Mental illness is something I’ve always kept closeted away, something I never wanted anyone to know about, even close friends. In fact, I think there will be several people I’ve been extremely close with for years who will be shocked by this post. But the bravery recently exhibited by one of my dearest friends in opening up publicly about her own mental illness has given me the courage to talk about mine.

I have the disorder known as anorexia nervosa.

This will come seemingly out of nowhere to the people who have seen me; I am nowhere near a person you would look at and think ‘she’s anorexic’. Anorexia is not always about starving yourself to skin and bones, although it can end up that way.

Anorexia is the relentless obsession over how many calories are in each bite of your food, and how many you eat in a day.

Anorexia is weighing yourself multiple times a day, and berating yourself over every little fluctuation.

Anorexia is looking at yourself in the mirror, poking all the parts of your body that are just too big and you hate, wanting to be able to take scissors and just cut off parts.

Anorexia is wanting to throw up every time you think about eating, even if you’re starving.

Anorexia is reading every food label, disgusted over the numbers on the container, and cutting portions down just to shave off a few calories.

Anorexia is being so hungry, but only letting yourself drink more water.

I’ve done all these things, and more, and struggled with it since I was twelve. Body image is hard, especially for women, and even more so for a woman that dances. Dance culture is especially hard on people, with the obsession with the lines of a dancer. “Dancers must be thin and graceful to dance”. Well, I’m not thin by any stretch, and I still dance. But it’s horrible, walking into a master class when you’re the heaviest in the room, when all the other girls have the thin, coveted dancer’s body. Even if they’ve never danced before, they still have the body for it. This obsession with thinness takes a toll, and often girls who have trouble losing weight (like me), end up developing this disorder.

I’ve improved somewhat from my early days in struggling with anorexia; in previous years, I would stick to things such as the ABC diet, or other diets similar, eating less than 500 calories a day. Every time I ate something that pushed me over that minuscule limit, I’d be horrified and disgusted with myself. All my thoughts centred around “don’t eat that, do you know how many calories that is??”. Weight fluctuation made it worse. Something as simple as drinking water will shift your weight, and I would relentlessly weigh myself, usually around 5 times a day. Every time it fluctuated, I’d be disgusted and horrified.

Looking in the mirror is still hard for me. I tend to avoid them, and won’t let people take pictures or videos of me, because I despise my body. And as much as I’ve tried to overcome that, it still exists. I’ve managed to approach the issue in a healthier way; I limit myself to getting on the scale to every other day (which I know is still a lot, but it’s better than before), and I’m trying to limit how much I obsess over calories and the numbers on the box.

But it’s still there, no matter how hard I try to get it to go away.

Even while exercising, when I’m getting tired, all I can think is the repeating chant in my head of ‘just keep going, think of how thin you’ll get. You’re doing this for the thin.” Not for being healthy, for being thin.

Anorexia is a difficult disorder to deal with. Because while the physical symptoms of it are easily treated, the mental part of it is not. There’s no magic pill that will erase the mental symptoms.

I am beginning to overcome anorexia. But it’s an uphill struggle, and one I fear will take decades. But I will get there, no matter how long it takes.