The first time I saw a shooting star, my only wish was to be thin enough to see bones. I weighed 105 pounds and stood at 5'9" and was obsessed with feeling empty like an addict on crack cocaine. If I allowed a calorie more than 1000 to pass my lips, I couldn’t bear to sleep that night. I would lie awake in my bed tossing and turning, despising my lack of self control even as I slowly starved myself into nothing.

It started long before I even understood what a calorie was. When I was younger, I could never fit into everyone else’s idea of “beauty.” The zipper never went all the way up, or the buttons wouldn’t close. Despite this, I still kept trying until I ripped my self esteem up the seams. It was with the torn fabric of self worth in my ten year old hands that I swore one day I’d fix it and one day I’d look beautiful. From that moment on, I lived a life sustained on numbers, spiraling smaller and smaller as I forwent food in favour of being a finite quantity. I was bound to being barely breathing, counting out only how much I need to keep myself from flickering out completely. It wasn’t a secret path to success, though. It was a downhill slope that just got steeper and steeper the further I slid, and soon, like a candle, I had consumed myself. I was wishing to be thin enough to die at the age of fourteen for no reason except I knew that was the way it had to be.

The irony of it all was the same little girl who was, perhaps, a little chubby in the middle and was guilty of liking potato chips a little too much also liked to read. I had read everything I could get my hands on, and at some point one of the books that I had read mentioned a few funny words that I’d never heard before: anorexia, bulimia and eating disorders. I still remember crouching on the green rug that I had on the floor of my room laughing to myself, thinking, “why the hell would anyone starve themselves just to look beautiful. I’d never have an eating disorder. I’m not that stupid. I like the way I am.” It was the same rug that I lay on four years later, holding a pen against my nonexistent waist trying to see how thin I really was, but I still thought a little like my younger self. Somehow coexisting with the part of my mind that screamed and writhed and flailed around whenever I put anything in my mouth there was another little voice that said, “Isn’t it sad, those anorexic girls… they starve themselves to non-existence, but that self control…” I was simply awed by how much care they put into their eating, but I also recognized the dangers of starving myself, and so I still swore I’d never be like them. I was smart, you see. I knew I could survive on 1000 calories, and, after all, a starvation diet is actually 900 a day so I was doing great.

So what if I was starting to get dizzy every time I stood up? I mean, maybe I was just tired from all the running, I knew coach’s workouts were hard. I knew it couldn’t be the eating. If anything, it was making me faster. After all, light and fast make sense together, like peanut butter and jelly. Not that I would dare eat that. Peanut butter was a fat, and fats were bad. Jelly’s all sugar and even the bread it was on would have been carbs. All huge “no”s for my allowed food. I wasn’t being obsessive, of course. I just knew I must still be eating something wrong because my heartbeat was going odd, and I had started to get tired doing even simple things. My legs had also started to tremble constantly— not that that was a problem. I burnt more calories that way.

It was out on a run when I began to realize that there was something horribly wrong. It wasn’t an exceptional day in any way, shape or form, except for that time seemed to be dragging on phenomenally slowly. I was slogging my way up a hill when the top suddenly seemed to get further and further away, and it got very dark all of a sudden. I think if I hadn’t been curious, the moment would have passed, but I had to look up to find where the sun had gone. That was too much for me, and I collapsed onto my hands and knees, in the middle of a dirt road five miles from home. I guess I was lucky— I don’t know how long I stayed there, shaking, trying to re-orient myself with the ground, but if a car had come I’m not sure I would have been able to move.

I don’t remember how I made it home. I did, though, and before I even took off my sweaty, dirty, bloody clothes I sat down in front of the computer, pulled up Google, and… then I froze. To type in the words that danced around the back of my mind would be to admit that there was something wrong. After sitting, hands poised shaking above the keyboard for about ten minutes, I dropped my head into my knees and cried— great, wracking sobs that let me feel every shift of my skeleton under my paper-thin skin. But I did it. Eventually I typed into the keys my greatest fear, and in some sick part of my mind, maybe my greatest desire.

“Am I anorexic?”

enter.

I read through the diagnostic criteria for Anorexia Nervosa on multiple websites, barely believing what I was seeing. Did I have an intense fear of weight gain… well, yes. I did. But for good reason, right? And anyway, I was fat so it didn’t matter… oh, that was another check mark on the list— conviction that you’re fat despite being thin or underweight. I knew I could feel calories like jewels, hanging off the porcelain framework of my bones, yellow globes gathering and dripping, spreading beneath my skin, weighing me down, but how many times had I heard people say I was so thin? Yes, I denied that I was hungry, yes, I lied about my eating— chewing food ten times with each bite wasn’t a ritual, was it? Yes, I ran excessively but I mean some people run a lot more than me and they’re all fine. I was in shock when I found my saving grace, as if someone had left a gift just for me, to assure me it really was all in my head and I was fine. See, for a girl of 5’9” I’d have to weigh 97.4 pounds to be clinically diagnosed as anorexic, and I was still hovering around 105. Just as I told myself with the 1000 calorie diet versus the 900, there was a big difference between 97 and 105, so I was fine. I must have been fine.

I was never diagnosed with any form of eating disorder. Maybe I was right; the importance lay in the most minimal of details… I don’t think that’s true, though. I didn’t stop for months after that day I first searched up the exact definition, but the entire time I held myself in a stasis. Never on a “starvation diet” and always hovering just above 97 pounds I allowed myself to believe I was fine. I was only almost anorexic, and everyone knows that almost only counts in horseshoes and handgrenades. I let myself live as if I were rehearsing my funeral, and it was really no life at all. I lost friends and I could’ve lost myself. Honestly, I might have until I saw a camp friend last summer who was thinner than me, and for the first time I didn’t get a surge of jealousy at her hipbones and collarbones and her astounding beauty because she was not just some picture on a computer screen branded with the mantra, “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” This was real, this was all real and when the words fell out of her pale, thin lips I knew what they were before they hit the ground.

“I’m anorexic.”

She was a better mirror than any pane of glass ever had been because in that moment, in her, I saw me. Maybe I wasn’t there yet, but I would be soon and it wasn’t pretty at all.

I still have bad days, and sometimes I still feel guilty about eating things I know aren’t healthy, but I’ve done my best to recover from something I may not have ever even had. With the help of friends and family, I slowly put myself back together again. It wasn’t half of what some people go through, but it was awful for me. I did learn a lot about myself, though. Some of it was terrifying, but I also learnt that sometimes I need to accept help, and sometimes I’m wrong. The world’s not out to get me, it turns out.

I think there will always be some part of me, now, that remembers what it was like to feel so hollow and I hope I never go back because they were right. Nothing tastes like skinny feels, and I’ve only been catching up on my eating recently but I haven’t yet found a food that tastes like rotten breath and crumbling teeth, or the rush of blood to the head or the butterfly heartbeat that started and stopped when I couldn’t sleep. There’s nothing that tastes as vile as hatred as it would rise in my throat at the thought of how everything I wished to be was everything I was not. I believed I wasn’t worth the space I took up in the world but I do deserve to be here, just the way I am. Only a few weeks ago, I was walking home on legs that can hold me up again, warm in my coat despite the slight chill in the air when I saw a shooting star again, giving me a second chance at a wish.