Normal Kills!

I am normal.

I wake up, do tasks, go to school, and work; all the while I die a little more each second. Minute by minute I get closer to reaching the period at the end of my life’s sentence. How can I be sick when society tells me I am the normal, but normal isn’t good enough. I must be faking. I must be an imposter in this subgroup of people, because how could I be anorexic?

Yes, I spend every other waking and sleeping second desiring and relishing the hunger. Body, I’m sorry! Wanting to be cold in a heated room, to be dazed, confused, and befuddled by the simplest problem, to be too weak to climb the stairs without pausing halfway. Body I’m sorry! I hide what little food I give myself for fear that I will be judged for it. Yes, I do all this and more, but isn’t that what you are supposed to do? Isn't that normal?

Eventually this became my normal, counting calories like I was taking a math test, just to decide whether I needed to find some way to undo them. I knew this spiral I was going down and where it ended. I knew, somewhere, that enough would never be enough; that I never really would be done until I was ashes. It’s funny how quickly the will and desire to live become funny themselves, just some punch line at the end of a bad joke. Never would enough be enough when so little was too much.

This said, I’m alive. I AM FUCKING ALIVE! And while I don't personally know anyone who has reached the end of that spiral, I do know the staggering numbers of those who have. 10,200. 10,200 deaths in any year are directly the result of an eating disorder. One person every 52 minutes DIES from an eating disorder.

Everyday I fight to believe that normal is truly normal and that is all it is. When every single part of me wants to be less, to exist less. All I have wanted to do is sit on a couch and sink into it. To sink and sink until there is nothing left of me to see. But that’s normal, right?

---Christian (Aspen) Walker 1/3/2021