I just saw someone commented on my February post, and want to thank them. I read the comment today after blogging, and with my current frame of mind, just started sobbing? Thank you so much, anonymous person.
I’m actually slightly mortified at the thought of anyone reading this whole blog… like holy SHIT, some of it is so painfully awkward…
My own blog has always made me wonder about other people… a lot. Like if everyone lives their life one way internally and a completely different way externally... Does everyone in life hide how truly messed up and sad they are? Or am I just especially messed up and sad?
The sad reality is that if you met me out and about in the world, I think you’d generally view me as a nice, well-rounded person. I look ok, smell ok… you would probably never think this bat shit is inside my head. And is it all of us? Or just me? Just some of us?
This is literally the only place in the entire world where I actually say everything. The *only* place. I have put things here I have never told a therapist, a friend, a family member, or a lover. There are things here that make me feel so much shame… this is the only place I’ve ever let anyone see my shame, under the veil of anonymity on the internet.
And over the years, the attention to me has dwindled, and that has been fine with me. Validation was probably the original purpose of my blog - being hella eating disordered on the dark web discussing Ana lightly like she was friendly, stating numbers plainly and out for the clout. I was chipper, but whiney.
Then I started to discover the power of just writing (rambling) about my shit. I can see in my own entries that I became more intimate with what I wrote. I started telling the bigger picture more often. Some posts weren’t even about how disordered my eating was - they were just about how messed up I was or what was happening in my life… it made me feel better and helped me organize my thoughts and process things, even if it didn’t attract any attention. I get about ten views per entry currently, and it’s baffling to me that I get that… I’m always like who tf… I’m sure this place will disappear at some point and just become me typing to a void. And that is honestly ok with me. If this is consumed by another and they find it palatable, relatable, or entertaining, then I am thrilled. Because I think that became the second goal of my blog and not my first at some point. At some point, the purpose of this became me just coming here to unload me. I’m too fucking much to handle…
And all my Ana and Mia girlies (I say “girlies,” because we are who primarily owned these spaces in the past) faded away over time… their comments and views and follows strayed away from blogger. Communities formed on twitter and tumblr, but it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t as whole or raw - just shortened little bits of ED life focused on the clout, and the audience was so young in comparison. The culture shifted.
Because Ana/Mia girlies were, and still are, a cultural phenomenon… We started what 16 year olds are currently doing online. We did not start eating disorders by any means, but the old EDs created the safe places on the internet to be fucked up and not judged and find all the ways we are similarly fucked up. We invented the ED communities that exist. There is no large place for the old EDs anymore… We sprinkle amongst the kids or hole up in a forgotten corner of the internet, eternally on a diet. We are the past, and at one point, we got a lot of attention, but the world has moved on, and so have most of us.
I often wonder to what... Did the Ana bloggers “recover?” (Still don’t think that’s a real possibility for EDs…) Stop talking about it? Die? Get fat and miserable? Sometimes I’ll think of a girl randomly that I used to talk to regularly in 2009 and hope she’s happier than she was back then. A girl I never really knew… but then did know better than the people she saw every day in her life.
And if you read all this, you now know me better than probably anyone who actually knows me, but yet, you don’t know me. Weird.
Is anyone ever really truly seen? I think it’s all we all ever really want… and I don’t know if it ever actually happens…
It is sad that the blogging community is not the same as it was seven or eight years ago. Raw and emotional blogs are hard to find these days. Even my blog has become mundane as my life has shifted.
ReplyDeleteFunny that for some reason, of all the ED bloggers I follow, yours is the only one Google is letting me comment on.
ReplyDeleteAs I've come and gone over the years I've read much of your blog, but not all of it. But I share so much of your sentiment in here. That I've shared things here I haven't shared with anyone. That I miss the old girls and wonder what happened to them. That I doubt anyone fully recovers.
Some of us are still here. Even if we come and go. It just, in a way, feels like home.