Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Sad.

I'm at a coffee shop today on my lunch hour. I wanted to do some personal computer stuff. But before I get to that, I really have to blog.

See, I'm looking at a woman who works here at the coffee shop. She so clearly has an eating disorder, it's painful to look at her. Aside from just the difficulty of seeing someone so emaciated, it's like her body is a reflection of some kind of inner pain. You know that a person doesn't develop that kind of thing in a vacuum. It's not like cancer or mutiple sclerosis or something. You don't just wake up with it one day.

You develop it in your own mind, usually as a way to control the one thing that you think you can. Which means you feel an utter loss of control in the other aspects of your life. Or maybe it's sometimes even more simple than that. Maybe you were heavy once, or someone just said you were, and it triggered something monumental in your mind - something that ballooned into an atomic explosion of disconnect and self-loathing.

Who knows what this girl's story is? I can tell you that she would be beautiful if her weight were normal. I don't mean she'd be attractive. I'm attractive - sometimes called cute and to a select few beautiful in their eyes. But this girl, she'd be beautiful. And you know she doesn't see it. She looks in the mirror, every day of her life, and she sees something...something else. She doesn't see what's true, because something else has power over her. Something else has corrupted her eyes, her mind, her life. And it will be the fight of her life to ever conquer it...if it doesn't kill her first.

It makes me sad.

2 comments:

Judy said...

WOW. You wrote this on your lunch hour? This is a wonderfully written, albeit sad, piece.

I don't know what it is in people that triggers them to "be that way". Goodness knows I've NEVER had an eating problem except for eating too much. I did have a housemate right after graduation who was bulemic, though...very painful to live with and deal with - tore our friendship up because I so did not want her to hurt herself that way, yet that was the way she was.

Lainey-Paney said...

...that is sad.