The story of Katy and his sister E, an overwhelming intimate story of anorexia

Reading time: 39 min

In my parents' house, there is a small photo ofE.and me framed upstairs.We must be 6 or 7 years old on it.The shot was taken a summer, in a garden, we had just run under automatic watering and our hair is soaked.Each to her matching checkered swimsuit - mine is pink, hers.My sister is fine and gray.Me, even today, I continue to find myself a little too job.We are really cute to laugh at the camera, like the two parts of a whole.As if we had no secrets for each other.

Sur mon front, un voisin avait dessiné le diadème de Jasmine –une large bande turquoise avec son gros caillou jaune au milieu.I think I remember that the thing had fairly excited to me, the tickle of the brush and the colors that spread out on my skin.E., she has nothing on her face.If my memory is good there too, it is because she had said no to painting, probably aware that any attempt to embellish it was completely superfluous.

Growing up, I started looking at this photo differently.At the start, I was crazy about my painted crown, but little by little, she started hitting me on the system.His hypnotic blue was too vulgar, too seeing, like my belly a little too plump under my swimsuit.Gradually, I understood what my nature was.I was the girl who was drowned in the colored box rather than being satisfied with the most beautiful pencil.I told stories to sleep standing, without tail or head.I gesticulated like a buffoon with the pool, but I was the slowest, the most clumsy. J'ai réalisé combienE.had always been elegant, how even in kindergarten, she knew how to preserve herself from the cry, cookie-cutting judgments.How she had this innate sense of an aesthetic principle that I have never managed to conceive: "less, it's better".

If you asked me when the anorexia seeds started to germinate in my heart, I would tell you about this photo.From me, in the corridor, the analysand with a new eye.So.It's here.It starts there.

"I wanted to save her, I wanted to make her disappear"»»»

And I also have a story to tell you.My parents, D.and j.are affable, loving and exciting individuals.My twin sister (we are dizygotes) is a beautiful and brilliant woman.At 14, she began to suffer from anorexia, driven by perfectionism, genetics and the kind of fate imperceptible to ordinary people but nevertheless sufficient to unbalance the cosmic order and all upside down in its path.At 17, I started to suffer from anorexia, driven by a perfectly trivial and poetry cacophony of motivations: I wanted to get closer to her, I wanted to surpass her, I wanted to save her, I wanted to make her disappear.

Dès la quatrième,E.wedged on a lifestyle that hasn't really changed since - it allows him to eat (a little) and play sports (a lot) without asking questions.For a while, my parents insurgated against this routine.Today, they consider it more or less normal.(The habit they have to ignore it at certain times and to encourage it to other shows that they are somewhere between denial and acceptance).Are they wrong?Who knows.At the time of writing, my sister is excessively thin.She is a charismatic, disciplined, brilliant doctoral student of a prestigiousHASmerican university.Et elle est malheureuse.

Me, at the same time, I tried to undo what I had done to myself.I have consulted nutritionists (and refused to follow their menus).I tried medication (taken sporadically).After college, I returned to live with my parents, in Washington, I found a great therapist and I recovered a little lucidity.As strange as it may seem, it will have been useful to me to be a miserable anorexic, convinced that the disease was deeply deleterious for me, while being unable to free myself from its grip.Until the release.The sun of reality was gradually disinfecting my brain.I had friends, books, a job I loved.I left my parents.I'm better.

Even today, I'm afraid of telling the story badly.Est-ce queE. est vraiment malheureuse?Est-ce que mes parents nous ont vraiment renforcées dans notre maladie ou ont-ils été simplement dépassés, impuissants, incapables de renverser la vapeur? Difficile pour moi de repenser à ces années de ma vie sans me croire coupable d'un grave péché narratif.

I am not the most reliable person when it comes to remembering events.(Besides, you are probably not either).I scramble stories about people in order to better understand them, to comfort myself, to entertain me.I sometimes balance my mental health on unstable materials - loved objects that do not stay in place that I intimate them.It is sometimes complicated to accept that your "characters" - Maman, dad, my sister - do not belong to you, even if it is you the narrator.

"A highly intellectualized hallucination"»»»

Narrative impulse often merges with anorexia itself.To be sick is to build an alternative reality, to use solid mantras to keep it in place and give in to the logical bewitching of fairy tales: there was once a girl who was eating almost nothing.Once upon a time there was a witch who lived in the black depths of a forest.Anorexics are convinced of being excruciating, bad, detestable.En même temps, elles ne cessent de ruminer leur sacrifice, leur noblesse, leurs pouvoirs éthérés.

"Anorexia seems to be less of a physical and psychological affliction than a spiritual elevation, a highly intellectualized hallucination", wrote Ginia Bellafante in her review of Going Hungry, a collection of articles on eating disorders::

"Reading Going Hungry, we tell ourselves that we wanted to convince us that superficial anorexic does not exist, that these creatures which are controlled in the extreme are always accompanied by imaginations or exceptional intelligences.»»»»

Are this overestimation of sensitivities, do this beatification say something about my problem?I do not know.At the bottom of my disorder, I did not see myself as a delicate fairy-poet, I did not imagine being able to paint the world with all the colors of the wind.But perhaps the myths on beauty surrounding anorexia fueled my idealization of my sister, the pedestal on which I placed it-the priestestal priestestal principles that I never managed to apprehend.Et j'ai sans doute permis à la voix de la maladie de se confondre avec celle de mes parents, pour finir par leur assigner la haine que je pouvais ressentir à mon égard.A kind of self-protective and self-destructive logic that will have pushed me to plant a decor and make my family evolve there.

