Missing Helena

Today is the 4th birthday my friend Helena has missed. She would have been 40.

Eating disorders are cruel. They don't just take those deathly ill in the hospital, wanting to die. They also take the ones who are in recovery, who are doing well, who are finally enjoying life. Helena died suddenly of heart complications related to her eating disorder. She was not anorexic or bulimic, the "glamorous" illnesses; looking at her, you'd never have known she was sick. She had binge eating disorder, although it wasn't yet officially recognized and it killed her just as surely as the others.

Eating disorders are cruel, and they make you cruel. I won't hesitate to tell you most of my eating disordered friends can be bitches. I won't hesitate to admit that I was one can be a bitch. But Helena - Helena was one of the sweetest people I've known. She had that rare ability to be caring but not condescending, to truly make you feel like equals no matter your age. To make you feel like you mattered, and were loved.

The last time I saw her, we made plans to marathon Fringe; she had similar TV taste to me, and had never seen it. I still haven't been able to finish the show. I stopped on an episode, near the end, where for once everything works out, everything falls into place. I like to think that somewhere, in some parallel universe, Helena is still alive. Happy and healthy and free.

"Stop Making the Thin Girl Ugly"

My short little response to this, because I like (most of) this post. I've seen it from both sides; I was (am?) anorexic, and I am naturally thin. I have an incredibly hard time putting on weight, or even maintaining a healthy weight. I've never maintained a BMI of over 18 in my life for more than a few weeks (let me tell you how happy my treatment team was/is about that). Anything under 18.5 is considered officially "underweight" (and the cut-off for the not-very-successful model bans). I was always the "skinny girl" - at school, at gymnastics, in the family. I grew into this role. I became this role. I became anorexic. I became anorexia.

There's more than enough written on how damaging skinny models are to young girls, on how they set up unrealistic expectations for the female body. There's plenty of awareness around "no fat talk" and accepting "bigger" bodies etc. And I certainly have no problem with this, but it's important to remember the other end of the spectrum: "skinny talk" can be just as damaging. Call a girl fat too many times and she starts to hate her body; call a girl skinny/anorexic too many times and, shocker - she starts to hate her body.

Obviously, it's more complicated than that. A discussion on the ethics and mentality of using super-thin models is the topic for entire books, and I won't get into it. But on the topic of all model body sizes, Jenni Chiu put it perfectly:

Thin-ness isn't the enemy -- exclusivity is. Instead of banning one body type, we should instead be demanding all body types.

I know that the knee-jerk tendency is to put down one to uplift another and that often, the pendulum swings high toward both extremes before settling in the middle. But I would caution against this particular fight being one of those times.

Ceasing to use one type of model isn't the answer. Starting to use other types might be.

We all have bodies, and society demands that we all wear clothes. Life is hard enough without the added insecurities body judgement brings us. So please do everyone a favor, and stop judging peoples' health and personalities based on a glance.