When I Started Writing About Anorexia, I Felt Erased. Now, I'm Telling the Whole Story On My Own Terms (Exclusive)
Natasha Jahchan; Courtesy of Catapult The first time I sold my story, it was for $40 and a tweet. In 2015, I was halfway through my first year of journalism school when a professor gave our writing seminar an in-class prompt: write a short, personal story about loss. In response, I surprised myself and wrote about myeating disorder. It was the first time I'd ever committed the word "anorexia" to the page, though it was a disease I'd grappled with for half my life. After years of intermittent therapy and oscillating weight, in the past months I had been in rapid decline. As my body hit new, dangerous lows, my family and friends back home in Chicago begged me to defer my move to New York City and enter a residential program to restore my weight.As a compromise, after my move to Brooklyn, I began therapy. Once a week, I stepped out of the chaos of my new life and into a windowless, book-lined office. There, I sat on a soft couch and dispensed small doses of vulnerability. Reflexively, I kept a tight grip on the narrative, readily answering questions about self-esteem and perfectionism, while skirting the issues that scared me — my history of sexual assault, my queerness or the intergenerational trauma which flowed through my Palestinian family. Each afternoon my therapist commended my "good work." Outside his office, I continued to skip meals, hovering at a skeletal weight. But whereas I once hid the fact of my undereating, I now discussed it for 50 minutes a week. I thought this was all it meant to "recover" — to simply attach language to the thing that was slowly killing me.At the same time, after 10 years obsessively denying my disease to myself, I developed an appetite foreating disorder tell-alls, devouring online confessionals and recovery memoirs. It was a strange sort of self-voyeurism, seeing myself through the frame of these stories. Their harrowing challenges and tidy, triumphant endings acted as catharsis, distracting me from the fact that my own "recovery" remained stagnant, stuck in its opening paragraph. The PEOPLE Appis now available in the Apple App Store! Download it now for the most binge-worthy celeb content, exclusive video clips, astrology updates and more! Then, with my professor's prompt, my projections found movement in my pen. It happened almost unconsciously — I organized the tangle of my past into a beginning, middle and end. I cast my character as a bracingly honest heroine, bravely breaking the then-taboo of discussing "mental health." It was this — honesty for honesty's sake — that would heal her. I wrote nothing specific about diet or weight, made no allusions to the complicated tangle of history, fear and desire that knotted unspoken in her. I never considered admitting that therapy, so far, had done nothing to budge the invisible hand that clasped my mouth each time I confronted food. My story ended, instead, on a vague note of hope. I left class mesmerized, seduced by the power to remake myself on the page. In class the next week, my professor handed my assignment back, tapping one finger on the front page. "Pitch this one," he suggested. "It's fascinating." Still a brand-new reporter, I considered myself lucky to even receive a rejection letter; most editors did not respond to my pitches at all. But it was the heyday of a certain type of confessional essay and an editor at a women's magazine snapped up the draft. Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE's free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer , from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. They offered me $40 for the story, which I took without negotiating, dazed by my luck. The revisions happened quickly, and almost unilaterally: the editor chopped my prose to pithy morsels, erasing the darker tones and my allusions to past self-harm. She removed, too, the inconvenient complexity of my Palestinian ethnicity, as well as my ambivalence about femininity. With these subtractions, the story's arc was even shorter, smoother as it curved from struggle to triumph. When I saw the story go live, I barely recognized the protagonist who shared my name. The editor asked me to send a selfie to accompany the piece — I shot one while sitting at my desk, and saw it quickly appear online. Just like that — an avatar. Bright-eyed and thin in a white turtleneck. I told myself this was what I was supposed to do — that I was "owning my story," helping destigmatize mental illness, refusing shame. Natasha Jahchan Another publication reached out, asking me for more pieces on the same theme. I found another angle, crafted another essay, one more comeback tale. It was a satisfying story, so American in its heroism, in its oblique references totraumaand its polite bravery. There was a touch of strip tease to the prose, too — a female form in fragmented parts, always fragile and clean. No mention of systemic issues, never touching class or race. Anorexia, in this telling, was irreducibly individual: a failure of self-love, cured by self-work, self-care, self-reform. For poignancy, I threw in a bony metaphor or