one thing about being a guy with an ed is that you feel invisible.
sometimes it's nice. cause like, everyone can tell. that chick with the grey face and baggy clothing and thermos of green tea? yeah, maybe she's like, sick or something. but also the psych instructor will single her out before the unit on eating disorders and her friends will go from envious to concerned after enough time and no one's gonna believe it was food poisoning when they catch her retching in the bathroom.
you've got the plausible deniability, that teenage boy metabolism. plus, you're like, a guy. everyone knows eating disorders are caused by not enough magazines showing women who aren't toothpicks. maybe if there were a few more plus sized models who proved big was beautiful, it would be better!! like starving and binging and purging is just for the aesthetics, because all it is is a preoccupation with the mirror, not a deeper near-neurotic need for control, not self destruction, no. just a girl who wants to pinch a couple inches because she doesn't think she'd be pretty in anything but the size triple zero dress.
because it's always a girl, isn't it. only girls could be so stupid (the asshats don't say this part out loud. it's implied.) to ruin their health for the pursuit of things like looking good in skinny jeans. you can't have that, guys have to be obsessed with getting like, muscular. Big, beefy, shredded. we have to self destruct by punching walls (I am not paying to repair that, dude) or getting drunk (too young) or being horrible people (because we're incapable of understanding empathy, clearly the fault of the y chromosome. the sarcasm here is thicker than my oatmeal. for the record). you can't be scared of ice cream, man. don't be a pussy. what are you, weak?
if someone's transmasc, then it's easy for the (bigoted) douchebags to blame the guy's problems on 'girl stuff'. I've heard it. punch to the gut, double invalidation in one hit. I don't know him, but I'd bet my left kidney it's not cause he wants to be the skinniest girl in the school deep down.
if you're cis you've got no excuse. this is both worse and better. the transphobes don't touch you, but don't you want to be a big strong man? it's wired in your dna! come on, kid, hit the gym! (fuck. off.)
but it's cool, cause no one notices. you're just lanky, right? you just have shit eating habits. no one expects better from you. you look up calories in the name of bulking or cutting or protein or what fucking ever (never dieting, they never assume that. it's called fitness if you seem cis het male enough), because a guy drinking a sugar free energy drink isn't omigod. is he anorexic or something? the way it can be if it's a skinny chick. shut the fuck up taylor, maybe she's diabetic. you're fine cause you're not dead, and when you are no one's gonna think oh, it's cause he wanted to be smaller. they'll assume drugs. or cancer.
except also, it's not great being invisible.
because no one notices, no one can tell, you start wondering if you've gone mad or if it's all in your head or if this is fucking normal. if you're really just making a big deal out of nothing. you hide in a hoodie. you're normal, just skinny. or took the cut too far. (hey, bulking sounds better than binging, right?)
for a long time, the diagnostic for anorexia nervosa was losing your period. if I'd been born two decades earlier, I'd technically be healthy, or at least not considered sick. can't lose your period if you physically never could have it and never will.
guys are expected to eat random shit because (allegedly.) they can't cook. if the bag of baby carrots is dinner, then that's only because I clearly couldn't have been a bit more creative, right? boy dinner, girl dinner. it's clearly not because I had a panic attack over the dining hall menu and I don't want to purge because my throat is already sore as shit.
it's all a horrific mess. and at the end of the day I sometimes feel kind of sick about how the only reason people don't think I could be the sort of person with this specific flavor of issues is because they're dickwads.
and if no one sees you as sick, are you ever sick enough?
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