Anorexic impulse which consists in romanticizing your illness makes it possible to keep, control and alleviate our truths not beautiful to see.Et malgré ses promesses d'expressivité, elle est l'ennemie de l'écriture.Et elle est très certainement l'ennemie de la vie.We have to sweep the false stories that our culture conveys about the eating disorders - shots that hinder and complicate care, contribute to an extremely low healing rate and an appallingly high mortality rate.En examinant de plus près à la fois la science et la littérature de l'anorexie, nous pouvons débusquer les incohérences des scénarios, les craquelures où s'immiscent l'auto-tromperie et l'auto-sabotage.

To contribute, the best I can do is tell you my story.Et vous la raconter avec le plus d'honnêteté et de précision possibles.

The power to say no

Anorexia, this is what the Faculty of Imitation can produce more sinister.I learned how to torture the contents of my plate-deconstructing, rebuild it, microwave infinitely-looking at my sister.En l'observant, j'ai aussi appris comment toujours me tenir droite, même devant la télé, à serrer les abdos, à tendre les jambes.But above all, I learned to say no, again and again, summer and winter, indifferent to the advantages as well as disadvantages.No, I will not eat starchy foods.No, I will not take chicken.No, I don't want a dessert, no breakfast, no lunch.No, I am not hungry.No, I won't be common sense.No, no and no.

I am sure that.also borrowed me some charming tics.His methods were openly hostile, mine much more deceitful.I got rid of food, hoods in towels, gave the dog.("It's K. que Ziggy préfère»»»», s'amusait ma mère lorsque notre croisé pit-bull aux oreilles tombantes me suivait dans la cuisine. «Moi aussi je t'aime»»»», roucoulais-je en le regardant dans le blanc des yeux.Not.Interest.HAS.Cafter.Or.I.You.Kill)

Contagion was also made by language.The indictment against the testimonies of anorexic which would actually be proof and pro-ana managers is well known. Que ce soit des écrivains comme Emma Woolf (petite-nièce de Virginia) ou des adolescentes noircissant des blogs ou des forums, il y a toujours cette idée voulant qu'en détaillant leur histoire, les anorexiques camouflent des conseils: combien de minutes sur le tapis de course, quel objectif de poids, combien de calories consommées.

By the competitive nature of the disease, this information, ostensibly presented as warnings, can be read as incentives.En parlant de Piégée: mémoires d'une anorexique de Marya Hornbacher, «pierre angulaire»»»» de la littérature sur les troubles du comportement alimentaire, Kelsey Osgood, elle-même auteure d'un ouvrage sur le sujet, avoue avoir incorporé certaines «astuces»»»» d'Hornbacher dans ses propres techniques d'amaigrissement.

But more fundamentally, anorexia is a mythomaniac whose favorite theme would be your identity. Parce que ses canaux d'action et de communication sont si souvent linguistiques, la maladie a inspiré toute une tradition littéraire pernicieuse, avec ses saintes patronnesses (Catherine de Sienne, elle aussi jumelle, qui consignera les détails de son ascétisme miraculeux dans des lettres envoyées à ses disciples mystiques), ses glamoureuses aînées (Emily Dickinson,HASnne Sexton, Sylvia Plath), ses tropes (les fées, la neige) et ses dispositifs (l'ironie, le paradoxe, le narrateur infidèle).

La «littérature anorexique»»»» fixe sur le papier les caractéristiques infra-littéraires et auto-mystificatrices de l'anorexie.From the novels of Charles Dickens to the poems of Louise Glück, she integrates and transmits something more infectious and undoubtedly even more dangerous than regime tips: a specific personality and sensitivity.

The new anorexic has arrived

What ethical and fascinating personality?Ask Persephone, the cursed goddess by six grenade seeds, or to one of the frail and tuberculous heroines of the opera. Demandez à Sia, qui de sa voix rêche chante la souffrance et la fragilité.Or encore à la Fée Clochette, avec sa taille de guêpe, ses ailes d'araignée, qui sacrifie son corps à l'amour et disparaît, littéralement, si on ne l'appelle pas d'un claquement de doigts.No contempt or judgment in my remarks: the quest for the hearing of the troubled of food is the mark of a much deeper alienation of self than could express the most extravagant of the Divas.

Anorexia is the psychiatric equivalent of the red shoes that make you dance until death.This is a performance - from femininity, pain, power - which turns into prison.The choreography absorbs you so much that you no longer have access to your own will, to your own desires.Et vous avez parfois besoin d'un tiers pour vous confirmer votre propre existence.

For a long time, we have associated pathological thinness with depth or poetic sensitivity.The roots of romance date back to Catherine de Siena, who feels closer to God when she stops eating and who, in spite of herself, can no longer swallow anything as she considers her sacred torment.If the excess of flesh on a woman is a sign of gluttony (a sin) or pregnancy (an infamy), the emaciation tends to demonstrate the domination of the soul over the body.The anorexia mirabilis - the miraculous loss of appetite - proves of the most intimate adhesion to Christic suffering and self -denial, or at least a spirituality so pure that earthly pleasures are indifferent to it.

And you know what?The archetype of fasting mysticism had a daughter.Just as adulated, just as small - and whose spiritual delicacy will once again prevail over the rudeness of the tissues.Elle se rebelle contre sa mère en appliquant sa rigueur héréditaire non pas à la prière, mais à une forme artistique de la féminité. Pensez à JaneEyre «délicate et aérienne»»»» ou à la Ruth d'Elizabeth Gaskell, «petite créature innocente et sans force»»»». Pensez à Dorothée Brooke dans Middlemarch, dont «la main et le poignet»»»» sont «assez délicatement modelés pour porter avec grâce des manches tout unies, comme celles de la Vierge des peintres italiens»»»».

