"My point is that idolizing this woman or her body is ridiculous."
Your point in posting here was to underscore how ridiculous the participants are? Or to see just how many cleverly-worded chops on a sick woman's appearance you could come up with, sight unseen?
I don't get why you would be participating in a thread devoted to pictures of someone who you claim makes you vomit, has lost half her teeth,and "looks like a junky". Even more surprising is that you would belong to an entire forum populated by people who probably look very much the same, despite the status of their sobriety.
I do apologize for dragging this out. I just hate it when I see this kind of attitude perpetuated on our forum. As if there's some great barrier of sanity separating those with eating disorders from the rest of the mentally ill population that grants us some right to look down upon sufferers of other (or in this case, additional) disorders. Just as bad is our instant justification of any necessary degree of slander/censor in the name of anti/recovery Depending on the way the wind is blowing in any given season- your comments would surely never have seen the light of day on this board circa 2001, smothered by the "rule" of anti-recovery.
I'm not arguing with the sentiment- if you had voiced it so simply in the first place we wouldn't have wasted a page arguing veinous scar tissue. I agree that A.W. is unhealthy. It actually breaks my heart to read so many media forum posts stating that "celebrity X can't possibly weigh that much" when "that much"= 90 lbs.
I'm arguing with the semantics. Sick is sick. Sick is universally unhappy, systemically unhealthy, heartbreaking, and at least occasionally gross. A.W. is sick. I am sick. Most of our board members are sick.* I assume, despite your initial interactions with me in the bulimia forum last September, that you are also sick.
Sick hurts too much to shower and sick is too tired to brush teeth. Sick says too much after a another sleepless night. Sick is bloated at an eternal #2 on the kidney list. Sick is unhealing bedsores and infected ulcers of pre-amputated feet. Sick is hair and shit and tumor and bone and vomit- human waste, wastes removed, and wasted human lives. Sick is universally understood to be negative and we all know that idolizing sickness is "ridiculous."
Editorializing is unnecessary. '
*Although it's important to remember that many members deal with at least one major mental illness in addition to an ED, along with a sizeable number of members dealing with one or more chronic physical disabilities/disorders.
LOL. lazer-precise critique & hilare
ReplyDeleteI love your writing.
ReplyDeleteI thought the same thing time & again at belmont (which is a state-ish hospital that takes involuntary patients but has an EDU). The EDU kids would talk about the crazies, when they didn't want to have to go out to smoke when *they* were out there, when they joked too much about trying to break into the other wards.
I don't know, did I miss something, or were all of us in a psych hospital, out of the world, removed for a minute because we were too sick to function, or soon would be? Eesh. Yeah. Drove me nuts.
Sadly seemed to be the view of a lot of staffers too-- one floater even said she preferred working w/the EDU patients because we were so functional & normal (and I'm quite sure some of the EDd chics took this as an insult).
Granted, there were definite differences, some of which were probably more the result of the age/chronicity of the patient than their disorder, but yeah. Why is it cool again to be anorexic?
At at any rate, I was trying to say that I imagine that my little 14 yo master trickster and deceiver stand-in was clearly already "a crazy," if I can reliably recall at least the tones used to describe the depth of her disorder. Of course, this brings up another point, which is that we (adults, but also teens facing college) are rarely forced into ED treatment either by legal action or by parental force. Although ambivalent enough that I refused to sign the papers for my first admission, I nonetheless chose the program (Over Hopkins, ewe- where they treated EDs & MDs on the unit x:)*
ReplyDeleteIn retrospect, this is probably the worst choice I could ever have made. Any psychosocial setting that does not on some level, treat EDs, inevitably enables them. And while I do believe that the very support, connection, and experiences of recreation and relaxation, can be very helpful as short term solutions for the so-called "major mental illnesses"; most, if not all of what is taught in EDUs, however simply is not workable longterm. Longterm support and connection is what is so desperately needed. As an aside I feel that access to the experiential activities needs to be widened. (IOW, Mr. Obama- we need to create the programs)
I don't know, chylo, what earns some of us membership in The Tin Foil Hat Club while others are content to believe in invisibility cloaks. Ha, no- I think I may have just figured it out with that last bit.
As long as your invisibility cloak is still in good repair and you haven't accumulated too much bullshit to hide under it, you may still appear functional. This can be dangerous as it tends to foster impossible expectations, in both the diseased brain (which convinces itself that the cups really do disappear once the cabinet door is closed, at least until they are categorically proven to exist via at least 3 different types of imaging. And let us not even speak of the impossible expectations even the harried and nervewracking odd unfurling of the invisibility cloak can kindle in those around them, so desperate for a sign of a miracle they gleefully ignore the toilet paper stuck to. . . hey, it's stuck to everything.