The Magic Of Signe's Jeans

TW: eating disorders

I am well aware that for anyone currently struggling with an ED, content about it can be very harmful. So if you are worried that you may be affect, proceed with caution. However, I posted this as I hope that my experience may be educational and potentially even helpful to anyone struggling.

A little context to start. I struggled with an eating disorder for 5 years as a teenager. It totally consumed my life for a long time and is still very much something I am recovering from. However, a year ago, in the middle of my finals, i had a breakthrough. I wrote an email to my psychiatrist and attached a piece of prose that I wrote on a spree one afternoon. This day, was the start of a long journey towards being healed and healthy. I want to express that while this day really did change everything for me, it was a long long time before I fully felt as though I was firmly in recovery. But this passage is my expression of the first day I decided that I had had enough. The first day I decided that I didn't have to get "sick enough" to deserve to heal. Enjoy!

"Dear ---,

Firstly, I would like to start by apologising for the ridiculous length of this email, I just had so so much to say. Please do not feel obliged to read it but felt I needed to say it.

I know this is random and truly I'm not entirely sure I'm allowed to do this but I wanted to tell you something.

Today, I think I have had a breakthrough. About the thing I struggle with most on a day to day basis, my eating disorder. I know we have and do talk about this, but I don’t know if I have ever told you the full story. Perhaps I have. However, regardless if I have told you the painful step by step history leading to where I am today, I think that you have gauged that it plays (and has for almost the last 5 years) a very big role in my life. However, today, I have had a breakthrough. I wrote a piece of (I am reluctant to call it prose as I don’t know if it fully fits that description however for the sake of this I will) prose. And while it may (or may not, I don’t know you bar for cringe cheesy self motivational information is) seem crony and factory made, it is the first time I, an avid writer, have potentially every writer a piece of this sort and fully, completely meant every word of it. As I was writing, I didn’t stop to think or pause or breath or edit. I just let what I needed to say to myself flow. I have attached the doc below incase you would like to read it.

Some context:

Firstly, I have recently started listening to the audio book version of Dolly Alderton’s “Everything I Know About Love” which has been a long standing tenant in my pile of ‘books I must read soon!’ That sits by my bed at home. At first, I thought that it was a funny, upbeat memoir about love, teenage binge drinking and friendship. And then came the chapter about her eating disorder. For the first half of the chapter, I was mentally taking notes and agreeing with this she said about the control and power and how people unintentionally fuel you on with misguided complements about how you look so good. But then came her explanation of her recover. She talks about how the boy she starts dating and falling for realises that she has a problem and when she says it isn’t an issue, he say that he won’t let himself fall for her if she won’t be open with him. And so she tells him everything and he say something along the lines of we are going to get through this together, I love you and I'm going to help you get through this. And then she gets better, and she talks briefly about her recover. When I heard this section, having been in a pretty good mood prior to this, I burst into tears. And I realised something I think I have been lying to myself about for a long time. A big surface level reason for my ED is that I don’t like the way I look and I associate being liked/loved with being thin but the thing I realised, which in hindsight I feel like you may already know, is that I want to get painfully thin and emaciated because I want someone to care enough about me, to love me enough to actively want to help me get better. I want people to be scared about me so that I know they care. Now, I understand that this is ludicrous and that I know objectively that people care about me but I think this has also been something deep rooted in me. I want a physical expression of the way people have made me feel. And while I stood in the bathroom, listening to this story of Dolly Alderton and the boyfriend who started her ED recovery, I was hit with a wave of sobs and the realisation that I had internalised the idea that no-one (my mum, but also others) had ever seen me as more than the golden perfect child and had never actually cared about the person underneath it. And I realised that I didn't want this anymore. I wanted to get better. At this point I was still on a stead fast restriction plan to lose 15 kilos in the next few months. But I had for the first time in almost 5 years, have a moment where I fully, completely, entirely, wanted to get better, for myself.

