I convulse: my entire body shakes as yet another cough takes ahold of it. Spots dance before my eyes, and when they clear I look down to see flecks of blood on my palm. A week has passed since my 15th birthday, and a shade away being 5’11 tall, I weigh in at 125 pounds. I haven’t eaten in almost two weeks. I’m dying.

I was willing to do anything to be beautiful.

Years have passed since the time of the eating disorder that once consumed my body and life. Almost 19 years old now, I gained that last hairs breadth of height and can now proudly proclaim myself to be 5’11, and lean muscle lines the entirety of my body. I’d like to think that I’ve grown in other ways as well.

One thing stayed the same throughout the periods of recovery, relapse, and introspection that followed in the years after the worst periods of the anorexia nervosa. My fixation on beauty never left, instead it began to grow in a different direction, to be nourished by the light of a different sun.

I don’t exactly remember just when it was that I decided to try to become a beautiful human being rather than beautiful in the classic sense. Was it when my boyfriend at the time threw a cigarette down onto the ground in spite of the trashcan a few steps away from him, or was it when I found out that one of my closest friends was cheating on his significant other?

Whatever the case, what I do know for certain is that it was disgust more so than any spiritual awakening that forced me to examine myself more closely, to make me decide just what type of person it was that I wanted to be.

Looking back, I find myself almost glad for the eating disorder and overemphasis on aesthetics that marked my early teenage years. Without that experience, I’m not sure that I would have gained the willpower necessary to embark on my quest to become a better person. One would think that if I had the willpower necessary to starve myself to a size zero, which I did, that being a good person would be a relatively easy task. How difficult can it be, right?

To put it bluntly, it’s pretty fucking hard, and there are still days when I’m still an asshole.

It goes beyond fidelity and properly throwing away cigarettes. Far beyond. To continually put ones own needs second to those of others, to make oneself into an ear ready to listen or a shoulder to cry on... for me at least, those things are harder than forced starvation. Maybe not at first, but the constant emotional wear is a hard burden to carry.

An old cohort once confided in me that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. Once, not so long ago, I would have believed him.

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.” -Leo Tolstoy