The reference to Mary is not accidental - like her mother, the new anorexic is pure and asexual.But she is also a designer, inspired and passionate.As Florence Nightingale wrote in 1852: "If [a woman] has a knife and a fork in her hands three hours a day, she cannot use a pencil or a brush at the same time.»»»»The hands of the new anorexic will overflow with pencils and brushes.When she suffers, her suffering will turn into oils, in poems.

Dans son livre de 2002, Victorian Literature and theHASnorexic Body [la littérature victorienne et le corps anorexique],HASnna Krugovoy Silver montre combien les réalités sociales et économiques de l'Angleterre du XIX^e siècle allaient tout faire pour idéaliser la minceur féminine.

To demonstrate its ethereal virtue, women were encouraged to suppress their appetites, especially at mealtime. «Si vous déclinez gracieusement»»»» quand on vous offre à boire ou à manger, conseillait un manuel de savoir-vivre de l'époque, vos convives «apprécieront la délicatesse qui vous fera refuser»»»».

Anorexia poetics

These values will infuse literature.In vampire novels like Dracula by Bram Stoker or Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, the hyperbolic disgust that inspires the very concept of female hunger is omnipresent.At Charles Dickens, vapory young girls move in emphasis and sublime. La «poétique de l'anorexie»»»» de Dickens, comme la qualifie Silver, trouve son parangon dans le personnage d'Agnès de David Copperfield.If you never see his body, you know that David sently associates it with "the sweet light of this stained glass that I saw in a church"»». Nelly, dans Le magasin d'antiquités semble tout aussi évanescente: «cette créature si jeune, tout esprit, toute délicate, une vraie petite fée»»»» passe son temps à s'évanouir. «[É]puisée de fatigue»»»», elle manquera mourir «de besoin»»»», son «visage pâle»»»» et ses «traits bouleversés»»»» comme un modèle édifiant pour ses amis.

While these punctures sylphids hated in Victorian fiction, another archetype was going to materialize in the popular imagination.Elle s'inspirera de Christina Rossetti, poétesse anglo-catholique qui, selon Paula Marantz Cohen, spécialiste de littérature britannique, «avait sans doute développé l'anorexie durant son adolescence, pour continuer à en souffrir adulte»»»».Its poem market goblin stages two sisters, Lizzie la Fugale and Laura La Gloutonne, as a sublimation of double and paradoxical desire for deprivation and excess.

Emily Brontë will be another influence. Qu'elle ait ou non souffert d'un trouble du comportement alimentaire durant son adolescence –au moins un de ses biographes estime qu'elle aurait lutté contre «l'auto-affamement et la mélancolie»»»» dans ses années de pensionnat– sa mort précoce d'une phtisie galopante offrira à la culture anglo-saxonne une image indélébile de génie fluette, fauchée dans la fleur de l'âge.HASux États-Unis, la spectraleEmily Dickinson entrera elle aussi dans le club. Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath etHASnne Sexton la suivront de près, comme autant de femmes brillantes mais folles et condamnées à l'auto-destruction.At a time when my grandmother's painter began to watch out for her daughter’s waist tour in the 1950s, the anorexic trope was at her peak.

Gourmet metaphors

Dans Going Hungry, l'auteure de littérature young adult Francesca Lia Block assimile l'anorexie à «ce mélange parfait d'angélisme et de démoniaque –la fée.Ethereal, delicate, so light that it can fly ”»».When she mentions her years spent in the grip of Farfadet, she talks about it with an outrageously irresponsible lyricism:

J'aimerais qu'il existe un prix des pires scènes de sexe dans la fiction, mais pour les envolées pro-ana.Et pourtant, devinez quel était mon écrivain préféré quand j'étais pré-ado?I me souviens de 1999, j'avais 11 ans, et tout mon être était magnétisé par les personnages de Block, ses marginaux malingres, ses bébés sorcières aux cheveux violets, ses magiciennes surdouées.I me rappelle les explosions épicées de jacaranda, les porches qui sentent la mandarine et la cannelle, toute l'exquise médiateté des plaisirs imaginaires. Francesca Lia Block décrit des baisers «aussi sucrés que des tartes à la pomme encore chaudes sur lesquelles fond une boule de vanille»»»», des baisers «au goût du chocolat que vous n'avez pas mangé depuis un an»»»».

Pourquoi son usage de métaphores alimentaires pour décrire des non-aliments ne m'a-t-il pas sauté aux yeux à l'époque?Et ses personnages, forcément languides, chétifs et minces? Mais par-dessus tout, je me souviens du passage dans The Hanged Man où l'héroïne déclare qu'elle veut être «aussi mince et pure qu'une tasse de verre»»»». Une tasse de verre!Youllement poétique.It was many years before Alice Gregory ridicule the style of block in the New Yorker and his allegorical excesses "which reminds of advertisements for mineral water designed in crazy asylums"»».

Si leur effet est difficile à quantifier, «beaucoup de récits et de témoignages (…) glorifient les souffrances et les particularités de l'anorexie»»»», explique le Dr.HASngela Guarda, spécialiste des troubles du comportement alimentaire à Johns Hopkins. Quelques «patients admettent que ces écrits ont pu romancer leur trouble»»»» et que leur lecture a pu «déclencher ou aggraver leurs TCA»»»».

Sadness is "interesting"»»»

If, in the reality of the facts, anorexia has absolutely nothing glamorous (you remember the atrociously boring passage on the counting of calories in Not that Kind of Girl by Lena Dunham? Ben Imagine when he becomes the fullyour existence), Guarda insists on the fact that "as long as concept, anorexia is very often"»».In Johns Hopkins, doctors generally advise against their patients to read most of the autobiographies of anorexic, and especially the significant portion signed by authors "who think herself, but who have all the air of being sick»»»»»».

