Lost Supposedly Funny Dragoness

"You're too thin anyway," is what they like to say to me when I open up about my eating disorders. Some of them tell me that men don't like thin women. That gay men are the ones who set beauty standards for our bodies. "Men don't just like bones," they say with - I'm sure - the best of intentions. These kinds of comments trigger me even more than people - especially men - telling me that I'm "not that thin" or that I look great because I'm skinny or that I have amazing legs. Even more than those who confirm my belief that I'll be unlovable when my ribs are no longer visible due to weight gain. What people who make these two kinds of comments don't understand (or choose to ignore) is that eating disorders are not simply the visualisation of a thin body, they are a state of mind. Being thin has been a huge part of my identity all my life. The abs that are only visible because of my low percentage of body fat are one of the few...

Before I started school I was a happy child. Sure, I was anxious and everyone knew me as a shy little girl, but at home, where I felt safe, I could relax, laugh and sing and talk and talk and talk until my dad half-jokingly told me to shut up. I'm not really sure what changed when I started school, but it was around the age of seven that I first started to feel suicidal. I didn't think much of it, and I don't feel like I was so deeply unhappy at the time that I just wanted to end my misery or some deep shit like that: I just didn't see the point of living. I simply felt like I was floating and there was nothing to gain from living. I'm lucky enough to have amazing parents who love me unconditionally and the only reason I didn't jump out of a window then was because I knew how much my death would hurt them. As the years went by, my social anxiety escalated rapidly. I always had a group of people I hung out with at school, but I never felt that any of them were my...