Consume

By Raymond Fox

My alarm goes off. I wake up and see the sun shining through the windows. I feel its warmth. I hear the birds sing their lullabies from outside my window. As I get up my feet hit my floor. Cold to the touch. I stand up and stretch. I stretch out all the bad from the night before. I go over to my mirror and realize how small I am. Not small as in short, but small as in skinny. So skinny that I look like one of those skeletons you see around Halloween. But I still see fat.. I don’t see how small I am. I still see that my thigh gap isn’t big enough. And that my underarms could use some work. Or the way my chest looks from the side. Or how long my neck is. I try to see how beautiful I am but that's hard. With an eating disorder all you can see are your imperfections. The imperfections that you will never be able to fix just. I hear a knock at my door. My mom comes in with my breakfast. The calorie scoreboard in my head immediately illuminates with numbers. The toast with butter 116, 91 for the scrambled eggs, 103 for the glass of milk and 140 for the bowl of cheerios. I wish there was an off switch to this scoreboard, but there is not. It runs off of what little energy I have in the first place.

This illness has consumed me.

Ironic, because I manage to consume nothing.

Raymond Fox is a sophomore here at North Penn. He is in Ms. Hauesser's creative writing class and that is one reason he submitted this piece. Also he likes to write about mental health and mental illness. He thinks it is not touched on enough and should be normalized. In his writing, he wants to break the stigma and end the silence that surrounds mental illness. Thank you for reading and helping to break the stigma.