Author's Note
Hey everybody. So I wasn't sure if I would ever do a sequel to Into The Mirror because it was such a personal story. But around this time two years ago was when my own eating disorder was at its apogee. With me starting my new job next week, and the anniversary of that lurking around the corner, I wanted to take the time to pen some of the lessons I have learned, and some of my experiences, down for all of you so that I can pass on my knowledge to those who are struggling or know somebody who is.
As mentioned in the prequel, do not imitate any of the behaviors mentioned in this story because they will kill you. Kay? Kay.
I can only hope that somebody can learn these lessons in a better way than I did.
The Last Doll
When I was a young filly, my mother had a set of nesting dolls on the mantle of her fireplace.
I used to spend hours taking those dolls apart to put them back together. Each one was smaller than the last. I remember thinking at times that I would never reach that last doll. But of course I did, eventually. And then, the process came of putting them back together.
I believe recovery is much like those dolls. When you take them apart and get to the last one, the focus then becomes putting them back together.
We, as ponies, are layered creatures. There is the surface layer, primed and polished to reflect what we want the world to see. The more layers you remove, the deeper you go, and often the darker it can become. The last layer of me- the darkest layer of me- had played host to an eating disorder. Anorexia Nervosa. Ana, as I preferred to call her, would speak, her voice breaking through all my layers and saying, “You’re so fat.”
I took myself apart like those nesting dolls, trying to obey her voice in order to silence her. I wanted so desperately to take that last doll inside of me and chuck her right out the window so she couldn’t hurt me anymore. There would be an empty spot at the center of me, but that was far preferred to the pain she caused me.
Empty. I’d learned to fall in love with empty. I’d fallen in love with the sensations of hunger. The high feeling that came with starvation, and the burning feeling in my legs as I galloped around doing exercise. I used to hear the sounds of my stomach growling and imagine it sounding like something close to an orchestra playing a beautiful tune. The sound was power to me. It said that I was unlike other ponies. I did not need. I was stronger than them, because I didn’t need food to survive. I coasted on ladylike bites like a refined Canterlot mare.
But the truth is nopony can outsmart the basic survival instincts in us all. After so much time coasting, it would only be a matter of time before I broke down and ate. It didn’t matter if I threw up after either. The body already absorbs 20% of calories consumed, and you can only purge 80%. It doesn’t matter how much water you drink, if you get sick so much you pop the blood vessels in your eyes, if you drink a foul mixture of warm salt water to make yourself even sicker. We simply cannot fight our instincts.
Whenever I ate anything, I could always hear my stomach digesting the food. The sound rang in my ears like Pinkie Pie’s horrendous playing of the flugel horn. It was so far away from the warrior cry of my empty stomach that sounded like a symphony. Anytime I ate anything, I couldn’t help imagining what it looked like inside my stomach. This pink-walled place with acidic green sludge slowly consuming whatever food I took in and immediately transforming it into cellulite. I’d picture the food absorbing into the walls of my stomach and making me gain an extra twenty pounds. I’d measure space and absence every time I ate. I needed to see if I’d changed at all.
What I’d never told anypony, not even my family, was that the need to be sure that I stayed the same stemmed from a fear that I wasn’t real.
As a filly, I’d always had a vivid imagination, and vivid dreams to match it. Naturally, one would assume dreams to be full of action, adventure, unattainable things. As Princess Luna might be one to tell you, that is not so. Sometimes, dreams consist of ordinary events. In my case, I could simply dream of getting something from another room and having a conversation with my mother. It was such an ordinary thing. But then I would wake up, completely confused as to how I had gotten in bed, cobwebs dirtying my brain. I would walk from my room in a state of unreality and enact exactly what had happened in that dream. Every time a dream like that occured, I would ask my mother, “Is this real?” And she would tell me yes, it was.
Unfortunately, the questions extended to my dreams as well. So it became difficult for me to tell what was real and what was not. It felt as though I myself wasn’t real. I felt as though I was in a constant state of dreaming. When one cannot depend on reality to be consistent, one must find that in themselves.
For me, food was my consistency. The absence of food became my way of telling myself that I wasn’t asleep and that I was real. The aching hunger in my stomach ceased when I was asleep. Even when I dreamt and could touch other things in that realm, the lack of hunger gave it away. The absence of food became the way I reassured myself that everything was real.
The issue with that, of course, is the lack of food becomes a lack of weight, and the problems that go along with that are also all too real.
My losing of weight seemed like such a personal problem. I wasn’t trying to push myself to the point of disappearing. I simply wanted to feel real. But pushing myself to said point was getting dangerously close to making me a memory of a real pony. My friends called out my problem, but I did not want to hear it. It was only in going to treatment that I recognized that I had taken this problem to the public. While it may have begun as personal, it soon became public because when you’re dying, everypony becomes concerned with your life whether you like it or not.
Most ponies believe the treatment of Anorexia is in getting fed. That is only a small portion of it. You need to be fed in order for your brain to get healthy enough to work on your real issues and for your body to fight for your life. Food has become the locus of your pain for so long that you cannot imagine it being anything else other than the enemy. But it isn’t the enemy- it is simply an energy source keeping you alive.
