Beautifully Young

I've spent a lifetime concerned about my image and when I was younger there were many difficulties alongside this. It was difficult to relate to a cohort that was focused on matters of sport, popularity, etc. It was difficult when my growth was affected by malnourishment. And it was difficult when I didn't have anybody to talk to about it because it was passed off as vain, instead of a concerning or serious issue. This was my experience, one mixed up amidst a pool of isolation, confusion and shame. 'Beautifully Young' is the all too common, minimally spoken story of a non-beautiful suffering from childhood.

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I look at the little girls in my life and am in awe of their confidence: Their words of ownership of praise I give them, their chin-up stride and their glowing energy. My marvel doesn't come from a place of jealousy but rather from a place of reflection in which I find a notable comparison between their attitude at their age versus mine. They have so much pride in their achievements, whereas I remember chasing pride in my ability to achieve prettiness, thinness and how many boys had a crush on me. I didn't believe in any praise towards achievements in school or co-curricular activities such as singing. Looking back, I wish I could hug and tell myself how much I deserved to believe I was good enough at something besides my image, even though I know that I still wouldn't have believed my older self because I still struggle to believe such things now, as an adult.

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My growth tremendously suffered as a result of my eating disorder. To this day, my family believe I would've grown to be much taller and would've developed normally if I hadn't started restricting so prematurely. There were and are a plethora of ways in which my body has suffered in the ways of health. Throughout adolescence, I shrunk in height, never received a period, faced abnormal pathology and heart rhythms and was severely underweight for my age, height and weight group to name just a few of the ways in which I differed from my peers. At some points throughout my sickness in which I was the most unwell, my signs of malnourishment were almost like badges of honour that proved I was 'sick enough'. But it is only now in early adulthood, when I am experiencing physical symptoms that others face much further down the track in their years such as diagnoses of osteoporosis, that I feel devastation much more deeply than I do, honour.

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I was irrevocably, deeply alone in the depths of what others labelled as vanity, but for me, was a matter of self-worth, deep depression and insecurity. It went beyond an off thought or feeling, which in the scheme of things can be a normal part of growing up... It was an everyday thought, feeling and experience that I had no idea how to communicate to anybody, meaning I never received any sort of counselling, help or advice. I hid my suffering from those around me as I was so ashamed of and so attached to my eating disorder that the idea of letting any amount of it go overrode my desire to admit that I needed help. It didn't matter how troublesomely miserable I was, not in comparison to my fear of weight gain and loss of sick control, anyhow. I also held in my heart that if I were to open up about my struggles, judgment and misunderstanding would be omnipresent and I was too shy and unsure to face such fear. Even now, after many years of having to share my problems with friends, family and health professionals, I experience the same trepidation to open up for there have been so many occasions in which doing so has been received wrongly, a preconceived judgement and misunderstanding being detrimental to my ability to recover. Words like 'I've seen worse', 'You're pretty enough' and 'Just eat a burger' proved to be met with my honesty, concreting my fear of honesty much, much further. You can conceive the severity of fear I must've felt in the early stages of anorexia if even now I am still beyond terrified to be honest about having an eating disorder.

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'Beautifully Young' clearly portrays the non-beautiful aspects of a disease interlaced with the concept of modern-day beauty. For something others say is about vanity, it sure creates some ugly feelings, and even more truly, it instils ugly side effects amongst its percipients. There is nothing beautiful about anorexia in my opinion, however, it is even less beautiful when it torments someone throughout childhood, a stage that is one of the most vulnerable stages of life.

Kisses, COS x