The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

by Evanna Lynch

Women made a room safe.

monosyllabically

‘Maybe he fancies you,’

Not good

someone who wasn’t my mother would have to love me, and I wasn’t sure they ever would.

others merely flirt with them.

I didn’t feel that I deserved cake or love anymore, and felt a thrum of satisfaction, a faint and interesting pleasure in rejecting them.

Maybe it is asking too much of a parent to smile and relax and treat their daughter as their daughter, and not as a sick, vindictive demon that has ensnared their child, when they can’t look at her without being appalled by the physical changes they see.

watching other people lick and swallow their way through sumptuous-looking treats that I long to taste is the closest I can get to actually eating them.

I was empty, unremarkable, unexceptional at everything, and that it would be hard to find love, friends, work, a place in the world at all, if I didn’t find something by which to define myself

And where my art, my friends, my dreams have faded and fallen out of my life, somehow Harry Potter remains.

and commanding respect. And today my laconicism

I have no damn right and no excuse to feel this awful.

It is so unusual to share these dreams with someone who sees only possibilities, who never snuffs them out with a sceptical frown or points out the statistical unlikelihood of a shy, inexperienced, unexceptional girl making a name for herself in the acting world.

I think dads often end up marginalised from their children’s mental health issues, confined to the peripheries of the situation, through no fault of their own. I think we’re just not socialised to trust our dads with these tender, irrational, complicated problems, and they’re not socialised to draw attention to them. So, maybe he really hadn’t had any idea what was going on.

cheque

I think to her, male doctors and paranoia are the two safest things in the world.

meagre

acrimonious

allopathic

meagre

my heart hammering.

vim

fey,

Friends get on with their lives and I am happy for them to do so, because all the attention and concern has been an inconvenient burden.

odious?

kerbside

Something tells me that my parents are not paying heed to the subtle hints of danger, and that I’m going to have to be the one who protects me from whatever is about to happen.

swathes

I’m not afraid of tomatoes; they’re just inarguably unappetising.

Thats why she gets 3

Hers are vacant, empty, lifeless. There is nothing in these eyes I recognise; nothing I can relate to. I can’t make this person understand me.

But he is a man. What would he know? He’s strong and sturdy, not soft and vulnerable like I am. He doesn’t know the fear and torment of having some external force rule and control your body, so I keep my eyes fixed firmly on my mum, even as I address him.

More men suffer from body dysmorphia than women

Cold, slimy, evil bastards.

They looked so intently for the anorexia that they didn’t really see us.

Nothing else has been taken into account; not my genetics, not my build, and certainly not my preference.

‘It will get easier’ is probably the most offensive thing you can say to someone in the grip of pain. You are borrowing from a future that isn’t promised, a future that depends entirely on their endurance of the pain. You are taking for granted a well of strength within them that they may not possess, fast-forwarding through the ugly bits that you don’t want to watch but they must live through, nonetheless.

Sometimes things are just unremittingly shit and the only respectful thing to do is to stand next to the person going through it and scream along with them.

Or maybe I hated her for how she had made me – normal, flawed, human – and how nobody would ever love me like she did, and for the way her love doomed me to walk the earth, hollow, and searching for it elsewhere.

Much like prison making masterminds out of petty criminals, the Farm made everyone better at anorexia.

The vision of a brighter future is what she sees as the solution to this traumatic situation, even as I scream for her to take action.

But to me, there is something deeply unethical about a scared twelve-year-old begging for help and crying ‘I can’t do this,’ only to be met with a blank chorus of ‘Sure you can.’ You know the end of this story already; I got out of there, and ultimately everything did get better, but, when someone is in such a fragile state of mental health and finding no source of comfort, I don’t know that it always would get better. Personally, when it comes to anorexia recovery, I don’t approve of solely treating the body and turning a deaf ear to the soul crying out for help. A soul can still drown in a healthy body.

A schism between my mind and my body. It is too painful to sit there in my body and feel it, to acknowledge her expanding and changing without my consent. She is not mine anymore. She is not someone to be trusted. She is repulsive and only getting bigger. There is everything wrong with her. But I can’t fix her anymore. Someone else has taken her over. So, I find somewhere else to hide out. I retreat to the safety of my mind. I become cerebral, reading and writing and reading. I focus on the things around me, anything outside of myself. Like all the more seasoned patients here, I cover her up. She is no longer a part of me that I will acknowledge. I cover her in long cardigans and shapeless dresses that fall to the knees, and try to get on with my life as if she isn’t there. As if I don’t live inside her. As if I could ever get away.

idolatry

privately vowing to it to lose that weight as soon as I was free.

Saw that coming

It helped to be surrounded by other young people whose spirits had been similarly flattened, and whose bodies were not their own.

I dreamed that maybe I could be something more than just thin. I saw myself working and dancing and acting and performing – and I saw myself doing so with pale, unblemished wrists.

Happy she didnt

until the person finds a reason to exist independent of their eating disorder, it doesn’t matter how many times someone fills her with food and sends her on her way again – she will just keep slipping back beneath the surface.

now?

I dont think u need to " catch up" wth anyone in life. Everyone goes thru life at their own pace

But sometimes, reality is truly unbearable, not worth enduring, and dreaming offers the only way out of it: a light in impenetrable darkness, even if it’s an illusory one you conjured by your imagination.

– I believe they can provide a lighted path out of the depths of an eating disorder, and that’s where recovering the self begins.

All things it can help.. Not just EDs

ebullient,