It’s been hard to miss the photos from the “What I Be” project popping up on our newsfeeds and around campus these past weeks: up-close and intensely personal shots of fellow students staring unapologetically into the camera, with their deepest insecurities scrawled onto their skin in capital letters.
Am I handsome? There are days when my face is clear and my hair all in place and I believe that I am very comely, and there are days when I am unduly scruffy and pimpled and I despise my own reflection. I
The most vexing thing, for me, as an admirer, is that he chose to hang himself, a gesture he had to have known was deeply dramatic, in the tradition of Brilliant Suicidal Writers like Woolf and Hemingway.
The dining hall lurches with athletes. You sit down next to your friend’s maybe-roommate and she looks down at her own plate. “Wow,” she says, “you’re eating so little.”
For a person with dietary restrictions, food in America is like a dense minefield of things he or she cannot eat. Meat and cheese are everywhere, sneakily stuck in the most unsuspecting locations.
Again and again, I told myself I wasn’t ashamed of my condition…. Yet alone, waiting for a McCosh nurse to take my weight, I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed by what the eating disorder had made of me.
