Anorexia sucks, part 1: a cocktail of causes

If you need to get around the paywall, you can read this story here.

I recently finished Jennette McCurdy’s fantastic memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died. As it turns out, Jennette and I have more in common than a birthday and a painfully-acute memory for sensory detail.

Jennette is raw about her years-long struggle with disordered eating and points specifically to her abusive mother as the catalyst. But what if you didn’t have a horrible, diet-obsessed Almond Mom (or any family trauma, really) and still managed to nearly starve yourself to death?

For the sake of my own parents and other parents out there who did nothing wrong, I feel compelled to dive into disordered eating (anorexia, specifically) from my own perspective and experience. And I think I still just want to reflect on the disease a little more and reckon with it, too, since being trapped in its astoundingly vile clutches for any period of time is arguably a trauma in itself (I dunno; maybe that will be “Part 2.” They always say this shit is caused by trauma, but we never talk about how much it’s still messing you up during and after the fact. Yeah, there will definitely have to be a Part 2…)

Anyhow. How, you ask, can one become anorexic without the abuse? Where does one get the inspiration to restrict when Mom, Dad, and the entire, intact nuclear family always happily and freely ate whatever they damn well pleased?