Eating Disorders
“I hesitated at the checkbox for bulimia when I filled out my medical information for enrollment to Harvard. I’ve never been diagnosed with an eating disorder, so I feel uncomfortable laying claim to a disease which has inflicted greater pain on other women, those even less equipped to deal with their bodies than I am. But maybe there’s just not a name for the obsession of my youth. After all, the popular statistic is that one out of four American women have struggled with an eating disorder at some point in their lives. Yet even when I choose to tell my close friends, I find myself describing my experience flippantly because the lack of an official diagnosis makes my problem less real, less worthy of sympathy. So I fall back on lines, like the accurate but insufficient “I had a mild case of bulimia,” as if the disease that plagued me all of early adolescence was about as serious as the flu.”
-Lena Chen, Sex and The Ivy 2006
If i wanted to describe to you my experiences with body image, you could pretty much take this article and replace the word ‘bulimia’ with ‘anorexia’ and call is the diary of —insert name here. Well said, Lena. Well said.
