I'm not a gymnast
or a figure skater.
I've never taken ballet classes.
I can barely stay on a horse,
so there's no way I would be
a jockey, and I don't wrestle.

The only articles I've ever seen
from inside fashion magazines
were witnessed over the shoulders
of my friends, in moments of
overwhelming boredom. I never
put stock in what they said.
I never gave them space inside my head.
I didn't believe in them.

It didn't start as a diet.
I didn't want to lose
a few inches or a few pounds.
I didn't suffer comments from
school bullies or familial ones.
I wasn't trying to fit into
that perfect prom dress
or that perfect swimsuit.
I don't like wearing dresses,
and I can barely bob with my head
above water; I haven't been swimming
in years.

I never met an ed-dealer
in some dark corner or alleyway.
None of my friends had reason to
help me stray from health into hell.
I didn't know anyone obviously
eating-disordered. I didn't have
to watch my friends not eat
their school lunches. I didn't
have to watch them slip away,
physically too small to catch,
mentally already gone.

I guess I was the one
who had to be viewed that way.

But I didn't want to put my
best friends and my family through that.
I didn't want to make anyone suffer.
I didn't want to make the team
or top the cheerleading pyramid.
(I never tried out for the squad.)
The pacts I made with friends
were promises of recovery,
sometimes broken by death.

And I'm sorry for all of those
people like me, who've had to fight
against the after-school-special
definition of this struggle,
who've had to shake people free
of the miseducation given to them
by Lifetime movies and word of mouth.
And I'm sorry for all of those
people whose stories more closely
resemble the stereotype,
whose struggles are more easily
mistaken for that definition
no one fits.
I'm sorry for every time I denied
your story in my desperation
to tell my own.
to learn my own.

I guess I was one of them, too.
One of the people who truly
thought she knew. And didn't.

chord

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