I wrote a television special they will never air. All the top-notch producers (all the mid-notch and low-notch producers) look at it and shrug at me. How do they tell a girl whose lips are set so fiercely, a girl with such passionate eyes, that she is naive? They don't, and so I don't tell them they're wrong to think so. I don't tell them that growing up in eating-disordered culture, even if it doesn't begin until your adolescence and even if you're blessed enough to receive help (relatively) early, feels like living in a war zone. Constant attacks against innocent civilians, friends in hospitals, in cemetaries, in terrifying hopelessness. My own struggle multiplied exponentially by the struggles I witness, by the culture that dares to glorify what tortures, abuses, and murders so many, by the attachment that lets another's pain echo inside me. It's naive these days to try and tell the truth, especially to try and tell it responsibly, in a manner intentionally prepared to create as little damage as possible. Reality television still floods the screen, but truth does not interest the producers. They shake my hand, weakly, as if they have to be gentle with me, smile their apologies and restore my work to my hands. No. They will not go forward with the project. No; I have compiled the truth, and they are unwilling to tell it. I have given them a responsible outline of an important, obscure truth, but it will not be aired.

After the third rejection, I flip through my work again. Notes, folders, word documents, interviews carefully gathered. Every reason the producer has for turning me down, I intentionally put into the piece for the sake of the truth and the sake of the people who will watch this. I worked endlessly to eliminate hypocrisy, to identify the lies and assumptions and replace them with realities, to give what the media never gives me. A penned footnote on the second page of my outline mandates that no diet or exercise commercials be shown in the breaks for this show. In my head, I know advertisements that sexually exploit any gender (a Victoria's Secret commercial pops into my mind) cannot be allowed as well. No commercials that talk about food as if it were a moral issue, as if there's such a thing as naughtiness in the manner by which one eats, nothing that contends there's a way to balance the extreme naughtiness of indulgence with restriction. Food is not a moral matter, even if the recent string of Subway commercials contends that by eating their low-calorie, low-in-nutritional-value sandwiches (believe it or not, lettuce on bread does not sufficiently meet your body's needs) you can compensate for "naughtier" choices. The admission of these commercials eventually extends into part of the piece: a direct explanation of why we cannot base our worth in what we eat or what we don't eat. We cannot allow ourselves to believe in a hierarchy where the one who eats the least and avoids temptation lives above the person who eats more and sometimes "succumbs." What measure of character exists in this behavior - that we can judge morally based upon it? Will power? Will power doesn't exist. Effort exists, but effort requires action; the application of will in effort causes change - not simply one's unmoving will. Will power does not keep an anorexic individual from eating; anorexia does. Logically, if the individual had the power of will large enough to pull off an overwhelmingly complex eating disorder, they could apply that will power to recovery, and "succeed" equally. But no one recovers through will power, the same way no one stays sick by it. Eating disorders, and the level of disorder just below them - the weight-obsessed, lookist, dieting, food-based-moral population that's become normal enough to pay no attention toward - are a matter of illness. Social or personal, the disease remains a highly complex response to a life filled with extremely painful realities and ideas.

That comes next. The origin of the disease. The questions of which came first - the culture that needed to be fit or the media that exploited it, the scores of eating-disordered individuals or the poor attempt to portray them? What did more damage, staying on the media front? The subtle insistence by commercials and popular television shows about what a body and diet ought to be? Or the outright recognition of eating disorders, the sensational, glamorous accounts, the interviews with emaciated women, the movie titles insisting that Gia was "too beautiful to die" or that a handful of adolescent girls traced in a documentary were "dying to be beautiful." No holds barred, I will tell the story that kicks too beautiful to die out of the conversation. I will tell the story of the girl I watched pull her life back from the clutches of depression and eating disorder, the same girl who relapsed just long enough to die. Or I will let you tell your story, of the loved one who didn't make it to recovery. Or the one who did, who is, and nevertheless, goes through pain that feels like dying. I'll tell stories and I'll let you tell stories that explain as best as possible, the mysterious cause of our illnesses: the unique stories, the overlapping trends, the rules, and the exceptions. We'll talk about the invisible pain, made more toxic by its inability to be pinpointed, about the abuse, or the neglect, the taunting, or the fear. We'll tell of the time when we reached a diagnosis, how the physician, psychiatrist, or nutritionist had to write some meaningless term on the paper, predominately something other than the "anorexic", "bulimic", or "compulsive-overeater" labels we'd learned. Tell how we fit a little into all those categories, how we had all but one symptom, or how we hadn't been sick long enough for the DSM-IV to believe our illness wasn't simply a phase. Tell how the insurance companies refused us help until we were six months closer to death, six months more sick than when we first asked for help. Tell how we ached to achieve a real diagnosis, to be undisputably sick, to be the top-sick in our hierarchy. Tell how the insurance company that fostered our illnesses and neglected our beings pulled their funds out from under one of the girls who did manage to make it into a residential facility where she could receive real care, in-depth, over a period of time. How she left prematurely because of this, how they did everything they could to prepare her despite the suddenness of her departure, to be optimistic in the face of it. How a month later they went to her funeral and what they said coming back from her wake. Tell them hell is being sick, and hell is getting better; hell is grieving someone who wasn't supposed to die, and hell is loving someone who could at any moment lose the fight. Hell is nineteen-year-olds having strokes and heart attacks, tears in one's esophagus, beds in ICU. Hell is forty-year-old women who talk like children and have been sick as long. Hell is looking at a plate and wanting it to just be ok, wanting to just be able to be normal, to function, to eat, and crying because you can't let yourself. Crying because you did let yourself. Hell is the fear that it will never go away, even though you want it to, sometimes, combined with the fear that it will somehow be taken from you, and without it you will die. Hell is that thought again and again: Without this, I will die, echoed in emotions, and followed always with the logic that you will die from it, also. All these realities are also truth. Trying to trick your digestive system into thinking tea is soup, trying to be sustained on the nothingness. Scrambling for nourishment and ending up shamed. Starting out shamed. Waking up with pain and going to bed with pain, and never, ever a reprieve from the sickness. Will you recover? Then your pain will let you catch your breath. You'll have longer lengths of better times. The hardest work you've ever done will, over several years and with a great deal of guidance, restore the possibility of life for you.

