Have you ever had a day, where you cannot help but wonder if
someone is trying to tell you something? And if that really is the case, can
you help but wonder what message they are trying to get across, and who ‘THEY’
are?
Today was like that for me. I’m in school. I’m working on
getting my RN. In today’s classes, the same point was brought up in each of
them, although they each had a different take on it. Can you guess?
Yep…….Eating Disorders.
I almost laughed during the first one because she taught the
stereo-typical information that most everyone believes. It wasn’t entirely
correct, but I wasn’t about to raise my hand to tell her the things she had
missed the mark on. Plus, I figured that she was teaching what would be on our
NCLEX, when it came time to get licensed with our national boards test.
The second class? Not so funny……not at all. She showed a YouTube
video of grossly emaciated girls who looked like the skeleton hanging in the
Anatomy & Physiology lab. To say the YouTube video was triggering would be
a gross understatement.
{And just now, I checked my word processor’s synonym file,
for a different word for the word ‘gross’ (since I used the root of that word
twice in the last paragraph) and do you know what one of the words were?
Overweight.}
By no means to I intend to promote the following, but rather
this is used to educate. There are websites, forums, chat-rooms and ‘how-to’
information on the internet that promote the ‘lifestyle’ of Eating Disorders.
They are commonly referred to as Pro-Ana (as in Anorexia) and Pro-Mia (as in
Bulimia) sites. In my less than professional opinion, they are just as dangerous,
(if not more so) than pornography websites. Yes, some of their pictures,
depicting the extremes that the human body can be pushed to, can be paralleled
to pornography by the nature of how much skin is shown. It is so much more than
that. It glorifies, promotes, endorses and blatantly encourages weight loss
extremes……as if to tell you how much space you shouldn’t take up. It is the
paradoxical lie that ED teaches, that the less the number, the more worth you
have.
That is what I heard ED say to me all day. I need to be less
in order to be more. I need to eat less, talk less, weigh less in order to be cared
about more, to be loved more, to be worth more. And as logical as I know this
is not, that is the feeling I’ve lived with for over 25 years.
It is so hard to learn the correct truth.
