Sickened

     Imagine having spent years of your life in and out of hospitals, having tubes shoved down your nose, and fighting tooth and nail to recovery from an eating disorder only to go to a Halloween party to find someone wearing a costume mocking the disease that you have fought against for years. I never even thought of this as a possibility until I was scrolling my news feed on Facebook the other day and saw a link one of my friends had posted to share her disgust. I won't show the link mainly because the costume made me physically ill and the comments on the actual link made me realize how much society still doesn't get how severe and life threatening eating disorders truly are. To put it simply the costume is a black mini dress with a skeleton down the front of it and a tape measure hanging around the waist. They even went as far as to name this monstrosity Anna Rexia.
     When I first saw it I think I was too shocked to even react right away, but once the shock wore off ten seconds later I was angry. I began "dieting" by the time I was sixteen and within a few months it became an obsession that would imprison until I was twenty three and will haunt me for the rest of my life. The summer before my senior year it was becoming obvious that I had issues, I wasn't eating, I was losing weight, and had taken to wearing long sleeves in the middle July to cover up the fact that I had begun cutting myself. My world was spinning out of control and by the middle of October of my senior year of high school rolled around it was apparent I had a serious problem, and once cuts were found on me at school my secret was out. The day before Homecoming I was officially diagnosed with Anorexia Nervosa, a demon that had only begun to show it's ugly face.
     Instead of going to college with my music scholarship I was hospitalized the first time from my birthday in December until February. When I finally got to go to school I was a year behind my friends and lost my music scholarships. I lost control the first semester, spent all my time running at the rec center and avoiding the dining hall. I ended up meeting the doctor that essentially kept me alive the next few years and never gave up on me, and come finals my first semester I was admitted to the adolescent unit of the hospital with a tube down my nose to give me nutrition. This became a regular occurrence leading to a surgical feeding tube being placed.
     I lost all those years until I hit rock bottom at twenty three and decided I either had to die or recover...I actually tried to kill myself before I went with option two. Looking back I lost my youth to anorexia, things I never got to do because I was too busy focusing on the food and the numbers and punishing myself when I thought I was weak. I lost all but a few friends, my family stopped trusting me, and I made a disease that my body already had get so bad that once I wanted to eat my body would no longer let me. No one understood why I couldn't stop, couldn't "just eat", and often spoke to me like I was just being a spoiled brat trying to punish everyone.
     I spent many months in rooms with others that suffer from eating disorders and they faced the same thing I did...no one understood that we weren't doing this by choice. The simple fact is anorexia, bulimia, and all other eating disorders are illnesses. People who have survived their eating disorders and even those who have lost loved ones to them have fought for awareness, fought to get insurance companies to pay for treatment, and have continued to fight to save the lives of those suffering. That Halloween costume is a slap in the face to every person who has fought to raise awareness, who has fought to survive, and to those who were tragically lost because no one saw what they were doing, or they couldn't get they help they needed because some person a thousand miles away at an insurance company decided they weren't "sick enough" yet.
     If you've ever seen an eating disorder up close you would be as outraged as I am over this. The onset age of eating disorders has fallen extremely low as the years progressed. Hospitals and treatment centers usually had programs for teenagers and adults, but now they have had to open programs specifically designed for children. When I say children I'm talking as young as six, younger in some cases. Imagine sending your six year old off to live at a treatment center for months, crying and pleading with you not to leave, and then when you visit you see your baby with a tube down her nose just to get her the nutrition her body needs. Anorexia has the highest mortality rates of any mental illness and in children it can progress even faster and cause very serious damage because their bodies aren't even close to developed yet. I lived the disease and I saw those very kids, and I was heartbroken to know that kids that young could be feeling the same things that I was feeling as a teenager and young adult. I have an eleven year old little sister and every chance I get I make sure to tell her how beautiful she is, and when I heard her call herself fat one day I almost broke down. The last thing I want is her to see some ignorant person dressed up as "Anna Rexia" for Halloween. These kids follow the examples that we set, and there is nothing funny about this costume. It is sick that someone would have the nerve to buy it and wear it out in public.
     If you want to play dress up and think that it would be super fun to dress up like an eating disorder let's go ahead and give you everything that comes with it. First you get to take everything you love out of your diet and start exercising obsessively. Then you get to start lying to everyone who cares about you because you have to protect your ED, they would try to take it away from you. Now you find yourself alone, depressed, and maybe you hurt yourself in other ways like cutting or swallowing some pills. You eventually get to take a trip to the emergency room where they will put you in the hospital and shove a tube down your nose to save your life. While in the hospital your every freedom is taken away...do you like showering with a nurse there, pooping with someone in the door, someone watching and telling you when to eat, what to eat, and how to eat? And, when it is all said and done if you were able to find recovery, which some aren't you will always have that voice in the back of your head trying to creep its way back in telling you that you are worthless, pathetic, and fat. You are forever changed by the disease, and you will always have to be aware of your actions making sure to keep that monster at bay. Does it really sound fun to have an eating disorder?