Except that what happened to me with block is slightly different.I n'étais pas (encore) anorexique, elle n'écrivait pas (explicitement) des récits d'anorexie, et je ne sais pas trop comment quelqu'un aurait pu changer quoi que ce soit dans cette histoire.

Sadness is "interesting"»»», fait remarquer Leslie Jamison dans son magistral article sur la douleur féminine.Et «la maladie [est] sa servante, qui lui offre non seulement une raison, mais aussi des symptômes et des métaphores: une toux caverneuse, un visage livide, un corps émacié»»»».Children die from wanting to be interesting.Les Souls-en-Peine de Block, with their graphic thinness and their dark secrets could only please my ambition and in my dramatic sense, without forgetting my childish narcissism.See this other Blockian character and his inventory in the Petrarch:

The scansion of the sentence is itself diaphanous.There is femininity, sweetness, erased brilliance of a distant star.En me projetant dans ce corps, l'idée que quelqu'un puisse tellement faire attention à moi qu'il en remarque la saillie de mes clavicules avait évidemment de quoi m'exalter.

Est-ce que mes clavicules étaient intéressantes?Est-ce qu'elles se «déployaient comme les ailes d'un oiseau»»»»?

My family, a clan of pyromaniac experts

Welcome (once again) in the W family. qui, à ce moment de l'histoire, va jouer le rôle du «déclencheur»»»»: une mère soucieuse de son apparence et de sa silhouette, un père athlète, une sœur qui deviendra rapidement à mes yeux l'anorexie incarnée.We are an unstable clan, pyromaniac experts who at the same time have a blue -tone of fires.Here are two summers, we decided to drag our carcasses in Ireland, each nestled in the indulgence of the other - a resource that seems inexhaustible when certain things turn you around, without you being able to face it.

One evening, in Dublin, we were invited to a dinner at 7 p.m..It was already 5 p.m. and my sister wanted to run.At our hotel, she changed speed.Me too - I had spotted an elliptical in the hotel gym and planned to do it at the same time as.would monopolize the carpet.About twenty minutes after the start of our respective training, the disaster arrived.E., who needed a total hour of racing and was already starting to freak not to get there, realized that the Irish machines measured the distances in kilometers and not in miles.She had to start everything again from the start and do it on the street, with an American application on her phone.But because she did not know Dublin well (and that it was necessary not to grill the fires of the studded passages), her jogging was going to require a good and a half hours.It was 5:45 p.m..At 6.30 p.m., we were supposed to be showered, dressed, and ready to go out.

My sister melted into tears by hitting the Stop button on the carpet. «Dis à maman et papa que je serai en retard»»»», a-t-elle reniflé, avant de se précipiter vers la sortie.It might seem weird to you, but I did not follow her, nor tried to dissuade her.The thing is strange, indeed. «Sois prudente»»»», lui ai-je envoyé en SMS.I was totally distraught and, I suppose, impeccable."Come back soon"»».Ensuite, j'ai texté mes parents."E.will be late "»».It was, I persuaded myself, all I could do.I suis restée sur mon elliptique pendant encore dix minutes, puis je suis montée dans ma chambre pour me préparer.

All four, we arrived at dinner around 8 p.m..Et me revoilà dans mon rôle de cafteuse: ma sœur est restée à sa place, à ne rien avaler, pendant nos allers-retours au buffet; elle s'est contentée de tremper délicatement ses lèvres dans son verre d'eau, tandis que des flots festifs de rouge et de blanc remplissaient les nôtres.Do you believe me?I was going to drink too much that evening - I have to specify it.Otherwise, things could have taken place otherwise.My sister fell the guests with her university stories.(They found it so delicious.I me déteste d'en avoir eu quelque chose à foutre).On a bench, I sit too close to my mother, the nostrils obsessed with her perfume.Some of me took advantage of the evening, when the other wanted to fart a lead - because of what, I don't really know.

"Proud?We were an hour late and she didn't eat anything! ”»»»

And then, of course, we returned to our hotel and it was very late. La chambre de mes parents était voisine de la nôtre, àE.and me.HASvant de nous séparer, ma mère nous prend dans ses bras.

I derive:

I fix my father.Disappointment quickly takes shape on his face.

Like me, my mother had drunk a little too much.We are two strong heads.

E.Lifts your eyes to the sky, then goes into our room.Good technique.I suis mes parents dans la leur.

I ask:

My mother rushes into the bathroom and slams the door.

I'm dying.It's time of the compassey speech that I know by heart, as if my father read his prompter on the opposite wall.It is about indulgence, to pay attention to the words I use, worry, reproaches.

I didn't want to demolish it.I voulais qu'elle arrête de faire ce qu'elle avait toujours fait, ces trucs probablement inhérents à son identité.Est-ce que ça revenait au même? «Bien»»»» me comporter –y aller mollo sur le sport, me nourrir– me semblait parfois si dérisoire. Mon problème, ce n'était pas seulement qu'on m'avait privée de ma petite tape sur la tête pour me féliciter d'être «guérie»»»» (Vous n'êtes jamais «guéri»»»» d'un TCA, vous barbotez éternellement dans le purgatoire de la «rémission»»»»).What was terrified was the vision that my parents had of me: devoured by jealousy and bitterness, always obsessed with my twin, like a small manic poodle.

Ascetic words

À chaque fois que le mélange compliqué de peur et de tristesse que je pouvais ressentir pourE.passed for hostility - I felt like I was forcibly embarked on a boat that suddenly capsized.

To want to hang on to the branches, I was only drowning under the dark and cold water that was so familiar to me. Celle qui me disait que le comportement deE.Was nothing so crazy.That it was not necessary to defuse yourself with salmon and peas, but to get throbed with a conversation as fine and sparkling as his glass of Perrier.That I too had that I dive, that I threw the abyss.That I am beautiful, again.

