The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: A powerful memoir of overcoming an eating disorder

by Evanna Lynch

But I don’t trust glamorous women either. I’ve never found them kind or sincere. They always seem too aware of their beauty and power to fully invest themselves in another person, to surrender to the act of truly listening to someone else’s troubles. They don’t need to, either; it isn’t a fight or even an effort for them to justify the space they take up.

Why was I here? What did it matter? I’d never felt like such a useless blob of a girl. I didn’t want to be a blob of a girl, soft and shapeless. I missed my edges. I wanted them back.

‘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. ‘It will get easier’ is not a helpful thing to say to someone for whom only the present moment can exist, so vivid, so intense that it’s not possible to imagine a moment beyond it. The future doesn’t matter to someone enduring an unimaginable pain, so let’s not entertain that childish fantasy. All that matters is the pain that is consuming you in this moment, that you grit your teeth and try to survive it. You invalidate the pain and the damage it inflicts when you hasten to skip past it to a brighter tomorrow. 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.

Dreaming is underrated, I think, so often dismissed as a fanciful, childish, passive activity for immature people not rooted in reality. 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. And that’s the great thing about dreaming; you don’t have to have a shred of self-worth to do it, you only have to have imagination. Dreaming makes us better people, because in seeing these wonderful, irresistible, beautiful images of a potential future, we ignite that desire to be around to witness them, to live and become part of the dream. How many times have you fallen in love with a person and put on your best outfit to meet them, pushed yourself beyond your comfort zone without noticing, gone out of your way to do something that makes them smile? You become your best self, regardless of how you felt about yourself when you encountered them, because you are compelled by the dream. Dreaming has a transcendent quality to it, this ability to pull us up and beyond what we saw for ourselves, and while I don’t think it’s the answer to recovery – because those dreams can crumble and dissipate in a moment, leaving you bereft, alone with yourself again – I believe they can provide a lighted path out

I think it’s important to acknowledge that letting a part of yourself die is uncomfortable, and there’ll be a substantial amount of resistance that comes with that.

I’ve grown up and changed and recovered, and even when the sun is lost behind dense layers of clouds, I believe sunshine is the earth’s default state and the clouds just its transient visitors rather than vice versa – and that’s significant progress.

And I was maybe just a page ahead of her on the journey, maybe just a chapter, so it was so simple. I literally saw her as me and it was where I disappeared in service to something greater, you know, and it was just beautiful – so that’s what began it for me. And I think, in gratitude for that, something then connected to me. Now I know what that is: it’s grace; it’s presence.’