dor. sinonimul domesticit al durerii. cândva animal tăcut ce vâna fiecare rază de liniște prin ierburi înalte, târâș. azi n-a mai rămas nici măcar una.
privesc stropii ploii căzând, stele cărora li s-a furat strălucirea. inerție. mă uit în depărtări, ecoul dinăuntru-mi nu lasă loc de uitare nesupusă m-aplec spre geometriile unui corp ce doarme și când e treaz, așteaptă ceva ce n-are de unde să-i mai fie pielea, tampon de cunoscut, de absorbit lumea, moale și caldă ascultă scotocind după nuanțe. nesupunere e să știi care scândură din podea scârțâie, cum s-apeși clanțele. te poți furișa de oricine, către oriunde, dar interiorul va sta mereu cu tine.
tu știi, și eu știu. sunt om, dar nimic din ce-i neomenesc nu e străin de mine. modelează tot ce nu pot deschide lumii în cuvinte. ornamente lăsate-n mers, în gesturi, în mișcări și pupile. tot ce-i neomenesc în mine îndepărtează și-atrage, alintă și sperie în flăcările ritmice, de lumânare, văd destine, arhivă-labirint de nuanțe
într-o zi, oceanul tău de secrete va-ntâlni focul cel veșnic al pasiunii mele, nu te teme. la vremea aia vei ști că pe stradă-s o pisică sălbatică, dar care iubește jocurile, care mușcă, zgârie, se tăvălește pe suprafața lumii, devorându-i necunoscutele, nepământeană, în mâinile tale vreau să-mi abandonez sacadat toate sclipirile,
azi nimic din ce-i neomenesc, nimic din întunericul din mine nu mai sperie. vino. hai să simți toate nuanțele pe care le poartă întunericul când se joacă de-a baba oarba prin lume. viața începe dincolo de lumină și de bine, dincolo de apus. o să-ți arăt tot ce n-ai văzut și o să-ți spun fără cuvinte tot ce nu s-a spus. adevărul trăiește mult prea rar printre cuvinte, iar geometria corpului, sacră, mișcată, rareori minte. tu vino. stai jos, deschide bine ochii și lasă-mi degerele să se joace, să-ți descânte, să te alinte. doar privește, atinge-mă, gustă și simte
Last week, I had a talk with a good friend that asked me, Lucretia, why are some people always complaining about their lives, but they refuse to make a change for the better? I admit, I’ve been taken by surprise by her question, as nothing from our little chit-chat was pointing to it, but it also made me smile.
Truth is, even if all kinds of words have all kinds of powers, one has the particular power of scaring people more than everything. Its name is Change. Of course, we’re told that change is good, that we need to look for it and embrace it with all our being, but the truth be told, for most of us, change ain’t pretty at all.
Change is not frightening by itself, as most people understand that it is nothing to be endlessly avoided. What makes it frightening, though, is its complexity and, even more often than that, its costs.
Because change is, before anything else, a process. A long-term process, involving being put in front of your own mistakes and flaws, and asked Do you like what you see? The real answer is, usually, no. And this is where the fun begins. Choosing to change is the first step, and the easiest to take, even if it doesn’t feel easy at all. The root of change, however, of noticeable change, is giving up. You give up whatever you notice that is holding you back- beliefs, habits, relationships. You might even have to give up on perspectives, and that’s a tough one to be done, I admit.
If you think about this, the existence of people who fear changes becomes understandable. No one likes the process of changing, but we all want the results of it. It sounds foolish and naïve, but it’s called being human. Evolutionary talking, change was never something good, or something to be hyped about. It meant loss, uncertainty, anxiety, maybe even danger. That’s how our brains got wired, during a long, long period, to resist change. That’s also the reason why we fear more social changes than we do fear the technical ones.
This is also why it takes so long for an individual to actually change something that bothers its life. It is, above everything else, an inner battle- a battle between your current dissatisfaction, and your amygdala, telling you that everything is fine just the way it is now, but it might not be as good if you’ll make changes. Maybe things will get worse, instead of getting better. That’s how your close ones dismissing changes think. This is how the change resistance sounds like.