Another myth about any eating disorder, not just anorexia, is that treatment fixes everything. That is a complete and utter lie. Treatment can help stabilize your vital signs, help you understand what your body needs, and help you begin work on some serious issues within your life, but once you are out of treatment, you must do that still. This time, however, you are on your own. It doesn’t mean you still won’t have problems. It just means you have learned some skills with which to manage them better.
There is no cure for any mental illness. There is only coping with it and doing your best to have a normal life outside of it. It is learning that your disorders do not define you, you define them. You give them the amount of control they have over you.
Every once in a while, a thought that isn’t yours may creep in. You’ll look at the fruit basket on your counter because you’re hungry. You want to eat. But the voice inside of your head says, Do you know how many calories are in that? It will take you at least an hour to burn it off. Why not just skip your afternoon snack instead?
You’re nervous, hearing that voice you’ve done all this work to try and rid yourself of. You know how this would have played out in the past. You would agree with the voice and skip the meal. But now that you have been in treatment, now that you’re healthy, the pressure is intense. In general those chronically ill are not expected to change their habits. But now that you’ve had treatment, and have gotten better, you are now held to a standard which at one timed seemed as unattainable to you as getting sneak previews of the new fall line up for Coco Pommel.
You know the lines you are supposed to say now, so you say them. I need to eat my snack to stay healthy. It will not hurt me to eat. It will hurt me to not follow my meal plan.The voice inside of you counters with But what if it DOES hurt you? Ponies get food poisoning all the time. You have no way of knowing that fruit won’t give you food poisoning. For all you know, it could be moldy, and then you would be sick anyways. Isn’t it better not to take the chance so that you don’t lose that extra weight when you get terribly sick?
You pause, unsure of how to refute that claim for a moment because the fear has taken you over. Then, you regain yourself. The fruit isn’t moldy. I just bought it this week. I am going to eat it. You say this, and actually do it. For a moment, you are incredibly proud of yourself, and know your dietician will be too. But then, your brain says, You’d better formulate a back up plan to get that out of you.
That is the hardest part. Your safety valve, your source of comfort, your sure thing is no more than twenty feet away from you, but you cannot turn to it because you know it could cause you harm. You know how easy it would be to run into that bathroom, start the shower so your sister does not hear you, line the trashcan with a plastic bag and force yourself to vomit it up, but you don’t do it. Because though you once did not put any gravity in the idea of playing around with death, suddenly the words Osteoporosis and Heart attack and Electrolyte imbalances haunt the darkest corners of your mind.
When you narrowly escape death, you either treat it with flippant disregard or the utmost gravity. I took the latter school of thought. True, I had narrowly escaped death many a time with my friends, but this was the first time I’d nearly seen death’s hoof pointed at me from the consequence of my own actions. It caused me to do a lot of reevaluating about my worldview.
When I was ill, I had become obsessed with removing the last doll inside of me. I thought that if I could somehow yank that out from inside me, I would lead a new, pure life in which the darkness could not touch me. I had deluded myself into believing that once she was gone, I would be okay, and all of this turmoil inside of me would be gone. But I know now that even if I had somehow managed it, the turmoil would still be there, because I was still there. My eating disorder was a manifestation of problems I had kept buried for such a long time that they were desperate to find a way out. Instead of working on them, I pulled the gossamer curtain over them by focusing on food and emptiness and calories. I did not want to look and see what was underneath because I was ashamed they even existed.
But I know now that the solution isn’t removing the last doll inside of me. It is working through all the dolls that make me up, and trying to understand myself better in order to face my problems. It is looking those problems squarely in the eye and telling them that they do not rule my life. It is learning to live with my illness, and the wreckage that I have done to my body. It is learning how to show myself the generosity I show to my friends, and the kindness my friends show to me.
Some days it is very difficult to do this. Some days the voice of Ana screams in my head to tell me how fat I am, that I am committing a cardinal sin by eating my lunch that day. In those moments with such a loud, domineering voice in my head, it would be easy to fall back into the world of the mirror, to pay homage to the beautiful pony in the mirror who constantly tells me I have to get thinner, and I will attain everything I want in this life. It would be easy to fall back into my pattern of self torment. In those very bleak moments, I remember the faces of my friends as they cried when I was in the hospital, and the smiles they gave me when I came home from treatment after three months.
Most ponies will tell you that to get better for external things is not a good idea. To base your drive to get well on things that are not finite is not advisable, because if they are gone, you will lose that motivation, so you should get better for yourself. I have to politely disagree with that point. Speaking from personal experience, I have never particularly given myself any real value beyond my career and my friends. Beneath my bravado, I have seen myself as a cipher. So living for myself, whom I have still not yet learned how to love in totality, did not make sense to me. But living for the friends who love me, for the family who never gave up on me, and for the ponies who may one day benefit from my story were what kept me going.
I will never be able to remove the darkness which has taken root inside me. I have accepted that. What I can do is try and make peace with myself in hopes that maybe, just maybe a bit of that light can reach the last doll inside of me, and finally let the light in for her at last.
