My alarm goes off but i 039 m already awake, writhing with pains shooting through my stomach. I am hungry, and i have taken too many laxatives the previous night which are now wreaking havoc with my body. Shakily i get up, sitting up slowly at first in order to avoid a postural drop in my blood pressure which will have me in an instant heap on the floor. My hands are cold and clammy, even though i 039 ve just emerged from a bed piled high with duvets and blankets too many for the season but i just cannot get warm. I spend hours in the bathroom, wondering why i took the laxatives when it is so degrading, but deciding day after day that they serve their punishing purpose.

Next i begin the only routine i have: as many cups of strong black coffee as i can stomach to force a false energy through my veins, and rolling cigarettes to smoke one after another to stave off the hunger pangs. Dinner i will eat, but my day will revolve around wrestling with myself over what i will allow myself to eat. When that desperately longed for yet feared time comes i will scrutinise labels, to check that nothing has changed calorifically. I will prepare my meal, often of foods in odd combinations, and set myself a time in which i must complete it. This is usually forty minutes, and i must make each morsel last as long as possible so that my fork hits the plate at exactly the right finishing time. Then begins my evening of guilt, punctuated by laxative overdoses as an attempt at relief, and self induced vomiting if the guilt overwhelms.

Economic Paper on Outsourcing

At bedtime i crawl back under the blankets, writhing with pains shooting through my stomach. I fell head over heels, tumbling my way through what would become a labyrinthine hell, with no idea of the way out. Of course, i did not know this at the time i simply felt that if i lost some weight the pain in my life might ease. I had never read a teen magazine, i had not been exposed to a saturation of media imagery telling me that thin equaled beautiful. A little voice piped up, telling me that if only i could shrink, things would be okay. What it didn 039 t tell me was that the more i withered beneath the orders of that little voice, the larger it would become. It wasn 039 t until 20 when i was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa that i tentatively began to understand what was happening to me.

Essay Writing Icse

I knew of anorexia, i had heard about it in the news, and i knew that it had killed karen carpenter, whose dulcet voice i listened to on repeat through headphones, losing myself in the words that resonated so closely with my heavy feelings. Now i knew that i been boxed into a medical discourse that defines anorexia thus: euro refusal to maintain body weight at or above a minimally normal weight for age and height. Weight loss leading to maintenance of body weight lt 85% of that expected or failure to make expected weight gain during period of growth, leading to body weight less than 85% of that expected. Euro disturbance in the way one 039 s body weight or shape are experienced, undue influence of body weight or shape on self evaluation, or denial of the seriousness of current low body weight. Euro amenorrhea at least three consecutive cycles in post menarchal girls and women. Well, 039 four out of four isn 039 t bad 039 , i joked ever the perfectionistic people pleaser , although i strongly disputed that my body image was distorted. It was, and remains too difficult to comprehend how i can see something in the mirror that is not even there.

Dissertation Program Evaluation

But i definitely refused to maintain a body weight that the medics deemed 039 acceptable 039. In my early high school years i was sent to be weighed by the school nurse weekly, who would show how my weight simply plateaued under the upwards drifting centile curve. Within this i was further categorised, at the beginning as a restrictive anorexic one who does not engage in binge eating or purging behaviour: self induced vomiting, or laxative and/or diuretic abuse. I merely ate a bowl of raisins each evening and exercised obsessively, walking up and down stairs incessantly and practicing calisthenics on my bedroom floor in the middle of the night when no one would hear me. Over time something shifted i started eating again and i could not stop, morphing myself into a binge purge 039 type 039 one who does engage in some or all of the binge/purge type behaviours. I would gorge myself on copious amounts of all the stodgiest, fattiest food i had been denying myself. A loaf of bread would be toasted, buttered and eaten within minutes, then vomited back up into bin bags.

Any money i could get my hands on was spent on food, meticulously planned like the pharmacy visits for my laxatives so that i never went to the same supermarket more than once a week. I often laughed my purchases off: 039 hosting a massive children 039 s party tomorrow! 039 i ate my family out of house and home. From 20 onwards, i became a patient, trapped in a cycle of admissions into eating disorder units when my weight dropped precariously low, or when my binge/purge bulimic cycles were out of control.

I also spent months in general psychiatric units, an adolescent in a world i should not know, frightened and trapped by and because of my suicidal thoughts and attempts. I lost family as i pushed everyone around me away for they would interfere with my 039 anorexic activities 039. My sustained and loyal companion was anorexia, the voice i heard through the dark days and the excruciatingly hungry and sleepless nights.

Critical Essay Checklist

This entity became the only thing i could trust, the only thing with my own wishes in its own heart. This photo essay contains some of the self portraiture work which i have made to both help me understand my relationship with anorexia, and to help others understand the dangers and precarious nature of struggling to survive with an eating disorder. Ambrose bierce apos s short story an occurrence at owl creek bridge tells a story during the american civil war. Peyton farquhar, passionate supporter of the south, would be hanged at the owl creek bridge by the federal army for attempting to damage the bridge to avoid the advance of the northern troops.

However, his sequence of writing and characterization successfully catches the reader apos s attention. The reader is led to believe he escapes under unbelievable circumstances, it is revealed at the end of the story that farquhar imagined his escape just before his death. In all reality this whole scenario was a construct of his imagination in between the time he was dropped from the bridge to the moment he died.

Second of all, during this imaginary journey he notices little things about life. Maybe he was not that good father and husband to his family because the first thing he thought was his wife and children. He probably did regret for some things that he did not do before all that drama happened. Finally, the writer probably wanted to give a lesson with this story especially in where he imagines escaping. People often do not appreciate what they have while they are healthy, but when the danger faces with them, they realize that they might have been happier with less. This is by no means a scientific piece, rather, it is a piece dealing with the feeling i have long had regarding the nature of death. To put it simply i believe that life is permanent and death is temporary.