Dying to be Thin

God damn its been a while.  

So long, I had to change my username and password in order to access my blog after failing to log in a number of times.  But enough about my great lapse, and onto pro-anorexia, a world for which I have recently developed a small obsession.

It all started when I came across a documentary Fearn Cotton had done on pro ana websites. For those not familiar with the work of Fearn, she is a young female British radio DJ and presenter who lives up to her name delivering news and banter with all the intelligence and charm of a plant and/or plant product. 

"I just can't believe, like, that girls are actually starving themselves in order to be thin" she states, getting to grips with the whole concept.

But a fascinating subject nonetheless, not to sound completely clinical, but I find fascinating the world of obsession for I can understand how easily it takes a hold and warps the shit out of everything.  And this particular affliction is the mother of them all, affecting so many women,  killing a staggering amount.   All from a compulsion that obtaining a goal weight will fix all the ills.  And it never does, so the compulsion spirals out of control until there's nothing left to lose but life itself. 

And I totally get how it could take hold for I  myself am prone to a wee compulsion now and then, nothing drastic - little bouts of cleaning when I get stressed, certainly nothing that prohibits consumption.

This new found obsession led me online where I became a frequent visitor of a pro anawebsite and specifically, the guestbook where all the girls chat.  I became fascinated by their stories, as they detailed the limited food items they had ingested for the day in pitiful detail, share tips on how to pretend they ate so their families don't get suspicious and the like.

Night after night as I climbed into bed, I'd check on their "progress" and as I grew to know the girls, where they lived, what boys they liked, what their stats were and their goal weights,  the anthropological stance from which I launched this venture shifted.  I became concerned for their safety, increasingly so and would be relieved when they returned the following night.

Especially one or two of them.  Especially the one called Perfect Disaster who if we are to believe her stats is 5'10 and 105 pounds.  That's 7.5 stone my British friends.  She's the one who cuts just for good measure.  She's the one they all look up to. 

Then there's Patty who throws up 30 times a day, who throws up blood and the other girls tell her to stop but she can't and I wish I could drive her to a recovery center and sit by her side as she mends.  But clearly that will never happen.  

I don't even drive.

I contemplated logging on myself in an attempt to infultrate, befriend and eventually, guide the ones I could away from the sites.  But conscience took over, I clearly wouldn't know what I was doing and these girls are fragile, fragile things, trying through their weight to control the pain of life they can't escape.

So I logged off and left them to it. 

...plus I started really noticing the amount of food I was eating and lets not even get near that slippery slope.

Once in a while, you'd find an entry from a girl who wanted "tips on how to lose 10 pounds really quickly".  For the most part these would go unanswered, especially if it was a model claiming she had pounds to lose before a photo shoot in a few days.  Probably not sort of thing a miserable girl in Idaho wants to hear.

"Dying to be Thin" by the way is this terrible made for TV movie about a girl training to be a ballet dancer who ditches food when her dance instructor makes one too many fat comments. As with all made for TV movies, it was completely awful so I watched it all the way to the end.

Thus ends my first entry in almost 2 years.  not a cracking start, but a start all the same. 

I promised a friend I would try.

your fan,

a.