It has never been about laziness or dreaming small dreams. It has never been about not wanting to be a better version of yourself, either, we all want that. It has, however, always been about fearing the process and the costs. Costs that are not small at all, if you give them a second thought. If you add to this some past traumatic events, the resistance to change is bigger than one could possibly expect. And, at some point in our lives, any changes, however big or small, involve the risks of new traumas. So, once put in front of this eventuality, the ordinary individual will make the safest choice, which is, usually, stagnation.
Because after the moment of deciding to make a change, confusion is coming. Ok, I have to change something, this is not what I want my life to be like. But…what should I actually change about my life? And this is how the whole process, anxiety generating and pretty painful, begins. There is a good reason behind the old saying the first steps are the hardest to take, and it applies the best when it comes to the trauma survivors faced with an urge for change.
This is something that personal development didn’t have the courage yet to tackle. Everyone tells you how wonderful the changing process is, and what a wonderful person you’re gonna be at the end of it. Somehow, nobody talks about the ugly fights that happen before one takes the decision to engage in a changing process.
About the self-monologues one has, that tells you to keep what’s working not as a way of seeing what could serve your purposes and what should be changed, but as a way to keep everything. And that also includes the things, beliefs, routines, and relationships that brought you up to that point, too.
Another reason why we have to battle our tendencies of resisting change is attachment. Yes, the good old emotional attachment. We have finally figured out a way of doing things that work (ok, ok, it could be improved, but it works out fine just like it is, too!), so we got attached to it. We like it. And you come and tell us that it should…change? For the sake of the better? The answer will be, most likely, a big no.
Because we like things as they are, and we want them to remain that way for as long as possible. We like our good evening routines and our good morning habits. We like having certain persons around us, even if we are aware that our lives would be way better without them around. This is how it works- we figure out something, we notice it working out in a decent way, we get to like it, and then we dismiss the guys that keep preaching change over and over again.
Yes, change is good. Sometimes, it is so, so needed. But the moment when an individual becomes aware of its need for change is something deeply personal. No book or workshop will ever teach you how to spot it, or how could you tell if somebody has reached that point. This is why most of the change missionaries tend to fail. Because there’s no outer clue to tell you if that the person in front of you needs a change in its way of lifestyle, or it is just your projection about it who’s talking.
So, whenever you feel the need to tell someone that they could just make a change take a deep breath and ask yourself which was the last remarkable change you have taken yourself. You might be surprised of the answer, and it might just as well remind you that every person has its very own life map, with changes and all the milestones marked accordingly. Learn to see the differences between their maps, and yours, as it is the only right way to choose for evolution.
WARNING: This article might be triggering if you are in recovery or suffering from an Eating Disorder. To be read with caution and a grain of salt.
Ana is a simple homegirl. She’s got good grades, she’s friendly and she loves fashion. Everybody loves her, loves the way she gets involved in humanitarian causes. Her smile and her jokes. But they don’t know that they’re in love with a lie. Because Ana is sick. You can say that it’s an invisible illness because you can’t see a thing, excepting the fact that she’s getting thinner and thinner with every single day. She is losing weight, and sometimes this could even be a good thing, but, you see, good things become bad too.
She’s a very good actress. You can’t tell a thing about her complicated relationship with her body and food, it’s hidden too well behind her smile. And even if you’d expect her life to be pink, it’s rather a deep, very deep shade of grey. As deep as her emotions. Ana is suffering from anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder. This could be translated in very low self-esteem, hating her body, being deeply ashamed with the way she looks and starving. Lots of starving. And let me not forget about her desperate search for love. For a mother to love, validate and cherish her. Because her own mother doesn’t know how to be there for her daughter. It’s a very big lie, her apparent balance. A lie hiding depression, anxiety, the fear of not being good enough for the cherished ones, and, above all, the fear of being fat. For Ana, every pound lost it’s a step taken on the path to happiness, every pound gained, a step taken on the path to death. There’s no in-between. You’ll tell me that I’m lying, that Ana is eating. And she does. But she’s also puking after. Drinking plenty of water and doing hard workouts. She’s punishing herself for daring to eat. Ana cares about two major things- getting thin and her grades. School is important to her, she wants to be the best. She wants to impress, to be the best in her future career. But she also wants to be as thin as humanly possible, no matter the costs. She forgot how genuine joy feels like, and her life became exclusively about calories. Nothing else matters for Ana.
