WBB ESSAYS
Real Females Unite
- by Justine
I’m a writer. I’ve been one ever since the eighth grade, when I wrote my first novel—a mystery that I’m sure I’d love to chuckle over if I was ever able to find it again. It wasn’t until my sophomore year that I revealed to my parents my true desires to someday become a published author. And then I wrote another book, which I ended up self-publishing a few months before I graduated from high school.
Once I got to college, my professional aspirations came screeching to a halt as. I relied on bulimia to distract myself from some intense fears of failure that had begun to develop at the back of my mind: it was my friend whenever I was stressed, or anxious, or just plain depressed because I didn’t seem to have it in me to write anymore.
After I stopped binging and purging, I thought everything was fine. I was “recovered,” done with my eating disorder, and ready to move on. The problem was, I was now literally afraid to eat just about everything. To me, certain foods were off-limits. Some of them, I thought, could trigger my bulimia again. Others were just “bad.” I didn’t think I should be eating them.
As the months passed, I became ashamed at the way people from my tiny town now seemed to stare at me whenever I came home to visit. I was ashamed of myself, and ashamed of my past. It wasn’t until I began to think about writing a body image book for girls like myself that I began attempting to conquer my fears.
Today, I’ve had to step completely out of my “comfort zone.” I’ve had to tell all sorts of people about my eating disorder—something I never, ever planned on doing. But I know that I’m going to have to be perfectly honest about my problems if I’m ever going to succeed in helping others to open up about their own, and be able to move on with their lives.
Eating disorders are terrifying and brutal, and they isolate us from the people we love. They’re not fun, and they’re not something to be proud of. But with the rising number of people with disordered eating habits in our world today, I think it’s becoming our responsibility to talk about them now. We need to make more people take notice of them, and their causes, and what we can all do to help prevent them. And we, as sufferers and former sufferers, need to band together and support one another. There are so many of us—why should we continue to suffer all by ourselves?
Today I’m also working on getting a group started at MySpace.com, where we can all gather to discuss body image, societal influences, and eating disorders, and to share some of the ways we’ve learned to begin moving past some of our own personal issues. Together we’ll learn, and together we’ll grow.
Visit my website at www.RealFemalesUnite.com to learn how you can help contribute to my project (Project Unplastic). Together, I know that we can make a huge difference in the fight against eating disorders.
- by Justine
