It is because they are devoured by an absolute hunger for love that they do not accept food as a material substitute for love itself.

– F. De ClercQ (Fame D’Amore, BUR, Milano 1998)

Under My Skin is a long-term anorexia documentary photography project that explores the emotional and psychological depth of eating disorders.

It all started on a summer Sunday. I was at home doing house cleaning when I heard the Mac in the bedroom ringing incessantly: they were the notices coming from the Facebook chat. After a recent publication in National Geographic, my social networks went crazy and Facebook alone reached thousands of friend requests in less than a month.

She was one of these, accepted for some reason (I generally take into consideration only people related to the world of photography) and after having written insistently alone without receiving any response from me, I decided to look at her profile: I understood the mistake made in accepting it, not being in my job niche, but there was something in each of his photographs that troubled me, encouraging comments for hospitalizations, surgeries and rehabilitations.

I went back to the chat and asked her, as the first message, if she has any health problems. Direct and without mercy. Her response was, “While talking about illness isn’t the best way to start a conversation, yes, I’m anorexic.”

I was silent for a while, reasoning, thinking, while she continued to write me without any pause. My second question, equally direct and free of filters, was: “Would you like to join a photographic project with me on anorexia?“. Sure of her negative response, I was, however, amazed when a very positive and honest feedback came with overwhelming enthusiasm.

So in the following days we began to think together about how to create it from scratch with one Elisabetta‘s only request, this is her name, not to further dramatize an already difficult condition. She asked me to represent healing, the exit from the disease, the ability to say “I did it” and the message that anyone who really wants to can do it.

And the project started.

This Anorexia Documentary Photography project aims to shed light on how societal expectations and media contribute to distorted self-image

Elisabetta

Elisabetta was born in the province of Rome and is now almost thirty-six years old. She has a sister named Ilaria and they are very close. Her relationship with parents is customary and difficult to maintain; she leaves the maternal home in old age to study at the National Academy of Fine Arts, where at the same time she begins to frequent gyms and environments where body control is everything.

The weight loss began and the belief that by controlling the body everything else was controllable, too. Distorted views of reality came, loneliness, tears, insecurity and fear.

The teeth began to fall out, a lot of hair turned white, renal function impairment, osteoporosis equal to that of a very old woman, a permanently compromised intestine, heart and muscles weakened due to a potassium lower than the minimum values, vitamin D and calcium practically zeroed, constant amenorrhea.

Today, Elisabetta is a person who is changing the way she approaches life and has decided to tell her story through these photographs. She tells herself like this:

“I was born in Marino thirty-five years ago where today I live with my mother. Parents divorced since my sister and I were little. The relationship with my father is not so brilliant: he has been rebuilt, recovered, since I was about twenty years old and before then we only saw each other last week, not always, as happens to many children of separated parents.

Even with my mother, the relationship is not the best I’ve seen that we hardly ever understand each other: she has always been a lot protective and possessive, having raised two daughters alone and for my sister and me this behavior was deleterious. She did not allow us to grow, to experience, to put ourselves to the test of life, to make mistakes on our own and when we became adults we found to be in front of a different reality from what we expected.

And there all our problems were born. Mine has flowed in anorexia. The disease began to take shape when I started going to university and then to the gym. In life I could not control anything else and so I focused on the only thing I could really dominate: myself. So I started to lose weight, not to eat, to do everything I had never done. Every problem that arose I was able to overcome only thanks to that monster who took possession of me, making me believe that if I had resisted hunger I would be stronger and could endure any adversity. And so I did: I closed myself in my little world of sick beliefs, distorted views, lies, loneliness, tears, insecurity and fear.

Over the years I have destroyed myself, lost esteem and love of many important people. I have lost opportunities that could have made me happy, I have seen smiles, hopes and dreams fly away. All that I was, was gone.

I just wanted a little happiness and instead I managed to do wrong to myself and to those around me. I studied, I got involved and still managed to graduate and become a teacher as I’ve always dreamed of. I no longer want to give up the possibility of chasing my dreams, of being able to have my own family, perhaps a son, of being able to enjoy the little pleasures of life. I’m no longer willing to say no to all of this.
I have not chosen to fall into the maelstrom of eating disorders but it happened as it can happen to every person who has a fragile heart, an overly sensitive soul, who turns out to be introverted and without self-esteem: for such a person it is easy to be overwhelmed and find comfort in an illness. Yes, it really is comfort. We bask because the disease becomes an alibi for the inability to react to the pains of life.

I have now decided to embark on my path of healing despite knowing the difficulty that awaits me and the possibility of falling again, but I will continue to move forward until I will not see the light. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to appreciate the change in my body, a body that I’ve never accepted.

