Today is the Worldwide Eating Disorder Action Day. In occasion of this important day we decided to release a Think on Ink on this matter. This piece unravels the struggles of overevaluating weight, a core component of eating disorders. Overevaluation is when an individual derives their self-worth and value on the perception of their weight. This piece in particular focuses on the topic of identity. We would like to remind you that this is just one aspect of the infinite that play into these disorders and that the experience, like always, is very subjective.
You often feel small when you have a whispering personality and are surrounded by many shouting ones. When all the noise in your head is silenced by your shyness, you feel small. I was aware of not being able to express to everyone what I reserved for myself and a few others. In my attempt to belong to something that did not belong to me, I was aware, therefore, of appearing flat, without character and not very spontaneous. The truth is that I was trying to hide my personality for fear that it would not be accepted. The problem is that at a one point I hid it so well that I could no longer find it. I started to see myself only through the eyes of others and my self-esteem started to depend solely on external words of affirmation. Not allowing anyone to look inside of me, I only received compliments about my physicality, and in particular, my thinness. So I clung to that thinness with all my might. That was my whole identity, the only thing I had.
When my childlike body started to transform into that of a young woman, I felt lost.... if I wasn't even the thinnest anymore, then what was I? Who was I? Watching my body change I heartened myself by telling myself that the people I admired weren't that skinny (or at least not according to the absurd canon of thinness I had set for myself) so why should I be? Because they can, my unconscious answered, because they are assertive and funny. Because they always have the answer ready. They have that and they don't need to be extremely thin. You do.
Over the years I learned that by surrounding myself with people who were willing to listen to her, that whispering personality spoke clearly and was understood. Gradually she gained the confidence to raise her tone of voice higher and higher. And as my awareness grew, so did my self-esteem. But by then I had become stuck in that idea of physicality and over the years it had become a cage that was difficult to break. Actually, I was quite comfortable in that cage - a bit like sitting on a comfortable armchair in a room on fire. No matter how hot I got at times, I couldn't find the courage to get up and walk through the fire. Thinking about running away gave me a sense of helplessness and I felt small again. Recently, however, I began to realise that I should not look at the fire as a whole but think about how to extinguish it one flame at a time, day by day. I looked around and realised that the people I had chosen to surround myself with could be firemen if I gave them the right information to find the extinguishers. Above all, I realised that fighting fire is a struggle that comes and goes - just when you think you've put out all the flames, there goes another one. Sometimes so many flames come back that I give up and sit in that chair again for a moment. In those moments I wish I had the strength to remind myself that it is not there that I have to stay and that it is much better outside. Even more, I would like to remind myself that I don't have to stay in one place and that I don't have to be one thing. I would like to learn to see my identity as a butterfly that lightly rests on the things that do me good and flies away the moment they stop being good.