This article includes descriptions of anorexia and disordered eating.
The lights flicker on, as the bathroom door locks shut behind me. At the sound of the click, I let out a sigh of relief. Now we won’t be interrupted.
I stare into those cold dark eyes of mine, and I have no idea what she’s thinking. Her eyes flit from facial feature to facial feature. My nose is too big, my cheekbones too flat, and my chin is too square and prominent. With a shaky breath, I slowly peel back my XXL hoodie to reveal the soft flesh I keep concealed underneath, biting the fabric so it doesn’t fall.
I hold my measuring tape taut against my waist like a lifeline. When I breathe out, the numbers fall into place. I smile a little bit, then step onto the scale. I am four-and-a-half pounds lighter, and I’ve taken an inch off my waist in the past week. I count my losses in exhilaration.
Anorexia was my gender’s first love. We met in 2017, during the hot summer that followed my graduation from high school.
When I came out to my family in the months before, I was received with very little fanfare. My father pretended it never happened, while my mother bargained. She said it was fine, just don’t wear anything weird or tell any doctors about it, or else she’d have a hard time financially supporting me throughout college.
My coming-of-gender had been dismantled in a single fleeting, one-sided conversation. All I could see were dead ends: Surgery of any kind was out of the question. Hormones were, too. I couldn’t wear clothes to make it better, because my mother was right. I looked like a boy, and I always would.
So I spent weeks in despair, staring at the sources of my gender envy: Lucy Liu, Zendaya, and all the other thin, pretty women they put in movies and television and on the covers of magazines. Hurting myself was punishment for the fact that I could never become them.
“You wanna look like her?” whispered a voice coming from inside me. “We can make it happen.”
Anorexia appeared to me in my time of need, like the fairy companion in a magical girl anime. She offered me a deal I didn’t have the luxury to resist: I let her into my mind, and she would give me control over my appearance.
In his 2009 essay “Part-Time Fatso,” the transmasculine author S. Bear Bergman writes of his weight and the way that fat lives on his body as “a male cue,” one that “not even my breasts and soft jawline and light voice can overwhelm in the eye of a theoretical beholder.”
Nothing could “overwhelm” the fat on my body either. When I look in the mirror, my companion snaps her fingers, and my body is reduced to just that: a pile of male cues in pounds and inches. She nods, trusting that I know what to do: destroy it all.
“Beauty is pain, my love.” She strokes my chin. “If you want to stop being a boy, lose yourself.”
Our first encounter left me empty, lightheaded, and head over heels.
“Make zero,” whispers my lover as my father sets the table one weekend. She waves her wand, and my bowl of rice turns into a pile of calories.
“You’re getting on my nerves, boy. Stop picking at grains of rice like you’re at a funeral,” my father says, as he clicks his tongue and shovels two pieces of fried shrimp onto my bowl. “Go on, [deadname], you love shrimp.”
The shrimp oozes oil into the grains of rice, and the numbers go up. My fairy companion cocks her gun. A bullet in the chamber.
“I’ll eat later.”
I leave the table.
“I’ve raised a boy without manners.”
My father glares at me out of the corner of his eyes as he leaves for work. He doesn’t see that my hands are shaking.
My companion takes my gender hostage with a gun to her head. There’s a bullet in the chamber, ready to make zero. She tells me she loves me as she rests her finger on the trigger, and I trust her. To save my gender, I carve out inch by inch, pound by pound to make her a size zero.
I lie to him when he gets back. “The shrimp was delicious.”
A few months later, when my semester starts, she’s grown into the Luna to my Sailor Moon, the guardian black cat that follows my every move. Anorexia supervises my transformation into something naked and frail, and she tells me it’s beautiful. By the hand, she leads me to a place where we can be together in private, and she guides my hands to my stomach to see how much of it I can pinch.
“Almost,” she whispers. “You’re almost a woman.”
Like a magic spell, she makes it fit better when I wear dresses, crop-tops, and the leggings that I try on in secret. She strokes my cheek with a lazy smile.
“Soon you’ll have nothing left to hide.”
I trust her.
The following summer, mother notices that I’m wearing a long-sleeved XXL hoodie in 95 degree weather. She tells me to wear something normal.
I don’t shed a drop of sweat. I’m a little chilly, actually. Strange. I remember it being really hot this time last year.
Mother insists on getting a blood test, and it comes out inconclusive. My lover and I have gotten away with it, once again.
I am rewarded on the way home from the hospital when I pass out and my body hits the sidewalk.
“You have to try to eat more regularly,” my college therapist tells me. “I’m sorry, Aerin, but I can’t, in good conscience, sign your letter for hormones until you can take care of yourself, especially when your parents don’t approve. You have to eat for the hormones to affect your fat distribution.”
Turning my back from anorexia, I knew — I’ve always known — she’s lied to me since the start. She promised to be a solution, but now she was holding me back from moving forward.
Anorexia was my gender’s first love, and like any abusive first love, the moment of escape arrived not in an instant, but slowly and violently. I could no longer keep up with her demands. I was too weak and busy and lightheaded to count calories, too broken to hide my disorder from my friends who insisted on keeping me fed. I called on her for months, wishing so desperately that I could regain that sense of control.
I can’t describe my recovery in a single moment of enlightenment, because it didn’t happen like that.
I’d always known what was best for me. I knew that femininity has nothing to do with being skinny, that my body is mine, and I should love it. I’ve known it all along, but I struggled to get it into my head over the calls of my companion. Eventually, I started hearing my own voice more than anorexia’s.
You are your own light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe you muster up the courage to finally walk toward it, or maybe you get too desperate to admit that you need rescue, or a mix of both. But once you finally get to hold yourself, and realize what you could be once you’ve recovered, it’s easy to see what you have to do next.
So you feed yourself a meal sometimes, until you can do it every day. You try your best to keep the batteries out of the scale. Some days are harder than others, but you gotta at least try. Every day, it gets a little easier. You just have to trust in yourself.
It was after an entire year's worth of days like that when I finally started HRT. It's still a little difficult, but every time I eat, I know I'm becoming something beautiful: the light at the end of my tunnel.
Today marks one year and seven months on hormones. My routine is largely still the same, despite anything: I click the bathroom door shut as I turn on the lights. I breathe a sigh of relief, and I love myself in secret.
Like any first love that ends badly, anorexia would leave an impression on me forever, so much so that my heart will never truly recover. I miss a meal, and I still feel the high of being a good girl for anorexia. I can’t rub her cold out of my body, no matter how much I try. I miss her to death and the things she could do for me.
But now, I look into my eyes in the mirror. They are still dark and a little cold. But they’re smiling, because I’m happy to see me. I roll up my hoodie and bite at it, as I admire how much bigger my boobs have gotten. I don’t feel empty anymore. I feel full.
I’ve found a second love, who treats me better.
My gender’s second love — her true love — is me.
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