I see thin girls everywhere. It's like when you get a new car and suddenly, that sort of car is everywhere. I didn't realise how many people owned a blue Peugeot and I didn't realise how many terribly thin, sick girls there are out there.
I would have stared and mocked before - thought mean things about stupid girls and diets and willpower and how unattractive, weird, sheep-like, selfish, blind. Now I pass a thin girl and I want to hold her in my arms and rock her. (I want to find her mother and hold her.)
A part of me wants to get angry at her, though - yell how cruel she's being and just bloody well stop it. Maybe it'd work with a stranger. I know it would have been futile with you. It would have shamed you and there is already sufficient shame in your mind to last you forever.
Now, instead of seeing something unknown and alien and strange, I see something that lives my life alongside me every day and inhabits my every thought.
I know you, anorexic girls. I know you. I know your fear and your anger and your complete bewilderment. I see my daughter in you all and it's like a kick in the stomach.
1 comment:
I do that too! I look at all the girls on the bus in their school uniforms and evaluate the size of their thighs in the current fashion for opaque tights and wonder. Is she just naturally built like a little bird or is she anorexic? Is it possible to be healthy at that size? I even do it with the mannequins in shop windows. I overhear their conversations and want to interrupt and tell them that their bodies are beautiful, natural, normal and rip the idiotic magazines out of their hands.
I've spotted a couple I'm sure must be ill and I too just want to hold them and tell them to get help now. But it doesn't hurt me like it must you. Looking forward for you to the day that the thin girls fade into the background again. Or if they never do because it's written indelibly on your consciousness, that the noticing is a softer thing, a tug on a memory rather than a slap of reality, and mixed with the thankfulness that for you and Grace it is a thing of the past.
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