"A Quick andEasy Crash Course on How to UseEnglish Punctuation Correctly"http://bit.LY/PMN9A

— Rebecca Hubbard Wed Dec 02 15:39:52 +0000 2009

Maybe Louise Glück would be able to teach me.

This is in any case what I thought, in college, by registering for my first poetry lesson.Consciously, I hoped that Louise Glück taught me to write beautiful texts, but in practice, it came back to the same.

If block embodies anorexic sensitivity in what is most theatrical and infantile, the poetry of Glück (which appears in Going Hungry) gives it the voice of maturity.In his restraint and his refusal of the charming, Glück distills in his first collections something of the anorexic state of mind.The abundance, noise and glitter disgust it.Elle tourmente les critiques par ses formules austères comme «intensité maigre»»»» ou «contraignante précision»»»».Et à l'instar de l'anorexique qui revient sans cesse à ses petites habitudes, à ses mêmes ingrédients, Glück tisse et détisse ses mots ascétiques: la mare, la glace, la butte, la lune, les astres.His first poems are read as meticulous renunciations, with punctuation going to the essentials, at most true.

The power of metamorphosis

After college, depressed and isolated in my TCA, I ruminated these three Persephone verses the Wanderer: "Unlike us, she does not know/what winter/just is the cause"»».In my eyes, Glück offered anorexia the status of a season, she mythified her, ennobled her.

During these years, I feared the chaos that I was able to trigger at every moment, that my secret flaws reveal themselves in broad daylight.Anorexia told me that I was disgusting, but it also promised me serenity, once reached the enchanted country of thinness.My perfect body was going to be my magic potion, my remedy against my interiors.Elle me protégeait des tempêtes desEnfers, elle m'enveloppait dans son éternel été.

I swayed, in other words, to obtain this ancient power: that of metamorphosis.Et nous racontons des histoires pour la même raison –pour transformer, pour élever, pour sauver.

It is the fantasy of anorexia, total expressiveness.See the sadness of anorexic, readable on its anatomy.Her intimate life, her emotions, immediately manifest himself to whoever wants to look at her.In a reverse transubstantiation, the flesh becomes a word, becomes personality.Only real artists, the most authentic, can thus experience their art.

By definition, a sign means something.But what does a body mean?Tell me with words devoid of romanticism. Sans boutons de fleurs et sans manigances.Tell me what winter is.

Anorexic literature, according to Jamison, is "nostalgic for hunger as a verbalization of anxiety"»».Elle valorise les métaphores –«les os hiéroglyphes, les clavicules pleurs»»»».Elle assigne «une éloquence au corps affamé, une sorte de grâce lyrique»»»».

I have nothing pretty to say about my body when I'm too thin.My skin eliminates and stretches in squamous plates.My oversized head is agitated on my chicken neck like a stupid balloon.TCA artists fetishize the bones of the basin, but I assure you that mine has no aesthetic interest.Et mes cheveux! Si pailleux, ternes et plats, la honte pour une juive.

An alienating experience

But the ugly aside, to instrumentalize my body - to present to others so that they read it as the character of a text - is a way to damage the most effective.Et je ne parle pas uniquement sur un plan théorique.I veux dire que vous affamer est l'une des expériences les plus aliénantes que vous pouvez vous infliger.Have you ever tried to do anything with a fully empty stomach?Despite the myths on a renewed concentration, intensity or imagination, at best you feel like a layer of dirt on an old kitchen table.

Admittedly, at the start, hunger gives you energy-specialists do not all agree on the origin of the hyperactivity of anorexic, is it a hormonal phenomenon or which is a conscious desire to burn calories?But in the end, you are just a cracked fishing net in which soft ideas pass.Impossible to speak, to write, to act.Hunger does not transform your existence into a glorious act of lyricism.Hunger turns off what you are.

According to a more scientific explanation, anorexia nibbles your brain. Comme le préciseHASrielle Pardes dans Vice:

(Fortunately, loss of brain volume is generally caught when the weight starts upwards).Hunger also decreases cortical blood flow, which slows down cognitive machinery all the more and allows anorexia mirages to go.

Besides that, I love to write when I eat.I love to put language when popcorn or peanut butter-butter crush under my teeth.I love getting off my office to go buy tinged candies, alternating from time to time with creamy chocolates, while compulsing synonyms in my head or trying to remember, at most exact, a feeling that II was able to have at a precise moment of my adolescence.In these cases, I also know that I invest too much in food.As if food had both become an opportunity and the expression of happiness, a kind of celebration of itself.

«Pour me la péter deux minutes, me ditE.On the phone, your mania to eat and write at the same time embodies the fantasy of a total and immediate opening, of an ideal and reciprocal exchange with the world.Both you produce it and you draw your material.You are not really locked up in yourself, excluded from pleasure and generosity.It is rather as if you admitted your interdependence with the universe, that this connection is creative, that as a writer, your story can also be that of other people.»»»»

(J'ai pensé:"Et ton histoire alors?»»»», sans lui poser la question)

A long story of anorexia errors

In 1873, the French doctor Charles Lasègue and theEnglish physicist Sir William Gull (who had personally dealt with Queen Victoria) published independently about the nervous loss of appetite, anorexia nervosa. Pour Lasègue, qui parle «d'anorexie hystérique»»»», l'anorexique est en général «une jeune fille entre 15 et 20 ans [qui] éprouve une émotion qu’elle avoue ou qu’elle dissimule.Most often it is a real or imaginary project of marriage, a annoyance relating to any sympathy or even some more or less conscious aspiration "»»». Par un hasard cosmique heureux, Lasègue est aussi le père de la «folie à deux»»»» ou «trouble psychotique partagé»»»», une notion si chère aux Waldman.

