Dear Society Part 2

Hi my lovelies

Here I am on my second half of my ‘Dear Society’ rant. If you missed the first part, you can find it here. Oh, and I'm not a expert and certainly don't claim to be one - these are things that are true and that I have learnt through my battle with an eating disorder.

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Dear society,

I’m sure by now you will have had time to read my other letter and I hope you are feeling suitably chastised. I understand that you may be feeling angered and maybe a little confused – that’s okay. But I just want you to know that you are wrong – your approach and beliefs are wrong and you need to become more supportive. Us strugglers, ones with eating disorders, we need help.

We are sick. Yes, sick. Actually, properly, medically sick. We did not choose this. I promise. Think about it – why would someone choose to have this level of low self-esteem, this utter hatred of themself, the huge myriad of health issues that accompany eating disorders? We are not just sick in our body, we are also sick in our mind. Our problems will not be fixed simply by feeding us and getting us at a stable, healthy weight. It will help, but it will not ‘fix’ us.

We cannot be ‘fixed’. Eating disorders are not like the flu. Eating disorders are like other mental problems. If you have depression, you will always have depression. You will not always be depressed, but it will always be lurking in the background, waiting for times of pain, loss or stress at which it will pounce into action – suffocating and controlling you. That’s what an eating disorder is like. Some may only suffer through the active time of their eating disorder once and then be stable for the rest of their life. They are the lucky ones. Mostly likely, we will experience relapses occasionally, times when restricting and purging seems ‘safe’, because that’s what we do well.

We are not always thin. Some people with eating disorder never even drop into the ‘underweight’ category (<18.5) of the BMI range. We do not always look like skeletons walking. But that doesn’t mean that we are not just as sick as those with extremely low BMI. We are all sick. Conversely, that also means that not every thin girl is ‘anorexic’ or has an eating disorder. Some people are naturally thin. Not everyone with an eating disorder looks the same but it does not mean that we aren’t all equally sick. Also on that topic, having one eating disorder does not make you sicker than someone with a different one. Anorexics are just as sick as bulimics and they are both just as sick as people with EDNOS.

There is not one personality type for an eating disorder. Not all anorexics are compulsive perfectionists and not all bulimics are out of control. Eating disorders are just our (exceedingly unhealthy) way of coping with our chaotic world.

Rich White Girls Disease does not exist. It is a myth, created by you in order to explain the unexplainable, categorise the uncategorisable and fix the unfixable. Black people and white people get eating disorders. Fat people and thin people get eating disorders. Tall people and short people get eating disorders. Rich and poor, blondes, brunettes and redheads, crazy and sane. The truth is, everyone has a chance of developing one. So stop trying to make us feel worse than we already do.

Sincerely,

Lissa Spelt, an actually sick person