Content note: eating disorders and self harm

My last boyfriend said to me, “the biggest problem in our relationship is your weight”. Now those words are a thorn in my chest I don’t quite know if I can remove on my own.

I know when people look at me they don’t see the mad dash from desperation to antipsychotics. They don’t see the points in time I couldn’t physically move for the things my head was telling me was real. They don’t see the scars where I tried to cut flies out my skin. They don’t see policemen dragging me to hospitals where I rant about how the world was going to turn to glass and break if I moved and no I don’t want juice they’ve poisoned the juice don’t drink it.

They don’t see a past where I didn’t eat. Where I found that three days of starvation makes the world go yellow in the shower. Where I hid food in the bottom drawer in the bedroom because I couldn’t face eating it. Where I envied those who could forget about food because the hollow in my stomach never would let me stop obsessing. Where I had notebooks filled with maths centred around calories.

I feel the space I take up keenly. I look at myself and try to figure out the proportions. I do the math and know I have to loose half of myself to feel real again.

Every now and then I write speeches in my head. I write speeches about how a medication left me with four hours of lucidity an a day, how it killed my metabolism and ramped up my appetite and I went to sleep for six months and woke up in a different body, how I can’t move for knowing the space I take up but I was going to die and I’m still alive. I tell this in my mind to every person who has ever shamed me for my size or for daring to eat in public.

I tell them as I tell myself that I fought and I fucking won but there were some casualities on the way and one of them was my body.

I tell myself that it’s okay.
I won.
Right?