Gull, meanwhile, prescribed "various remedies (...) a preparation of quinquina, mercury bichloride, iron phosphate syrup, quinine and iron citrate"»»».An administration which, alas, was not going to be followed by any "perceptible effect"»»».

Thus began a long history of errors on anorexia.We still do not really know what are the causes.This relates, in part, to the fact that the kind of longitudinal and standardized study necessary to illuminate its etiology is far too large and expensive for the vast majority of researchers to get there.(Anorexia-bulimia affects approximately 1% of the population, which means that the slightest experience according to a randomized group of people to see how sick fall should enlist thousands of participants to obtain significant results).

It is also because research on eating disorders lack funding.HASux États-Unis, les Instituts nationaux de la santé (NIH) allouent seulement 1,20 dollar de recherche par patient souffrant de TCA, contre 159 dollars pour la schizophrénie (qui, elle aussi, touche 1% de la population).But it is mainly because TCA are excruciatingly complex and mix genetic, environmental and cultural factors.

Simplist explanations

The history of anorexia will have been a tale woven with simplistic explanations - false history - which still keep their influence thanks to the small grains of truth that each can have.

Here is a selection.

1. Les femmes hystériquesComme Julie Hepworth le souligne dans son livre The Social Construction ofHASnorexia Nervosa [la construction sociale de l'anorexia nervosa], les termes anorexie et hystérie ont été quasiment interchangeables au cours du XIX^e siècle. Selon Lasègue, l'hystérie perturbait le «foyer gastrique»»»», d'où une aversion pour la nourriture. Dans ses premiers écrits, Gull parlait de l'anorexie comme de l'«hysteria apepsia»»»», «suivant l'hypothèse que les anorexiques souffraient d'un déséquilibre de la pepsine, ce qui ternissait leur appétit.En 1884, dans ses conférences sur les «névroses viscérales»»»», le physicien T. CliffordHASllbutt estimait qu'à l'instar des hystériques, les jeunes filles qui s'affamaient réagissaient «histrioniquement»»»» –de manière exagérée– à l'air du temps et à ses injonctions genrées. «L'invincible dégoût pour la nourriture»»»», déclarait-il, traduisait chez des patients «exubérants»»»» un désir autrement normal d'apprivoiser ses «propensions animales»»»».

2. Un trouble hormonalAu début du XX^e siècle, des médecins autopsient une anorexique et lui trouvent une glande pituitaire ratatinée.They then formulate the hypothesis that the disease would be caused by too low concentrations of pituitary hormone and plan to treat anorexic by injections of said hormone.That will not work.Anorexic will then see their blood flooded with thyroid juice, insulin and estrogens.It was not until the 1940s and a sum of poor results - visibly, hormonal injections can help treat a TCA, but only if they are accompanied by very calorie foods - so that the idea of anorexia as a purely endocrine disorderor finally discredited.

3.The anxiety of pregnancy 1939, George H.HASlexander, un psychanalyste freudien de Rhode Island, décrit le cas d'une adolescente anorexique qui avait commencé à s'affamer lorsque deux de ses camarades de classe étaient tombées enceintes et avaient été renvoyées de l'école. Selon la théorie d'Alexander, sa patiente était atteinte d'un délire paranoïaque dans lequel le «gras»»»» équivalait à la «gravidité»»»» et la nourriture symbolisait un «agent fécondant»»»».It will take two decades to understand that this assimilation of anorexic to individuals drowned in an irrational anxiety of pregnancy was only based on wind.

4.Too invasive mothers and fathers too absent with the boom in systemic family therapies in the 1960s and 1970s, doctors were going to seek to prophesy the answers to the questions posed by anorexia by reading in the bowels of the households.The TCAs were (and are still for some) a raised power struggle between tyrannical mothers and too docile children.En 2002,HASnna Krugovoy Silver continuait à écrire qu'au moins en partie «l'anorexie est une stratégie de pouvoir par laquelle une fille refuse de manger pour gagner en influence et en attention au sein de sa famille»»»». Le scénario typique? Un environnement familial «contrôlant mais non confrontationnel»»»» où une fille «perfectionniste et ambitieuse»»»» a souvent une «relation problématique et conflictuelle avec sa mère»»»».

5.Patriarchate in the 1980s, feminism was once again transforming our apprehension of anorexia.Books like fat is a feminist from [the fat is a feminist question] of Susie Orbach or when beauty hurts Naomi Wolf contained a lot of errors, but allowed public opinion to become aware of the unrealistic representations of the bodiesfemale media.Eating disorders were going to become powerful symbols of social injunctions weighing on women and cultural expectations wanting to transform them into simple decorative elements, their identities and their reduced ambitions to the congruent portions.It was therefore enough to change the aesthetic standards and anorexia would have been defeated for good.

Slow down

Obviously, none of these stories is totally false.Hormones most likely play a role in TCA.Many women fall sick on the eve of puberty and many doctors isolate estrogens as a possible accelerator factor.The leptin (a satiety hormone synthesized in fatty tissue) and ghrelin (a fain hormn produced in the stomach and pancreas) are both managed by Insula, an area of the brain that tends to do notnot operate properly in patients with TCA.Likewise, anorexic individuals also have very high cortisol levels, but this increase in stress can be as much a corollary of the business as a cause as.

It is true that some anorexics have dominating mothers.Except that it is just as true as seeing your daughter set off and playing sports to die tends to activate your protective impulses.A 1995 study observes also chaotic and counterproductive parental behaviors during meals in parents of anorexic and children with cystic fibrosis, often too sick to succeed in eating.