Since I was a little girl I have had a body with female shapes and those shapes have always attracted prying eyes. Precisely those looks that do not make a woman feel loved but an object, used. My body suffered the violence of those eyes and her wounds reached her soul, dirtying her, making her feel guilty of an evil that she had not committed. I wanted to live in another body but since it was not feasible I decided to destroy mine, making it as unwatchable, sickly as possible, so that no one would ever use their gaze to hurt me.

Until I found myself alone, pen in hand and a squared notebook in front of me, I had no idea that I was going to smear those clean sheets with heavy black ink, as dirty as my tears, shed for too many years trying to know – survive anorexia.

It is a serious, dark disease which in most cases especially if adults, it remains attached to you, even forever. There are those who heal, those who die and those who learn to live with it. I am
one of the latter, for now.

It is unexpected in order to be readily understood, but there is a side that I define as good about the disease, that is, what I got from digging in the mud for years, always reminding me how much I have suffered and is still struggling to save what can be saved: I call it will.

For this project I had to change my perspective: from a weepy anorexic who lets herself die, to Elisabetta ready for revenge.

All in all, except when I had those bad relapses, in thirteen years of illness I have always done everything, as normal people do. Graduation, work, shopping, sport, painting, dance, travel, driving my car, living together, loving.

Although anorexia feeds on insecurities and frailties, the strength and determination that one uses to not eat and to be able to control one’s body is impetuous.

I have learned so much from this suffering. I have suffered a lot. Pain, hospitals, humiliation, medicines, isolation, needles, disappointment, abandonment, misunderstanding, trust, offenses, flaps, bags, tubes, edema. At thirty-five I have osteoporosis with a high risk of hip prostheses. I have been taking potassium for my heart for almost seven years, for me it is necessary. Three pills a day. My heart and the few remaining muscles are too tired. I played a kidney. I ruined my teeth with gastric acids because as a bulimic – in some periods – I vomited frequently and they began to crumble by themselves: they literally fell into my mouth. This is just a hint of the life of the Other Me.

However, there is a beautiful part in all this hell: I have found indifference, wickedness, selfishness but also love, friendship, solidarity, understanding and not from the family as everyone would expect, but from strangers, wonderful people I met along the way, remained until now in my life. They can’t even imagine how lifesaving they have been to me on many occasions.

Anorexia is not just feeling sorry for yourself for fear of gaining weight, because taking a kilogram means not being accepted by everyone and at that point you get angry with the whole world. What are you doing then? You try to control yourself by punishing yourself in this way, by not eating, because you feel insecure and unable to live.

Anorexia is also something else. It is to want to live even when death is dragging you into the pit.

Grin through clenched teeth after you cry over eating, for your own good. To love everything and everyone fully, in the light of the sun, even if you are marginalized as if anorexia were contagious, offended in the street with a loud voice among passers-by, at the restaurant observed by everyone as they ask themselves: “What is that skeleton doing here? He doesn’t eat anyway“. In the hospital to be told: “that we do it to do the X-ray, it is not necessary, the bones can already be seen“.

For me it has been and is a continuous discovery of myself, of my abilities, of my tolerance and of my limits. Of ignorance of others, of insensitivity and superficiality and of those who deserve to be next to me or not. It’s true when they say that diseases make you harder: you suffer so much that you realize who really cares about you in those moments and who doesn’t. Anorexia is a cursed, slimy, devious, cruel, continuous lesson of life.

Few people can “feel everything, feel the double“.

Understanding, even minimally, what those suffering from eating disorders can feel, is not for everyone. But not because it is complicated to do it, just because it requires a lot of soul, time, sacrifice, courage to face the pain of another. It takes sensitivity to understand why a disease of the soul can destroy a body, reducing it to the shadow of itself.

Protecting a person in pain, protecting her anguish, fighting her fears with her, rekindling her hope, lifting a pile of bones and dust to hold her in an embrace requires knowing how to feel double. It takes guts, hair on the stomach. And not all, indeed, few, are willing to make this effort, or rather, this act of heart.

I realized this over time, during the passage of this sick life of mine. Few people stayed with me just because they “wanted to be there” and not because they were forced by blood ties or otherwise. My life is full of a few special souls, of sincere, sweet words, of hugs, of sighs. Of hope, love, support and smiles through tears.

I received all this without asking from strangers, while those who knew me moved further and further away from the monster I was becoming: because my appearance was scary, it was disgusting: too many bones, ugly aged skin out of the blue, dull and suffering eyes, the breath that was barely perceived.

The smile had become unpleasant.

