I'm angry...

I'm angry...
Angry about all the years I have wasted being a slave to my eating disorder, to the scale
Counting calories obsessively and watching the scale, the number never right.
I'm angry because I know several people who have died from their eating disorders, and I continue to read and hear about how these illnesses ravage lives, people, sucking away joy until all that is left is a shell that is empty/void/hollow.
I am angry because little girls in this world go on diets at the age of eight or six or ten, when they should be playing with their baby dolls, feeding and nurturing and dreaming of being a mother/nurse/doctor/president/CEO.
I'm angry because I live in a world were the size of one's body measures the size of one's soul, and women (and increasingly, men) feel the need to diminish themselves, refusing to take up more than an inch or two of space, apologetic that we dare breathe and move and hunger when we are told that we must rein in these human traits and become a race of aliens.
I'm angry because so many good, intelligent, kind people feel the need to either starve themselves or purge themselves of all of life's goodness.
I'm angry because much of society still believes that eating disorders are caused by vanity and the desire to get thin, and I wonder about this because if it were about looks, I would have stopped before I became enmeshed in anorexia, becoming a skeletal shell of my former self, dying and wishing to die each day as I slowly faded into the carpet in my home.
I'm angry because many people still feel it is okay to tease/bully/make fun of people who are overweight, judging their characters by the size of their bodies, feeding on prejudice until it is overflowing.
I'm angry because insurance companies believe that a life is only worth one/three/seven days, and send people home once someone with anorexia is near his or her ideal body weight or someone with bulimia has stopped purging on a regular basis, not realizing that weight and food and size are only the symptoms of a larger problem and until that problem(s) is addressed, the relapse rate will continue, and why do these businessmen/women hold the power to decide who lives and who dies...and it is the rich who typically live on the backs of the poor, those who can't afford treatment for their eating disorders and therefore must live in the hell created by...what???
I'm angry that research has failed to uncover the causes of anorexia/bulimia/binge eating/EDNOS.
I'm angry that so many clinicians fail to see the symptoms of eating disorders, and instead label sufferers as having borderline personality/bipolar illness/some off-the-wall, unheard of exotic illness, not bothering to uncover the truth behind the suffering.
I'm angry that a well-know eating disorders center (you know who you are!) spent God knows how much money studying the effects of women's attitudes about makeup and how those attitudes influence and contribute to the development of eating disorders....really, this is too much.
And I'm angry that as I write this, someone else has died of an eating disorder and no one seems to care...

Read more about the Renfrew Center's survey on women and their thoughts about makeup and body image at Carrie Arnold's blog, ED Bites.