In the heat of my fifth summer, I became a girl for the very first time.
I was in the backyard, helping my dad with the weeding alongside my older brother – he was ten and I was five, and we were both shirtless, backs glistening with sweat from the radiating sun. Like most children, I had been shirtless in front of my father countless times – my body was just that – my body, a vessel for which my being was carried. I did not know shame or guilt or impurity.
But on that day in the backyard, my dad saw me, like a rabbit caught in headlights. He saw me in that heat, something in me that hadn’t been there for the previous five years of my life. He saw me, standing in the shadow of my brother – and I felt something then, a feeling I was too young to put a name to. He looked at me and I could feel his eyes prying into the dust lined cracks of my ribs, his gaze peeling back my flesh – not even my childlike innocence was immune to that stare. He looked at me and told me to grab one of his huge white shirts that hung on the clothing line, and he told me to put it on, and I had no choice but to listen. I could feel it immediately cling to the dampness of my skin, and I remember the weight of it even now; it was so heavy on my back, the repulsive feeling of sweat sticking to a cheap cotton blend. The weight of it would never leave me.
And I continued the weeding – but I stood behind my brother instead of alongside him. I watched him and my father, hunched over in the sun, magnificent in their scintillating, shirtless glory. No one else was there to see it, but I became a girl in that heat, and would remain that way for the entirety of my life.
From that moment onwards, my existence as a young woman has expanded in and around this one central moment. I was a child, the first-born female in a traditional Syrian family, raised to be seen but not heard, raised to succeed in school but not to be curious, raised to be a wife and a mother but not a person of my own. Most of all, I was taught that as a female, the first thing people would see when they looked at me, was my body – so I navigated my life around this cardinal tenant. I felt wasn’t seen as a person, and instead was reduced to purely my anatomy– an assortment of legs and arms and other body parts that never quite felt like my own, misshapen, and unsymmetrical.
Throughout my early adolescence, I often complained to my father (who was a doctor) about this knotting pain in my stomach – I had an MRI done when I was 11, my dad being worried it was some disorder within my stomach. I was never worried about the pain in itself – it was uncomfortable, sure – but in a strange way, it felt like some sort of gratification; almost as if I was sick, then that would be people’s first perception of me; they would see that instead of the endless imperfections of my body. The night before the MRI, I prayed endlessly to God, begging him to reveal some malformity within me; I wanted this unforeseen sickness to give me the answer to who I was, to give me some defining aspect that existed outside of my physical body.
By no surprise, the MRI came back fully clean – a perfect bill of health, yet the gnawing guilt of imperfection only continued to spread like a virus within me. It festered within me as I continued to grow, rotting me from the inside out, turning me into less of a human and more of a creature – with each day that passed I felt further and further from knowing who I was as an individual. I knew vaguely what I liked and disliked, my favourite colour and food. These were the things I knew. But beyond that, I existed purely as blood and memories weaved together – being a person did not come naturally to me the way it seemed to for others; people who were sure of themselves awed me. I studied them like they were one of my exams, trying to mimic their ease – but I knew that there was something different about me, and other people knew this too, yet no one could ever put their finger on what it was.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines anorexia as a restriction of energy intake, relative to requirements, often leading to a significant low body weight in the context of the age, sex, developmental trajectory, and physical health. Symptoms include:
- Loss of menstruation
- Fainting or dizziness
- Lethargy
- Tooth decay
- Death
I write often about my time in hospital – I consider myself to be at least partially recovered from my eating disorder, yet I still write about it in the present tense. A part of my body is always going to be bound to that hospital bed, in the same way that part of my girlhood was irreversibly lost to that summer many years ago. I did not mean to hate myself – I did not even think I knew that I hated myself, yet I was hated. I was hated so intensely; I carried that with me through life with more pride than it deserved – a bruise of honour, a strange sense of self-awareness.
The first time I slept in a hospital bed I was seventeen – my parents and I had waited eight hours into the night at the local hospital’s emergency department – I was seizing, drifting in and out of consciousness. My blood sugar levels had dropped dangerously low, and the pain was unbearable; a slow and steady thrum of discomfort that increased into a great crescendo of agony that lasted for who knows how long.
This is the end, I thought.
Not quite death, but I had pushed my body to its physical limits – in fact, I had chased it that way. At one point I had started rambling in the emergency room in a fit of hypoglycaemic delusion – my parents were sitting with me, my dad was crying, and I was trying to tell my mum about my bedroom, about how I had to vacuum, about how my floor was so dirty. How my dog must have been on the other end of the earth because he was not right there in the room with me. I was talking and talking and talking, the talking would not stop, and yet the pain still coiled and knotted in me, pulling me open and unearthing within me new things I could not say yet because I did not have the words for them.
I don’t know if you’ve ever felt this way, I told her during one of my rambles.
It was the kind of confession that may as well started with can I tell you something? But she was my mum, and thus the answer was unconditionally yes. I was intricately aware of how what I was about to say would sound and was equally aware that it was what felt unbearably true in that excruciating moment in the hospital waiting room.
I know everyone has their own pains. But the more people I talk to, the more isolated I feel. Even people who share my experience – no one will ever be here inside of me, feeling this exact pain with me. I’m scared of how lonely that is. Have you ever felt that?
Of course, I did not mean pain as in the physical one I was feeling in that moment. I meant something else, and I knew she understood what I was talking about – it had been the unspoken truth between us since that very day in the backyard; the deep sorrow I had found in that very moment, the bitterness of my stolen girlhood. The air between us did not stay quiet for too long, not even a second – as if this was a question mothers were always asked by their daughters, as if she had been waiting all this time for me to grow up.
Not in the same way, she said. But like everyone other woman in the world, I’ve been scared that no one will ever truly understand me.
I thought that was what the end felt like.
A paralysing fear, a last word of confession. A desire so deep to be talking like this with my mum before being torn open by a group of doctors.
You can restore your physical body to the weight it was always supposed to be at. You can develop a rational and balanced attitude to food, as well as healthy habits in relation to exercise. I have done this over and over and over, yet the truth is that there are some things that cannot be healed, certain aspects of your existence that are forever scarred and bruised. There are things that I have lost that I will never be able to get back. There are certain things that I cannot forget, despite how much I try – the calories in a piece of toast are etched in my mind. The exact number of steps it takes to burn it off. I cannot forget the exact weight I was, down to the gram, every day of every week of every month that made up those years of torture. I have tried as hard as I can to block them out, but on most days, it feels as if I will never be as liberated as that 5-year-old shirtless in the heat, marvelled at the power of her own body.
That is how I remember being young – fearless and free.
Lately, I feel like I’m shining a flashlight into a black hole, my life feels large and dark, and my future feels small. My body feels small. When I try to think ahead, to imagine any sort of future, I hit a wall. What did it feel like before, when I was a child? When I was a girl? There is that one moment of purity I have in the backyard when I was five. That is all I have left of it. When I try to write it down there are no words left for it. This part is a new story, and I don’t know how to tell it. This part of the story is still happening. This is the wall I hit.
It’s interesting though, from that old story I remember. The periods with which I loved life were so equally full of mourning – one has not existed without the other for years. But like a library book loaned to an artistic child, I am only trying to return myself back to the place where I am looked after – but my body has become the pages, a collection of all the things that have hurt me. A collection of all the things I have loved. But this body is my home – my childhood is buried here; my desire has made a home here, festering and wearing itself thin between my brittle bones. I exist here. I live here. I am life. It’s in me. I have to believe that will be worth something to me again eventually.