It is also true that a desire to slow down the passage of time and to delay the major stages of adulthood - sex, marriage, pregnancy - can encourage a girl to stop eating.Ditto for our culture where the assimilation of thinness with prestige is omnipresent.Anything that can give a teenager the idea of reducing her calorie socket can light the organic wick and explode the TCA.

Here are the facts

And this is the element that almost all these stories leave aside: the existence of a biological wick.Otherwise, what explains that we are not all anorexic, while we all bathe in Photoshop retouching, Thigh Gap injunctions and other ambient molecules that makes the resemblance to CarDelevingne an existential ideal?(As the Dr explains to me. Guarda de Johns Hopkins: «La même pluie tombe sur tout le monde, ce qui laisse entendre un certain niveau de vulnérabilité individuelle»»»»).

De même, pourquoi l'anorexie existe-t-elle au Ghana ou chez lesHASmish, où les silhouettes malingres ne sont pas valorisées?Et si les TCA n'étaient qu'une affaire de «contrôle»»»» et d'édification de soi –surtout face à des parents autoritaires– que faire de toutes ces filles à l'enfance heureuse, passée auprès de parents parfaitement sains et aimants, et qui tombent néanmoins sous le charme de l'anorexie? À 17 ans, quand j'ai commencé mes régimes, je n'ai pas le souvenir de m'être sentie perdue ou impuissante, j'étais simplement terrifiée à l'idée de prendre du poids.

Here are the facts: you run between 7 and 11 times more likely to become anorexic if a direct parent is too, and in real twins, the risk is 50 to 80% higher than in dizygotes.The individuals who develop anorexia also share several character traits: introversion, perfectionism, sensitivity to criticism, vigilance, competitiveness, obsession and risk aversion.

Biology is the piece of the puzzle which most directly contradicts social myths on anorexia, but also the one that most struggles to convince. Parce qu'ils se fondent toujours sur la théorie des systèmes familiaux, bon nombre de médecins recommandent une «parentectomie»»»» aux patientes anorexiques, pour reprendre la formule de Tom Insel, directeur de l'Institut national de santé mentale, soit «l'exclusion des parents et affiliés du (…) projet thérapeutique»»»».Whatever studies in the United States or the United Kingdom observe "much better results when parents are taken into account and integrated"»»».

"I don't want her to finish"»»»

Likewise, many therapists take care of the TCA as if they were there to decipher any fundamental psychological code - that they had to find mysterious psychic forces conveying the disease.HASlors qu'ils devraient se focaliser sur la nutrition et le retour d'un poids normal –qu'importe ce qui a pu déclencher, au départ la survenue de l'affamement volontaire–, l'extrême majorité des symptômes anorexiques –des signaux de la faim qui se détraquent aux pensées obsessionnelles– sont les conséquences des changements physiques survenant dans un cerveau sous alimenté.En d'autres termes, ce qui alimente l'anorexie est, pour une très large part, l'anorexie elle-même.

Somewhere, we want the stories to always last, since their progress reminds us of that of our own existence.

Sometimes I start to eat, and I can't stop.

This part is difficult to write, but it is also part of the story.HASprès la fac, dans les aléas de la rémission, mon trouble a commencé à se transformer, à perdre tout ce qui lui restait d'héroïsme ou d'accès vers la délicatesse des beautés gothiques.I had stored my denial and I swallow whole packets of cereals, liters of ice cream, sachets of grapes dipped in nutella or melted caramel.When they started, these episodes had a taste for glory - such as small ends of permission granted to a fascinically austere life.Bosch's Delights Gardens where all the characters are made of almond paste.

But in the middle and at the end, it was to shoot himself.You are convinced that you are the most filthy, most abysmal, most useless creature on the planet.The worst psychic pain that I have known.I was going to work by wondering why people did not throw me stones in the street.If a colleague was nice to me, I felt so dirty, so unworthy that my eyes lacked tear.HAS chaque fois, les répercussions émotionnelles de ces orgies étaient tellement atroces que je me le jurais les grands dieux: je n'allais plus jamais recommencer.Et, surprise! –je recommençais.

"Anorexic has a flashing neon: Gave you non -stop"»»»

This twist in the history of anorexia has often passed over in silence, because it does not stick with romantic martyrdom that one imagines TCA.Except that excess mouths are a most common reaction to psychological and physical stress that the limelment induces: more than half of the anorexics flirt with bulimia or hyperphagia on the path of remission. «Se restreindre, c'est rendre la nourriture plus gratifiante»»»», explique CarrieHASrnold, auteure d'un livre détaillant de récentes recherches scientifiques sur l'anorexie et expliquant combien elles sont utiles pour la traiter.

The chronic hungry must fight against a primitive desire not only to relieve its stomach cramps, but also to compensate for very serious nutritional deficiencies. Comme le préciseHASrnold, «dans son cerveau, l'anorexique a un néon qui clignote: GAVE TOI NON STOP»»»».For a time, the anorexics ignore it in style, until they are no longer able to.

In my family, most women are good at handwriting.Me, my fly legs look like hippopotamus fingerprints.E.and j.have very beautiful writing, naturally fluid and graceful.Elles adorent toutes les deux le Don Quichotte de Picasso, avec le personnage élancé du chevalier, tenant davantage du hiéroglyphe que de l'humain.I les imagine croquées sous la plume de Picasso.Elles auraient été aussi fines et tranchantes.

And here I go to the hunt for doubles and masters: Don Quixote, Jamison, Glück.Impossible to tolerate anorexia without its eyeshadows.

A choice and a non -choice

People are different and anorexics arrive at this disease by different paths.If I got there in sensitivity and literary tradition, this is obviously not the case for everyone.But I think we are often similar in our language quest, this word hunting capable of explaining what happened to us, what we did.

