Content note: This personal essay discusses anorexia, distress about body image and online content that encourages eating disorders.
Pro-ana sites glorify anorexia as a lifestyle choice. How do I know? I was drawn to them.
It was difficult for me to write this article. It meant having to go back there. Back to the pro-ana sites. Back into the darkly supportive online spaces where I harvested solace and motivation.
There were cliques here, different corners for people with different eating disorders. There seemed to be a home for everyone. I clicked into the anorexia subsection and opened a topic with a lot of replies.
There was humour here, and GIFs lurching all down the page. Beneath it was the same pursuit: becoming thinner. Some of us were able to get out, and some of us faded out.
In another thread, a woman had uploaded a photograph and described hating part of her body. She got the support she craved.
These people understood what she was going through; they understood the self-hatred and fear and shame that crashed over her. They discussed their own perceived flaws. She was comforted by them as they praised her appearance. I could feel the relief she must have felt as she was validated, the loosening of her chest just for a moment.
It must be really difficult for someone without an eating disorder to understand the allure. I was never a member, but you didn’t have to be to view all of the content. I was also very sporadic in using the site, but when I arrived back, it felt like someone was giving me the needle so I could inject my addiction. Sweet and pure.
The sites I visited also condemned therapists, dietitians and family members, who were “meddling” in something that was none of their business. These thoughts were already in my head, these twisted concepts that snarled at the idea of needing to “get help.” Pro-ana sites reaffirmed those beliefs. Members discussed ways of hiding eating-disorder behaviours.
Pro-ana sites were not the source of my illness
For me, pro-ana sites were not the source of my illness. But every time I committed to ridding myself of this crushing, so-called lifestyle, returning to them was a last-ditch attempt to hold onto it. I’d be a week into the tears and blinding fear of recovery when I’d find myself on my laptop, soaking up the security of my eating disorder. All at once, I felt relief and safety, and comfort. And the discipline to retreat into starvation.
When I was an inpatient in a psychiatric ward for eating disorders, they didn’t take our phones away. I could see other patients scrolling through the forums. I didn’t judge; just like me, their coping mechanism had been ripped from them.
The closest analogy to this inpatient experience is if you imagine you are scuba diving, and then without warning, somehow, the oxygen tank floats away. You’re so far underwater that you have no way of knowing which way is up. Panic sets in. But suddenly you’re forced to trust a stranger, a professional.
Although everyone told us the professionals were leading us toward the sun, they were not the voices that screamed in our heads at night that were adamant we wouldn’t survive.
It felt like an exorcism.
It was difficult to explain what I was feeling
It’s not easy to explain that you feel fat to someone, that you’re having a panic attack about your body. How can someone who hasn’t experienced it understand the biting fear? How can your family and friends relate to this? When it felt as though they couldn’t, I turned to people who seemed to understand on pro-ana websites.
Why I kept going back
My eating disorder was always ten times louder after an hour on one of these websites. When life was too stressful, I’d use this distraction. My life became more straightforward for a while as not eating became the priority.
Looking back, I don’t understand why I was given free rein to hurt myself the way I did. I think there might be more stigma than many people, even myself, realise with eating disorders.
The race to the bottom of the scales had nothing to do with vanity. I saw little in my life worth pursuing other than my goal to be thin. And when I found myself in secret competition with others whose bodies were shutting down from malnutrition, there was no moderator.
On these sites, education, careers, having a family, socialising: it could all wait. The eating disorder came first. It had to be appeased, but it was insatiable. Its claws sank deeper and deeper, until living with it felt instinctive.
And all these other users appeared to be managing. Their stories of restriction made me want to do worse. The diets here were not diets; they were torture mechanisms for people who didn’t think they deserved anything in life.
More from Roseanne Murphy: Why hiding my anorexia from family and friends nearly destroyed me.