When a girl smiles, her face lights up. If I tried to, I looked like a sad clown with bad teeth. So I began to smile silently, keeping my mouth shut. I couldn’t do it too much because jaw and jaw became noticeable and veins were pulsing under the thin skin of my face. The eyes on the sides made furrows: the eyes, me, I had them so beautiful.

My aim was precisely not to appear, to make myself invisible, anonymous in the world, transparent as air and I thought I could do it with anorexia by my side. But no, I drew a lot more attention to myself and it wasn’t what I wanted. I only ask for love and sharing. A shoulder, to lean on every time I fall in an attempt to stand up with my head held high.

Anorexia is not a disease that makes you weak. It can annihilate you physically, yes, but it’s amazing how much strength it takes to force yourself not to eat for days when your body cries out for help even for a single bite of bread. And you undeterred you insist on punishing him, in raping yourself, for sins you don’t have and the only way to do it is to vent on your body. The only thing you really feel you can control while the rest of the world slips out of your hands.

Help would be welcome in figuring out how to transform this self-destructive energy into a positive force that re-generates life, self-esteem and self-love in a person suffering from eating disorders.

The point is this. A help to love me again, to rediscover who I am, they would be more useful than listening to those who tell me that if I don’t feed myself I will die, that I have to eat because I’m skin and bones, that I have to heal my head, but they don’t know that my pain it comes from the heart. I am covered with sensitive skin to every gesture, every sentence, every look and unspoken word that is addressed to me. Whoever is not willing to understand this will never be able to help a person like me.”

Unlike typical portraiture, Anorexia Documentary Photography requires empathy, patience, and full trust from those in front of the lens.

DRAWING

The first meeting with Elisabetta took place in a cafe of a Roman shopping center. We met, we laughed but she was visibly stressed, crying shamelessly, talking about her illness and how she wanted to get out of it to rebuild a life with someone.

That someone who has decided to leave her alone because he is unable to be as close to her as she should and wanted. Plausible, horrible. We agreed to have tea together to start shooting her photos and videos, her demons her fiercer than her who would inexorably immortalize her by putting her in front of herself. After a few weeks I reached her near her house, in a place where she goes every time she wants to stay focused on drawing her. She started creating an eye for me: “The photographer’s eye that you can see through things and souls” as she likes to say.

“I’ve never been very good at expressing what I feel with words. Drawing has always been the preferred form of communication where there was no need to speak or write but only to put feelings, emotions, desires on paper, through images that would help me understand, even if not by everyone.

Or, in some cases, to create a distance between me and the world. Expressing the inner voice: this is what drawings are for. I would have I could tell about awesome things, about the mask I had worn for years, about the pain I was carrying inside, about how much I hated me and my body, about low self-esteem, about feeling caged, trapped in a body and in a world that they belonged to me and how angry I was because no one deigned to understand how much I suffered. No one listened to me screaming for help, no one understood that I was just hungry and in need of love.

With a simple drawing I would have solved everything much faster but no, in the drawing I found a perfect hiding place for me and for my discomfort. Yes, because taking a pencil in hand for me meant feeling good and I was able to create something uniquely mine. I made something beautiful come from my hands that everyone appreciated even if under those colors I hid a great interior darkness. Nobody was supposed to know so I felt protected while the others seemed happy with what I could do. Even proud. Basically it was what I always wanted, to make others happy and yesterday of me, and it is only in this way that I was able to obtain it, because for the rest I considered myself incapable, useless and convinced not to arouse interest in others.

I have always known how to draw, I was born with this gift. Knowing how to do it has always made me interesting on the other’s eyes. As a child I was the one who always made more beautiful drawings: even my parents boasted about how good I was, but they never realized how much, for a child like me, introverted and closed like a hedgehog, this could become a double-edged weapon. I became more and more isolated, the important thing was that I had my colors and my papers next to me.

When I was scolded for doing something wrong, I would lock myself in my room and draw. I was not a sociable child and for this I spent my time between colors and pencils alone with my imagination. Even when my parents separated, during weekends I had to be with my father, I was doing nothing but drawing all the time. I didn’t talk much, I was afraid to verbally communicate but not to use black in my drawings. My school companions became passionate about colored painting, the Impressionists, while I was already attracted to the angular, skeletal, almost bruised and distressing bodies of Egon Schiele.

Growing up I developed an interest in slender, elongated, bony shapes. When I attended the Academy of Fine Arts I was able to draw from real human bodies, but I tended to simplify and reduce appearances. Since I did not accept my forms, I found myself not even wanting to represent them.