We engulf in a behavior with biological foundations which is reinforced biologically.But we cover it with a universal struggle - the need to express ourselves, to become what we are.Anorexia is both a choice and a non-choice, anorexic is both itself and another. Comment rendre le phénomène intelligible?I garde espoir: en trouvant les bons mots, je vais peut-être avoir le droit de revenir en arrière et de tout recommencer ou, du moins, de transfigurer mon problème avec du sens.

Anyone looking for the biological foundations of anorexia will necessarily fall on the insula.This region of the brain, deeply hidden in the cerebral cortex, is responsible (among others and many things) to monitor the inner state of the individual.It is a sorting station that receives signals from other regions of the brain and integrates them into a coherent story to let you know how you feel at some point.It is the Insula who tells you if you are hungry or want to sleep, if a colleague has just given you an annoying remark, if the end of a novel is saddened you. Les individus très attentifs à leurs émotions et à leurs besoins physiques internes ont une «conscience intéroceptive très développée»»»», grâce à une insula en parfait état de marche.

Anorexic, even in remission, do not have insulae in perfect working order.Their cerebral scanners reveal connectivity and a lower calculation speed in this region.According to researchers Ken Nunn and Bryan Lask, it is very likely that the anorexics intuitively apprehend the state of their bodies and their sensations intuitively.These are individuals who may take longer to understand that they are exhausted before going to bed.Who will not realize that a conversation stressed them before suffering physically from the tensions of their jaw.

In an experience on interior consciousness, anorexic women were asked to estimate, without measuring it, their heart rate.Result, compared to their real pulse, their margin of error was much more substantial than in non-anrexics.En tendance, les personnes souffrant de TCA n'ont pas des réactions normales pour tout ce qui est contrôlé par l'insula: elles n'ont pas de plaisir à goûter des saveurs agréables, elles ne sont pas excitées quand elles gagnent de l'argent.When we show them neutral images of food, their reward system starts in a free wheel and bombes the brain circuits governing disgust.

One of the most important tasks - and the most mysterious - of the Insula is to build a body image: "a mental representation of what we think to look like"»»».To do this, it intertwines information on our way of occupying space and moving it (proprioception), internal sensations (interrocement) and external indices (a movement in the mirror, the compliment ofa friend).Except that, as we have seen, the insula of anorexic is relatively blind to internal sensations.

Self-objective

To compensate, anorexic will therefore overinvest external indices: figures on a balance, the opinion of a partner on the distance between his thighs. Cette dépendance aux retours extérieurs dans la constitution de l'image de soi génère ce que le chercheur italien Giuseppe Riva appelle un «blocage allocentrique»»»» –une sorte d'auto-objectification où l'on ne cesse d'adopter le point de vue d'un tiers sur sa propre personne.Difficult to develop its agentity when your identity is shaped in the eyes of others.

A 2008 study observes that anorexic and non-anrexic shows a comparable neuronal activation when they look at men and women they do not know.On the other hand, when the researchers show their own images to non-anrexic, it is a completely different brain cartography that lights up.This is not the case in anorexic: faced with their reflection, their brain reacts as if it saw third parties.Elles se voient littéralement comme des étrangères.

It may not be so surprising that anorexia takes us away from ourselves.But could these anomalies in the insula explain the narrative penchant of anorexic?The fact that they imagine themselves more as a character, not as an autonomous individual?

Is the physical fragility that Francesca Lia Block makes it so desirable would be the metaphor for an anorexic truth-a fragility of the self?Couldn't the disease affirm its identity because nothing else can?

Before, I tried my teeth looking at my sister's photo and me in a swimsuit.HASujourd'hui, j'y reviens les yeux chargés de questions.E.has always been a perfectionist, she has always hated the risk - the type profile of anorexic. Moi, j'ai passé énormément de temps à lui en vouloir parce qu'elle avait «choisi»»»» d'extérioriser son TCA.Now I tell myself that she has never had the slightest chance.

Isn't that I the most sick?

Me, I was the girl who was not allowed to touch the coloring books, because I scribbled everything in my path.Et pourtant, voilà ce que j'ai fait –j'ai vu l'anorexie surE.And I decided: me too.I vais sauter les repas, compter les calories, multiplier les séances d'abdos jusqu'à ce que la maladie m'attrape dans le miroir et qu'il soit trop tard.Are my parents right?If I still count the points, isn't I the sickest?The girl without genetic predisposition who nevertheless summoned the demon, by the sole force of her will?

For the third time, I look at the photo and something jumps out.HASvecE.We both smile, we only see that on the image.We are happy.Elle est rigide, je suis mollassonne, mais personne n'est malade.

The thought has saddened me, I love to imagine the parallel world where the twins w.have never become anorexic, in which no circumstance has rubbed our organic match, where we lived the life we needed.I love to imagine everything we could have accomplished, at present, the kind of relationships that we could have developed.I love to imagine my mother and father without these wrinkles who block their forehead, dug by later to force their daughters to eat.The serene holidays, the passions that we could have cultivated thanks to all the time that we would not have spent yelling on the food.I m'imagine avecE.on the picture.We are adults.Our link has never been broken.We are the two parts of a whole.We have no secrets for each other.

The fact remains that memory offered me tools that are mine today and that it is impossible for me to look at the past without the filter of my story.In the attic, I find the traces of childhood.My father's sweaty smell when he came back from tennis and took us in his arms.My mother who is busy in the kitchen in the morning by preparing coffee.HASutant d'objets que je saisis délicatement entre mes doigts.Their surface is smooth and shiny, patinated by time.They have the lightness of insects.En moi, la tristesse ouvre sa corolle.On the steps of the stairs, I freeze, I hear the sounds of my existence.