That leads to step two of this ridiculous story. Signe’s jeans. My friend Signe is awesome. She is the kind of cool that is magnetic. She is like a combination of a 70s hippie, Donna Sheridan in Mumma Mia 2, a tree spirit and all the non-annoying bits of the artsy girl in movies. She is tall and danish with a curly blond bob and she wears black leather bomber jackets and big knitted jumpers and she would always vote skinny dipping over normal swimming. She has this pair of vintage Levi’s jeans that she bought at a charity shop in Copenhagen which she has lent me. I have always liked them but today was the first time I have ever put them on. And then this morning I got dressed in one of my old band t-shirts and her jeans and looked in the mirror, expecting the same sort of painful, 'I look fine' mental conversation that I have with myself most days, but no. These jeans are magic. All of our friends who have worn them no matter shape or size, love them. And I am simply the latest in a long line. I love jeans as a clothing item, I just never really like them on myself. My legs are a part of my body where I have particularly bad dismorphia. But when I put on these jeans, I loved them. Wholly and completely. And more importantly, I LOVED the way I looked in them. I don’t think I’ve said that in a very very long time. All day I felt powerful and confident about the way I looked. And then, all of a sudden this after noon I sat dow to do a chemistry past paper and a song came on. The lyrics of which say “I can't hear you, I don’t fear you.” And I felt it. So I opened a doc on my computer and started to write.

I hope you enjoy,

All the best,

Rosie

I CAN’T HEAR YOU, I DON’T FEAR YOU! FUCK YOU ANOREXIA!!!

The magic of Signe’s jeans

I have decided I don't want to be sick anymore.

I have decided that I want to get better. Like properly get better, not that half arsed fake thing that I attempted for a little while and then gave up on at the first sign of adversity, not the pretend I'm getting better bullshit that I fed everyone to cover up that a part of me had decided in a moment of… i don't even know, to tell a few people that I was not ok, but was really an excuse for me to get sicker. I have realised that I use my illness as a way to prove to myself that no one cares about me and that people only like you if you are what they want you to be, but what I actually need to remember is that I am done waiting for my mum or my dad or my friends or anyone to turn around and say “Rosie, I love you and we are going to get through this, I'm going help you because I care about you and I don't need you to become emaciated to realised that I do.” I have to do that to myself. I have to say “Rosie, I love you and I am going to get you through this and I'm going to get you fully better.” Because I am so so incredibly done with hating myself and the way I am. I'm done with it. I would like to like myself now. I am going to love myself now. So that I don't need someone else to fill the hole that my lack of love for myself has left, I need to want others' love, not need it. I don't remember who said this but I agree, we absolutely cannot think that the idea of “you complete me” is ok or normal. It absolutely isn't! “You compliment me” is a much better, more healthy outlook. I finally understand the saying “no one can love you until you love yourself” because I finally understand that what it means to say is not that no one CAN love you but rather that no one SHOULD love you until you love yourself. If you, the person who spends every second of your life with you, can't see the greatness in your existence, how the hell are they supposed to find it. It won't be healthy and it definitely won't make you happy in the long run. It is a dependence and it's not love you feel for them, it’s craving for the validation that you refuse to give yourself. And on that note, stop the self depreciation, it doesn't make people like you more, it just makes you dislike yourself more and we definitely don't need anymore of that, do we?! Get to the point with yourself where you feel comfortable enough with yourself and have enough UNCONDITIONAL love for yourself that you can be silly or put yourself out there and not want to die inside if you embarrass yourself because it doesn't matter what others think, because you like yourself. Fully and wholly and unconditionally. Regardless of how much you weigh or how many spots you have or if you have broad shoulders, stretch marks, love handles, a muffin top, a thigh gap, hair, no hair, snort every time you laugh or none of the above. Other people’s opinions should not and do not define you, you define yourself. If you decide you aren't good enough, then you won't be, you have to decide that you are worth it. Worth life, worth love, worth joy and happiness and peace. And that's not to say everything in your life will always be sunshine and rainbows, but if you love yourself enough to have a fully formed sense of self where you love every fugly picture and horrendous slipup, you will make it through.

Try and wear a mental pair of Signe’s jeans every single day and dance in the mirror and sing out loud to your music in public and swim in the sea and laugh at yourself. And maybe try and persuade Signe to let you keep the real pair too for good measure."