely. But that is what anorexia does—it doesn't even give you the chance to question. I like to describe it as the brain being hijacked, and we call the hijacker Ana. Because tell me, how is it possible to look at your own skeletal body, bones visible under skin, a body clearly deteriorating, and still have your mind insist you are overweight, ugly, undeserving of this life?
Something that needed punishment. Something that didn't deserve softness, or food, or rest, or life.
And now, years later, I look back at those photos of that same woman, and my heart breaks for her. For that girl.
To see so clearly what everyone else could see then—the fragility, the illness, the disappearance of self.
To see how traumatic and depriving Anorexia Nervosa is.
To grieve for the fact that she could stand there, shrinking, famished, and still be convinced she was “too much” or “too overweight.”
That is the entrapment. Not just what anorexia does to the body, but what it convinces you to believe about it. And how completely it will strip you of reality, identity, and instinct until you no longer trust your own eyes, your own body, or your own right to exist. And the most devastating part is how long you can live inside that distortion, fully conscious, fully suffering, and still be unable to leave it.
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