Hi, my name is Aisha and I’m 13 years old. I live in Gothenburg, Sweden and in this text I’ll try to tell you as much as I know about anorexia from both others perspectives and from my perspective.
I actually don’t know when I got my anorexia, both my mom, I and my psychologist thinks that I’ve had it a long time but that I just didn’t act on it from the beginning.
I was a pretty happy child up until I got 6 years old. That’s when my mom and dad got a divorce and I started feeling sad and lonely. I kept to myself for the most part and I started feeling insecure. I wasn’t very good in school when I was younger so that really didn’t help. Skip forward 4 years and that is when things started to change, I kept to myself a lot and I started working really hard in school. I had always been very scared of fighting because my mom and dad fought a lot when they were getting the divorce and so every time someone in my surrounding started fighting I got very sad and depressed and that is something that is still with me to this day. Then skip forward one more year and I was in fifth grade, I got a few friends that I still hang out with and I was very good in school but then my friends changed schools and we couldn’t hang out as much. I think I was trying to find myself all of those years because I had always changed my personality throughout the years. Sixth grade was good and I got good grades plus I had great friends:) but it was midway through sixth grade that everything went downhill... I got a comment from a guy in my class and that was the one thing that triggered my eating disorder.
I told you that I had always been very insecure and mostly that was about my body. That one comment was the only one that I had ever gotten and it was just a joke. But it proves that a small comment like that can be the end of your life. Anyways, he said:
Have you gotten fatter (jokingly)
I got so sad that I dieted that whole following week and little did I know that that “diet” wouldn’t stop until my mom found out. My mom thought that I was just trying to get healthier but that wasn’t what it was about for me, I just wanted to loose more and more weight. Anyways summer break came around and I had to be at my grandparents house. I ate very little and I was exercising a lot. I was told that I was getting skinnier every day but I couldn’t see that, after all I was just a fat pig, right? No, I wasn’t fat, I just couldn’t see through my own eyes anymore, it was Anas.
Life was horrible and it was like having another person in my head making me miserable...
My mom knew what an eating disorder was but she couldn’t do anything. It was summer and you can’t get a lot of help at that time so she just had to hold out.
After the summer break I got my first appointment where a psychologist was going to diagnose me. It took about 4-5 months to before I got to the anorexia/ bulimia clinic and that is where I am now.
I have gone through so much during those 4-5 months and a lot of things happened. I learned that I could just purge whenever I felt that I ate too much and I had no one that knew how I felt, the closest thing to someone who knew what I felt like was the psychologists who had studied the acts, causes etc of anorexia. But I fought and I am still fighting to get better.
Every day is a battle but for every fear food that I challenged myself with and that I still challenge myself with I’m slowly winning this battle. Of course there will be bad days but there will always be good days following those few bad days that might happen once in a while.
I want you to know that there is always someone that loves you and that you deserve to live and be happy. For me that was my mom, I was so far gone that I had no love for myself what so ever anymore but the only one that could get me to keep fighting was my mom. Her love was and is everything for me and it is the one thing in the world that got me that little hope to recover from anorexia.
You might not have any hope to recover right now but I didn’t have any motivation either at first. The motivation and willingness comes with time but the most important thing is that you know that you are loved❤️
“Always keep fighting”
Written by: Aisha Tarawneh