I'm Sorry That I'm A Problem & Not A Person Anymore.

Luka
May 10
3 min read

This infamous quote from 'To The Bone' shares the inextricable fight between the two selves of a person and anorexia. Those suffering from anorexia, as well as their friends and loved ones, will undoubtedly relate to feeling the burden of someone you used to know becoming the source of incessant and infinite struggle and hardship. The day I became a problem and not a person was when everybody, including myself, realised I'd lost touch with all of the things that once made me, me. I'm sorry to everybody whose hearts I've broken along the way. I'm sorry for the tiredness I've imposed upon your leaking eyes. I'm sorry for the development of your desperation for me to get better. I'm sorry that I'm a problem and not a person anymore.

I miss, terribly, others' reactions to me when I was just a person. I sense everyone's anxiety around me, and it kills me because I know their moves, thoughts, and feelings flow with calculation rather than the simplicity of joy, care and ease that they once did. I'm sorry for every instance that evolved into a pattern. I felt your heart break alongside mine, with every count of confusion that tore us further and further apart from the place where we were once on the same wavelength of understanding. What has evolved is a life in which we coexist, once experiencing the same thing, but now experiencing separate things. You now know everything I once knew. And now? I know things you never will. We are not the same. We were once two people, and now there is you, one person, and me, one problem. I'm the puzzle you never solved. I'm the enigma you're working on. I'm the girl whose identity became an illness.

The problem that is me is the girl you've tried everything on, asked every question, and given every tool. All of the solutions you've brought to me on a silver platter have been returned full, no pie taken, no bites eaten. After a while, people stopped trying to help me because they didn't believe I could be helped. I gave up on myself long before anybody else did, but it felt as though I gave up on myself all over again when others gave up, too. The pain of losing my identity as a person felt like nails clawing on a chalkboard - jarring, deafening and eerie.

When I used to walk into a room, it was illuminated with the smile of a person happy and present, with her life ahead of her, the world at her fingertips, pulling on the heartstrings of those present with her genuineness emanating. Now, when I walk into rooms, I feel like a ghost, as though everybody can see right through my smile and see the everlasting fear and worry etched into my soul. My presence makes situations harder, not easier. Everything I say seems to be tainted with the voice that's yelled at them before: 'I can't get better' & 'I won't get better'. People remember me this way. People have replaced the words I've never said yet with the words they've heard before, keeping me in this type of lock, in which I'm frozen in time as the girl who's defined by her incurability. And in this way, I can't become more. In this way, I'm defined by my problematicness and not my persableness.

There is a person buried beneath my illness, despite the words I've said, despite the person who's stood before so many and been assumed by even more. There's a girl just dying to come out. And I may die trying if I remain, primarily, as a problem and secondarily, as a girl... a person.

Kisses,

COS x