I don’t want to write about how cold it was, about how yellow my hands were, about how my hair was falling out, or about how slowly my heartbeat was. I don’t want to write about the way in which I was looked at with horrified faces, with disgusted faces. But I want to write about what I was feeling. I know, because for me too, at some point, anorexia was an ideal, an impossible-to-reach ideal. Something I could only dream of, but which I could never get, because, in my mind, I wasn’t strong or grim enough.

I longed for this disease, I tried to imitate it until it became what I am. Until every minute was spent either exhausting myself through sport, either eating. It seemed impossible to escape from that vicious cycle, in a way I didn’t even want to because I was feeling safe. It seemed like I was the only one who existed, and I was feeling, and I was doing, and that everything around me was void, cold, and impenetrable void.

It didn’t take long until I lost my friends, I didn’t need them anymore. I didn’t have time; I didn’t have patience. Soon my mother and my father disappeared too, and with them, any aspiration of mine disappeared as well. I was the only one left and a body I looked at with hatred. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t read, I couldn’t listen to music or watch a movie anymore. I didn’t love anything, and it seemed like nothing loved me either. I got, without my will, at doctors, I did analysis after analysis, I was losing week after week, full days of school going to all kinds of people who seemed like they had the solution, the solution which would escape me. But it wasn’t enough, and I was feeling that, slowly, slowly I was sinking even deeper into my fears.

I’m not ideal, I will never be. I escaped by chance, not by will. And yet, there are so many girls, so many boys who die for this. So many people don’t escape, constantly searching for perfection. But that perfection, so high in glory, is disgusting, is morbid, and, in the end, is out of reach. It’s a trap, a scam, and without paying attention, you’ll fall into it. I fell into it looking for help from the ones around me, and I forgot that I am the only one who can get me out of this.

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editorial: Tudora Bărbulescu

graphic design: Ioana Butaru

translation: Maria Delia Dana

DP (desktop publishing): Ioana Butaru