two, dropping tweetable insights in the penultimate paragraph. All of it was reliably past-tense. Never once did I believe I was lying — like any successful seduction, I saw what I wanted to see. Until that point, the portrayal of eating disorders existed on only two extremes: the severely, almost-irredeemably sick, or the inspirational heroine. There was only one role I could bear. Perhaps something similar was true for my loved ones. After their initial pressure about treatment, they receded to an uneasy silence as my body wavered on the cusp of physical collapse. Though I moved on from publishing eating disorder essays, my life itself became an exercise in narrative denial. As medical complications quietly accumulated, I pushed my story forward with sheer force of will and denial. I completed my degree with flying colors. I traveled, partied and fell in love. I worked relentlessly, and continued to dabble in therapy. Each accolade, each Instagram post and milestone, granted me a little more proof that I was "free" — or at the very least, no longer in the grips of disease. I pointed to this evidence to silence the doubt of family, friends and myself: my story was vibrant, arcing upward, and so, surely all was well. By then, I was completely divorced from my flesh — no amount of physical warnings could pierce the story I had woven for myself.Maybe my family and friends were persuaded. Maybe they did not know how to respond to the desperate stubbornness in my eyes. Maybe they, like me, were hoping this story could be true. "Do you know how sick you are?" The doctors asked me on the bright October day in 2019 when I was admitted to the hospital. My 5'10 frame was skeletal, my pulse slowed to a whimper the EKG machine could barely hear. They repeated their question: "Do you understand?"I stared back at them, speechless. Of course, I did not.It would take me years to begin to see — how nearly my heart had ceased to beat. How obviously, devastatingly ill I had become. It was not only that anorexia, like many addictions and afflictions like it, deeply clouds the judgement of those caught in its hold. It is also because I had no language, no imagination for the vast, messy, slow work actual "recovery" would require. I had never heard anyone tell a truth like mine, one which refuted both simple heroism and reductive pathology.But the narrative had been ripped out of my hands. I would spend many months lost in a roar of panic, withdrawal and slow confrontation with ghosts — both my own, and that of my Palestinian ancestors. I spent 16 weeks in the hospital, where I was treated as a set of symptoms, supervised by doctors who did not trust me to even shower alone. Forced to eat — 4,000 calories a day or more — I was flung into confrontation with my food phobia and my complex feelings about gender and race, all at once. The PEOPLE Puzzler crossword is here! How quickly can you solve it? Play now! After discharge, bereft without my old coping mechanisms, I came to recognize how anorexia had not only numbed me from my past trauma, but also from my secret dreams: to live a life of abundance, not accomplishment. To devote myself to writing and art. As I approached 30 years old, I realized: I had never really learned who I was, or how I truly wanted to live. "Healing," crept in so quietly I did not, at first, feel its touch. Like a shift in some intimate weather, my body slowly beginning to settle, warming as it learned, for the first time, to feel safe. I marked private milestones — the rehabilitation of weight and food, new relationships, my first forays into creative writing and poetry — without any pressure to narrativize or announce them. I knew I was getting "better" when I began to feel more like a child — a new ease in my body, at peace with its urges, stirred by a sense of play. And I knew I was growing as I allowed others to glimpse my messiness. I wrote, then spoke my secrets, releasing tears and rage in therapy, and then in the company of trusted friends. I asked loved ones for help, took up space as I allowed them to hold, hear and feed me.Thiswas vulnerability: not shallow, pop-inspiration, but the true rawness that lies at the heart of any life. Courtesy of Catapult Now, 10 years after that first journalism prompt, I have surprised myself again bypublishing an entire bookabout my experience. It has come out at a time of unprecedented violence against Palestinians, the silencing of our voices through censorship and death. It emerges, too, amidst the resurgence of diet culture and into a social media landscape which still offers too many airbrushed, apolitical and simplistic "recovery narratives." This time, I have written the story backward — beginning in the rigidity of anorexia, then shattering, sprawling, swelling toward a different, fuller sort of self. One which has surrendered the desire for tidy endings, resuming my commitment to speak, and resist. Now, I live to begin, and begin again. The Hollow Halfby Sarah Aziza is on sale now, wherever books are sold. Read the original article onPeople
When I Started Writing About Anorexia, I Felt Erased. Now, I'm Telling the Whole Story On My Own Terms (Exclusive) Natasha Jahchan; Cour...