I told you that she hates her body and having to eat, but there’s more than just that. For her, food is something with whom she’s deeply bonded. Food brings her peace, joy, guilt and shame, punishment at the gym and puking at home. Because every single Ana knows that you don’t miss that particular food, but the taste of it. Because every single Ana girl knows that every pound she’s losing is not one step closer to happiness and fulfillment, but another cry for help. For love and attention. She’s sick, but there are days when she’d do anything to fall in love with life again. To stop counting calories, pounds, diets which didn’t work out for her, or how close she is from her almost-deadly-thin weight goal. Because she has to be goals- body goals, lifestyle goals, family goals. And she’s nothing but damaged, and she knows it better than any of us does or ever will… But she’s trying. She’s trying so hard to live up to her high, self-imposed standards.
There are days when she makes it- she’s respecting the diet, the workout schedule, she gets high grades and manages to somehow trick everyone around her to think that she’s fine, everything while she drops pound by pound, getting thinner and thinner. And there are the days. The days when she’s binge-eating, gaining weight, skipping a workout, losing focus and getting bad grades. The days that remind her that, no matter what she’s doing, she just won’t be enough. Not tall enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not sexy enough, not thin enough…not good enough. Because, at the end of the day, this is all about- about being good enough. At what costs? Irrelevant, they’re not important, since no one knows about them. As long as it looks natural, it doesn’t matter how horrible it feels, how strange, how bizarre. Ana is needy. She needs every single bit of love and attention that she could receive, but you shouldn’t expect anything in return, and not because she’s selfish, but she can’t. Her emotions are compulsive, superficial, she’s not able to authentically love someone. And you can’t blame her for not having anyone around able to teach her how to share the love and good vibes with the others. Her life is movie script-worthy, but the beginning of the whole story was an enormous cliché- everything started with Ana being bullied.
Yes, I know, it seems so little. But it really isn’t. Everything started at school, with a colleague screaming Hey, fattie, come here, my friend wants to meet you!. They’ve laughed, but she left, and a question stayed with her: Am I really fat?. She gets home, goes to the mirror and she starts analyzing herself. She’s noticing that she really has some extra-pounds, but she won’t say that’s because of puberty, no, it’s all her fault. She’s eating way too much and way too unhealthy, and that has to change. Now. And it does.
Everything starts with her first date with a diet forum, where she’s gonna meet her Ana best friend which will give her valuable tips and tricks about how to lose weight fast while pretending you’re alright and fooling everybody around you. Losing weight feels so. fuckin’. good. She gets more confidence in herself, becomes more popular, can wear everything she wants to wear.
But nothing’s ever built to last. The lost pounds are coming back. She’s having her first major depressive episode. She’s not getting it- what happened, what was she doing wrong? So she’s starting to binge-eat. To have reported cheat-days, weeks, months. Her body looks worse than before, she’s fatter, no one likes her, she can’t be as trendy as her classmates anymore. She’s a fat, ugly, unpopular girl. Being smart it’s not helpful, but at least thanks to God that she’s not stupid as well. This is how she starts to look for Pro-Ana websites, blogs, Tumblr accounts…whatever works, at this point. She’s meeting new Ana girls, with more experience than she and she start learning. In the beginning, about the aliments- how many calories has each one of them, which are allowed and which are totally banned, which should be her daily calorie consumption in order to get thinner again. In the meantime, as she starts binge-eating again, being weak in front of her cravings again, she starts looking for more advanced things. How to artificially produce her vomit, how to make it look like you have just finished eating, but not eat anything at all. How to eat three cupcakes now and then starve for two days, just because she was craving them. How being fat feels like, because fatness isn’t only a fact, a trait that you have or have not. It’s a feeling. It’s feeling like you’ll never be like them, that girl squad that’s so thin, beautiful and trendy while it’s eating KFC on a daily basis, how she will never have as many people dying to be her best friends, that many beautiful, last-Instagram-trend clothes, that many apparently perfect boys wanting them. It’s about becoming a social no-no. About feeling ugly, feeling unuseful, feeling rejected. Reportedly rejected. So you get sick of it and try to change it, and you make it, but…
This is how things work. Especially when you’re a teenager trying to find herself in a visual society. This is how things work when you’re a young girl losing a big amount of weight, as well. There are a lot of psychological traps that no one tells you about. No one will tell you that you lose weight faster than you get used to the changes. Or that you try to look at least close to the girls on social media which have an army behind those flawless looks. And some good photo editors, too.