My special avoids war stories. It doesn't mention a single number - be it weight, bmi, calories, or anything else - and it doesn't show emaciated or triggering images. Individuals who participated in interviews are allowed to craft ideas for the video they want shown with their words, and everyone's story is validated. No one is the beginner, and no one is the veteran. No one has been put onto tape to show you what the seconds before death look like, to trigger you into memorizing their frame and weight and striving for the same. Conversely, scores of people have been invited to speak on recovery, to offer their voice, to tell not only of their sickness, but of the difficulty and rewards of escaping it. One mentions how crazed he feels by the self-help section of bookstores, how recently he bought a journal and began to write his own helpful notes, after reading too many memoirs that spent three-hundred pages on illness, and ten or twenty on recovery. They practice telling their stories without affirming their sickness; they talk of their lives now and give little merit to the the eds that controlled their lives before. They validate but do not justify what happened to them. They understand that it happened to them, and they had to happen to their illness, in order to save their lives. They don't blame themselves for being ill, but they don't excuse the presence of illness as something over which they have no power. They begin to minimize the extent to which they discuss the sickness, not out of shame but because they are entranced by their new lives and feel tired, bored, downright sick of sickness. They've stopped frequenting eating disorder forums, and they refuse to read the handful of cult-eating-disorder-novels they missed during their struggle. They're ready for change, or if not, they're tired enough of the present to want that readiness. They discuss life, how it - mistreated or untended - can fall into a need for something so brutal as an eating disorder, about pain that feels more dangerous than the disease. They discuss the effect of illness on life, their own lives, their families, their friends. They tell how they escaped it and wish they could explain better, wish there was a magic formula to spare the rest of those who suffer. When the movie-of-the-week studies eating disorders, they end up reading, biking, playing a computer game, going out with friends. Sometimes they think about the specials they no longer watch, which take up more space in their minds than most would like. They remember those they've seen, how many people will grow sicker having watched this, how the special intended to deter at-risk individuals from the disorder will almost always have the opposite effect.

They are bigger than the cliches they fit into, as gymnasts, figure skaters, wrestlers, dancers, or don't - as writers, actors, scientists, animal-lovers, and all the overlooked. Together they tell the story of the overlooked, for whom sickness did not fit stereotypes, and the overly-looked-over, for whom the stereotypes have diminished fullness of self. They tell their stories and shake their heads at the inability to describe their individual identities to the extent they now know themselves. One woman laughs a little and says, "I can do whatever. I can tell you the sob-stories, the horror stories, the inspirational stories, the how-to guide. I can tell you what I do on any given day, what I'm interested in, what I like, what I dislike, how I eat even...and all you'll know are things about me. I'm essential. I'm broader than the labels I fit into. I'm broader than the sum of those labels. To know me, you have to interact with me. You have to know me through experience, and still be willing to ask. Because, you know, I could talk on this topic forever, but there would still be more you didn't know."

We end, or rather stop - for the moment at least - there. We can't go further and stay inside our allotted time. More importantly, stopping here allows us to end our story at the beginning of every other that needs telling. Speak. Ask. Experience. Know. That's how we come to take back our lives, from illness, from stereotypes, from grief, from fear. That's how we counter the two talk-shows and three made-for-tv-movies giving a poor and triggering account of eating disorders during this week's line-up. That's how the truth gets told.

-Mary (previously chordchild)

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note: The documentary described in this entry is fictional, though I wish like hell it wasn't. Peace.

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