PERSPECTIVE: A 14-year-old suffering from anorexia nervosa reflects on how the eating disorder changed her life, and the painful process of recovery. "If my body was something I would die for, it should also be something I live for."

Mothership and The Birthday Collective are in collaboration to share essays from the 2019 edition of The Birthday Book Jr.

The Birthday Book Jr is a collection of 55 essays featuring young Singaporeans from various walks of life.

Apart from showcasing the diversity of young voices in Singapore, these essays also discuss our collective future as a nation.

Here, we have reproduced the child's essay from The Birthday Book Jr (2019) titled "Pain brings strength".

By Carolina Mejia Rodriguez, aged 14

“You have Anorexia Nervosa,” the doctor announced.

I felt my mother’s body heat beside me, not a tear left her eyes, but my river was already flowing. I reached out to her; I needed comfort. She flinched at my touch and flashed me a look that said “You let it go too far.”

What was anorexia? Did I just have to gain weight? But I didn’t want to. I had already been bullied, neglected, excluded, and now, I was finally thin. I wasn’t sick.

Anorexic people only existed in the media, it happened to other people who lived far away-- it would never happen to me. I wasn’t sick or obsessive, as the label indicated; I merely reduced every meal, stopped eating anything sweet, prohibited myself from eating carbs, and ran 3km five days a week. I was being healthy.

Then doctor dropped this bomb unexpectedly.

Since then, I have learned that it isn’t about just wanting to be thin.Those who know me will tell you that I am a perfectionist, a control freak living a messy life where nothing is in my control: I have lived in four different continents, moved countries five times, changed houses six.

It’s not of my choosing. Yes, it can be wonderful, but it is also scary. Uncertainty is scary, and the one thing that I can have for certain is the food that goes into my body.

I truly believe that my vocabulary isn’t large enough to show the gravity of an eating disorder and how it changed my life forever. This one word—Anorexia— would take a drastic toll on my life. I lived in fear over calories and anything that would make me gain weight.

This irrational fear led to my body eating my muscles because there was no longer fat to burn in my body. My heart was one of these muscles. I started having a dangerously low heart rate and was at risk of permanent scarring.

Because of this, I had to start eating and stop moving, so that my body would no longer burn itself. Truth is, just the sound of the word calories made my hands sweat and my legs shake. In some ways I was right to be afraid of them, not because of how it affected my physique but how it affected my mental health.

My life became a cycle of crying, panic attacks, anger over food, calorie counting. In the end, I see now that it wasn’t much of a life.

In addition, I became familiar with terms like Anxiety and Depression. On paper, these concepts sound trivial–petty even–but only a few can understand that this illness has ended the lives of many.

I was constantly worried about my appearance without realising that my body was slowly fading away. More than my body, who I was, what made me, well, me, started to fade. I was only left a sack of bones and skin.

My parents tell me that I used to be a happy girl, loved dancing and singing, being with family, eating ice cream. But since, everything changed. I was finally thin—sickly and thin, but thin nonetheless. But at what cost? What was all of this for?

It took two years before I received adequate treatment. I had suffered so much in that time that I did not know if things could get any worse.

When I entered treatment I felt ambushed by both my parents and doctors to gain weight. The first thing I had to work on was on making my body “liveable” again.

After a month of ice cream, milkshakes, candy, chocolate, peanut butter, and every high-calorie food imaginable-- I gained the weight; 12kg worth of it. I got my period back, my hair started growing again, my nails got stronger, my skin lost that yellow hue, and the bags under my eyes got better.

In my ignorance, I thought that gaining the weight would be the hardest part. I was proven wrong once again. Now that my body was recovering properly, I had to help my mind recover too.

I had to figure out all possible culprits of this illness and get them out of my life. The mind is a complicated thing: I could feel something but not really understand why I felt them or where they came from.

I went constantly to psychologists to understand what was going on inside of me. I increased my dose of medicine and continued fighting.

This narrative does not yet have a conclusion: I am still fighting, I am not at the end though I am sure that the light is nearing.

And even though this illness had brought a wave of darkness over my family, it also taught me that I possess immeasurable strength and perseverance.

Even though I am still suffering, it is nothing compared to what I was feeling before -- storms do pass.

The voices are sometimes present, and the anxiety sometimes reaches record-breaking levels, but I have learned that if my body was something I would die for, it should also be something I live for.

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If you happen to be in the education space and think this essay may be suitable as a resource (e.g. for English Language, General Paper or Social Studies lessons), The Birthday Collective has an initiative, "The Birthday Workbook", that includes discussion questions and learning activities based on The Birthday Book essays. You can sign up for its newsletter at bit.ly/TBBeduresource.