This is a common story. It is a part of my own story, but also of my close friends. It affects young men and women from all over the world. And it has so many forms of manifestation that you can’t even put a finger on it on its early stages.
When you lose weight, when you lose big amounts of weight, things get to happen that no one teaches you about. You don’t get told, for example, the fact that you will, at a certain point, feel like your body makes space for a new, stranger one, hidden inside of it. Somehow, it is a psychological metaphor of blooming, to explain it somehow.
No one will tell you that you will have mixed feelings about your body, either. That you will love feeling your bones when you dress up, or that you’ll feel insecure about being looked at on the street. You won’t be told about the joy felt when you’ll randomly notice in the mirror, one morning, that your collarbone is visible. The collarbone is the consolation prize of any Ana girl because it is the first bone to show up. No one will tell you that, one day, the feeling of your bones under your fingertips will be the synonym for accomplishment. Or that your close ones telling you that they’re proud of you for losing weight will put pressure on you to get rid of the rest of the weight quicker. Because being admired for the way you look is a newly encountered, addictive feeling.
And they won’t talk to you about these things not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t know how to. Some don’t even know that this is an actual need to be met in the weight-loss process. The only people that made me aware of all these things were my Ana friends. They warned me that I am becoming one of them and that I could be the perfect Ana. Actually, I could’ve turned into an Ana girl and no one would’ve suspected a thing, because, as they’ve told me if you become anorexic when you’re already thin, you’re sick, but if you become anorexic when you’re overweight, then you’re a success story. This is crossing my mind even today, whenever I think about my weight-loss journey. Because it is a long, possibly dangerous journey, even lethal for some. But it’s also rewarding.
I’ve managed to save my friends by loving them and always being there for them. By teaching them that their best will always be enough. That if somebody is conditioning them by telling them that they will be loved only as long as they do this or that, they don’t need that person’s love. No matter how much they care for that person or want it in their lives. I’ve also encouraged them to seek help, to go in therapy. I’ve learned a lot by working with them and helping them become the wonderful young girls they currently are. I’ve documented on the eating disorders spectrum, learned how to help them and how to help myself.
But if I was to name what I know about this now, I’d say that Ana is not a disease of a body, but a universe trapped inside of a human body. An imbalance misleading the vulnerable ones towards a fake perfection.
And if I want you to know something, on the Eating Disorders Awareness Week, it’s just that you have to pay attention to what happens around you. Seriously, that’s all that it takes. Pay attention to the girl that lost a big amount of weight all of a sudden. To the girl that has always just finished eating when it’s invited to take the dinner or lunch in town.
Take her for a walk, encourage her to talk. Or him, for that matter of fact, as I’ve seen plenty of boys developing eating disorders as well. Talk, let them know that you’re there, ready to listen without judgment. Read about it, learn to recognize the signs, and be always ready to show them their best sides, as they often forget about them in their quest for perfection.
Because this is how Ana works her deadly magic: firstly, it makes you feel unworthy of appreciation and love, and then, it isolates you from all the loved ones. It is not just about the person battling the disorder, is also about everyone else who loves her and cares for her. Ana hurts and drags down everyone around the victim.
And for you, for all the people that managed to seek help and are now in recovery, you have all my love, admiration and support. You’re some different kind of rockstars, so make your voices heard and tell your stories exactly as they were. No matter if you’re a teen, an adult or even close to the old ages, your story will help. Your story will heal. Will let the young ones, the confused ones, the ones that have lost faith know that there’s nothing lost forever.
Because it might be true that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, but it is also true that happines is so, so much more than a number on a scale. And if you want to discover it, giving up on caring about that number is the best start you could possibly have. Your beauty is not a number, and your intelligence is not your grade.
It is, somehow, only one number that really counts: the number of people that you’ve made to smile, the number of people that you brought joy to, even for five minutes. And that is not depending on how much you weigh, not even a bit, not at all. So get yourself together, and put the guilt, the shame and the good enough stuff in a box. Tomorrow is a brand new day, the sun will shine, and you will try again, totally aware of the fact that small steps are still steps taken forward.
