I traded my bulimia for anorexia and my anorexia for orthorexia. Ironically, these words are mouthfuls.
I am sixteen the first time I regurgitate my food. I don’t think I actually mean to do it, but I feel full and it almost feels natural. Previous to this, I have been binging only. I would come home from dance class and make four peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and eat them one after another in quick succession. Or an entire box of cereal…more milk, more cereal, more milk, more cereal until the box is gone. I think nothing of it. I am tired and I am hungry, it’s late, I have homework to do. So what?
In the past year the girls at dance are starting to disappear. Oddly, they are the ones also getting more attention, more solos, more praise. I begin to look at my own thighs, now more muscular than my duet partners. We used to look the same, but now she’s ninety pounds. She gets a tutu made. A blue one. I am seething with envy. I thought we both hated ballet and were more of the powerhouse jazz girls, but now she has a tutu and stick legs and she gets the solo. I am the one with the big thighs.
I start to think maybe all these sandwiches are a bad idea. The girls at dance only eat cream of wheat in our short break where we take off our pointe shoes, tape our blisters and get ready for jazz. For the last seven years, since I was nine, I have been acutely aware that I do not have the body for ballet. I have been told many times. It crushed me as a kid but now I am a teenager, a damn good dancer and a very strong one at that. But now I see all the girls waste away around me and it’s working. Their muscley bodies are becoming ballet bodies. They look like the girls that get chosen for ballet summer schools and the lead in the Swan Lake. I start to feel like I need to get rid of these thighs.
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