It must be very strange to be friends with someone whose appearance has changed as drastically as mine has these last few years.

It must be very strange to watch your friend gain 60 pounds in the space of three months. To watch her not-bad skin become bad skin. To watch her clothing sizes bounce around like a stray rubber ball.

But then, it must also be very strange to watch her go from being The Fearless One, whom you would always get to order for you, to being the one who could not get out of bed and go to school if her life depended on it, the very idea of professors and other students shooting her into spirals of fear and depression.

Right? It must be very weird indeed to watch that happen from the outside.

I spent yesterday with my oldest college friends, and I kept remembering how similar we all used to be. I think the main difference was that I looked the same as they did--pretty, small if not exactly thin, outgoing, etc--and so they assumed that I was the same as they were, and treated me as if I were the same as they were. But I always felt I was fooling them a little. Making them think I was cooler than I actually was.

Maybe I was just that cool. Maybe I am just that cool.

I recently read Harriet Brown's book Brave Girl Eating (and you should, too*), and what struck me was her absolute certainty that her daughter had not always been like the disease made her. That the happy child she had been was the truth, and the sad and withdrawn and angry child was the lie. Throughout the book, she maintains an almost super-human belief that the disease is temporary and has nothing to do with who her daughter actually is.

I've talked before about how I felt when I started to get fat. Instead of horrifying me, it was oddly victorious. I knew that this was how I 'really' looked; the rest of the time I had just been lying to people. That's a theme in my life: feeling like I was fooling anyone who thought positively of me. When people liked me it was because I had tricked them. When people thought I was pretty it was because they liked me as a person--which, you'll recall, was me tricking them--and that was blinding them to how I really looked.

Once it started happening, it felt like my depression had always been waiting to happen. Lurking inside all these years, waiting to get out. Much in same way that the fat had--see a connection there?

Here is what Harriet Brown's book said to me about that:

Bullshit.

Bullshit this is how you always were, Flannery.

This all sounds so disordered when it's all stacked together like this. It made so much sense to me at the time... Even now, it's whispering at me don't fool yourself, Flannery, you know this is true, you know people only like you because you're tricking them, why would anybody ever like you...

So which you is the real you? The person the disorder tells you you are, or the person your friends tell you are?

I think I've proven that I'm a pretty poor judge of myself. Maybe it's time to listen to people who actually like me instead. Easier said than done, as always, but no harm in trying.



*although it comes with the same warning all AN memoirs do--there are some triggering things, and some things the disorder would take and run with, so I would say definitely don't read it if you're anorexic and still in the process of regaining.