Skip dinner, be thinner

JAMIE WATSON

Tumblr users are sort of infamous for romanticizing mental illness. I think the most well-known example is the way they started toting the term “socially anxious” like a charming accessory. It’s annoying, sure, but mostly harmless. My own personal experience with Tumblr’s fetishization of serious diseases carried a few more consequences.

Tumblr can’t entirely be blamed for me developing an eating disorder. I suppose the potential was always there. During my Junior year of high school, my mother went on a “diet” of plain yogurt and chicken salad to combat the weight gain from the steroids she was taking for her lupus. She had always been on the heavier side, but soon enough she began to shrink right before my eyes. I thought it was amazing. Standing at five foot nothing in heels and weighing in at roughly 130 lbs, I thought, “If Mom can do it, so can I.”

Mom was in charge of the family meals, so one night I asked if I could participate in the diet with her. Mom’s eyes were too tired to look at me as she slowly shoveled a single spoonful of peanut butter past her cracked lips and said, “I’m doing this for my health.”

I flew to the Internet. The BMI (body-mass-index) charts said that at my height, girls were weighing in anywhere from 90 to 100 lbs on average, which meant I had work to do.

Mom wouldn't help me, but I wasn't discouraged. I figured it was time to take control of my body and show it whose boss.

It was then that I started looking for my own diet. This is where Tumblr came in.

One day I stumbled across something on someone’s blog called the ABC Diet. The ABC Diet is a series of calorie restrictions over the course of one month, starting with 500 calories a day, and gradually going down to 400, 300, 200 calories, until finally you reach “fasting days” in the middle of a week. Exercise included. The blog advertised itself as “pro-ana.”

Ana is Tumblr’s adorable name for anorexia nervosa, and is usually coupled with her twin, Mia or Bulimia. I followed this blog and others like it. I read the sweet letters authors wrote directed toward Ana and Mia. These blogs posted pictures of skeletal women calling them “thinspiration.” They pined for bones. There were tips for getting through fasting days and impossible exercise regimes. I saw guides on how to throw up, and how to take care of your teeth after. Some would post advertisements asking for texting buddies who could “encourage” them. They would post “before” and “after” pictures of themselves. I was so encouraged by their progress, but it wasn't just a dieting thing; t wasn't just encouragement.

These people tore into each other and themselves. The more you hated yourself and others, the more people respected you. Every once in a while I would scroll past a picture of some girl digging into her wrist with a box cutter, and I would go on with my day and pretend I hadn’t seen anything. I promised myself over and over that I wouldn’t be like these people, even as I observed and reposted their pictures. I used to say, “I will not lose control.” I recited it like a fucking prayer.

I don’t know why I pretended it was glamorous. I don’t know why I made a new blog so that I could document my weight loss to the public. I don’t know why I listed my goal weight in my user information. I don’t know why that number kept getting smaller and smaller, but Tumblr kept the ball rolling for a few years.

I was on the ABC Diet and I was walking around my neighborhood for 3 hours every day, past the point of exhaustion. When I would come home I would be so dehydrated I couldn’t speak. My knees went to shit after a few weeks. Nobody knew. Someone at school said I looked great, and I cried because I thought they were lying to be mean.

I think the thing that got to me most were the mantras, things to tell yourself when you started getting “cravings,” and by “cravings” I mean instances when you needed to eat, because you had a body. “Drink Water, Look Hotter,” “Fuck Flab, Get Abs,” and my personal favorite, “Skip Dinner, Be Thinner.” There were even some mantras, which almost sounded positive, like “Each binge is a stumble in a long journey. Don’t let it stop you.” How nice.

None of it mattered, though. Pretty soon, the growling of my stomach became its own mantra. Then the growling stopped, and it was just the pain left to talk to me.

I must imagine it seems easy to you. It must look like I could have stopped at any time and pulled back from this constant stream of toxicity. The thing is, I thought so too. I thought I could go back to a normal diet any time I wanted. And before I could even admit I was caught in the current, the hunger pains and the promise of feeling attractive became addictive. I was addicted to the numbers. I snuck into my mother’s bathroom just to step on her scale in the morning, and I remember dropping to the floor and curling into myself with such heavy emotional pain time after time when the numbers just weren’t low enough. My younger self had never once imagined we would be here, contemplating suicide because of some tummy skin. I never thought of myself as one for self-harm, but I have a burn scar to show just how far Tumblr pushed me.

When I tell people about this side of Tumblr, most people don’t believe me. Most people would rather believe that Tumblr is a safe place for fandom and reading and activism (with the occasional porn post here and there just to mix things up), and I don’t want to discredit these things which can make Tumblr great. But I think it’s important to remember that Tumblr offers the user a constant stream of information, and I think my high school self is a perfect example of how impressionable people can be. The messages I received day in and day out destroyed my state of mind and my body. It is truly astounding when you think of how mainstream media does the same exact thing. Looking back, it feels like a dieting commercial crossed the line and then invaded my life. It felt like I was replaying this commercial over and over and over every day for almost three years.

I managed to claw my way out of this shit-hole, but I’m still dealing with the consequences. I still catch myself pinching and pulling. I still check the nutrition labels on cans of soup and something in the back of my mind still asks, “Is it worth it? Do you deserve it?”

The answer is yes. Shut the fuck up, I deserve to eat.

I don’t really know what the right course of action is. The Tumblr staff is already taking baby steps to dismantle these harmful blogs. “Pro-ana” content is now against the Tumblr Terms of Service, and looking for thinspiration gives you a little message with a phone number for a national help line, which I guess is a good start. All the same, I would just like everyone to know that there are thousands of blogs run by men and women alike who call themselves “pro-ana.”  I would like to remind everyone that no matter what cute little labels you dress it up with, a disease is a disease, and it is not okay to romanticize that shit, because it is not glamorous. It’s real, and it hurts people.

And if you’re reading this and you’re dealing with an eating disorder, you can recover. This body is the only one you’re going to get. It’s not as energized as you’d like, sometimes it smells, sometimes it may seem like a big hunk of crap but it’s your hunk of crap. Please be gentle with it. You deserve so much better, and people on the Internet don’t know shit.