My body, my image, were not welcome even on sheets of paper: if I could, I would have erased them like erasing a graphite drawing. Anything I reproduced was unequivocally marked by dark colors that aroused anguish and by violent, harsh features, with dark landscapes and when present, deep and sad eyes.

— I began to draw eyes because I found relief in those of others, I saw a light that did not belong to me, now absent in mine, and I liked being able to stop it by drawing it. It’s like looking at the life of others and trying to live it for a moment, afraid of your own. All these images that I collect, all these eyes that I draw, keep me companionship, make me feel less alone and sometimes I immerse myself so much in these looks that I make them mine, I feel them for me.

I do this because they are not looks that hurt like that of those who, on the other hand, invade your body to destroy your soul. And it’s from those looks that I have always fled.

The first time I had anything to do with the camera and that I have talked about myself and my illness, I brought with me some pencils and a sketch pad, letting out from my hands immediately an eye, which then in the end is the eye that looking at it in the right way he knows how to tell everything, better than mouth and its words.”

Through Anorexia Documentary Photography, I aim to humanize the statistics and tell real stories of pain, strength, and resilience.

WEARING

The second time we met we did some photos that told of the anxiety of anorexic people in try on clothes and sizes. Often the department to look at is that one of infancy, of children, where the choice of the garment to wear it is not appropriate for the subject’s true age.

“We were in agreement for Saturday, 2.30 pm. It is a safe time, there are fewer people and you can work better. Appointment in Rome, a well-known clothing chain store. I choose what to wear: I always go out in overalls to hide in clothes like garbage in a black bag. Not today. How can I do to reveal myself, but not too much, because still a lot thin, without my image disturbing others?

I knew the day I feared would come, in which I would have had to deal with the photographs, with the judgments, with the eyes of others who observe me while I choose a dress and bet on which size I will wear. Meanwhile I look at the clothes, every time I pass in front of a mirror I hear a voice that says: “Look at you, there is nothing more interesting to show. Go back into your darkness.”

A dress or a photo will not be enough to save me, big problem for me. I am terrified of the camera, as well as of the mirror. Of all those things that portray me. I am terrified of being photographed by another person, simply because I am afraid of discovering how others perceive my image outside of myself, that I have the mind and the sight consumed by anorexia. After thirteen years of illness, for the first time, today, I have to deal with my image seen from the eyes of another person.

Why him to show me what I am? Because even he did not know me, he understood that behind this mine
ugly appearance covered by a painful smile, there was much more. I saw in his pictures the courage to show emotions and I have thought it was the right channel to finally understand something.

So I went, we met and without wasting time we started shooting.

The camera is like a spy, trying to investigate, understand why it has become this way, what lies behind this forced smile and hands that incessantly tremble for fear of being discovered.

Seeing the mask of suffering removed and the scars shown you carry a disease that completely eats you: this is what I thought at the beginning.

I hope that the choice to talk about me through these photos will help to pass the fear I have of the judgment of others, that it can make me realize who I really am in addition to that monster that you see, that it makes me understand that there is so much more to notice because, as I always say, anorexia it’s not just what you read in books, it’s not just pain or death but courage to live and fight against yourself between falls and goals for a long time, because it will be part of your life.

In the meantime, however, something must be done: accept help, live by adapting to the world without ever losing the dignity and respect for others and for oneself. Always remind me that, as Mike once told me, “people like you, in the current state of affairs, need to feel bad, they don’t want to feel good. If they were well without problems they would not have to justify other shortcomings, they would not have the courage to say “I am this even without problems“.

But no. It doesn’t have to be that way. Problems are shields, induced suffering is a punishment suffered deliberately as a palliative of an existence otherwise devoid of profound content “.

If we instead put away the fear, facing everything, and only discover that it is not so… what would happen? I want to find out. This is what I understood from the beautiful afternoon spent taking pictures to that part of me that everyone sees in a distant way from mine. I’m afraid, yes. A lot.

Back home I got sick. Until Mike sent me the first photo, I was calm, more or less I would say, considering I haven’t eaten anything all day. I was anxious, because he will view the photos taken, he who does not know me well, he will immediately notice me and what is wrong with my figure, how rotten it is inside. I don’t know what effect this will have on me in the next few days. I believe it will increase awareness of what I have learned about anorexia.”

It’s not just about “a photograph”: for me it’s admitting all the mistakes I’ve made, empty eyes, dull smiles, dark thoughts, anger and fears.

PLAYING

The loneliness of an anorexic person can be disarming at times. But in addition to this, we must also consider aspects that are taken for granted for a healthy person, such as the inability to swing quietly on a swing without the fear of falling and causing irreversible damage.

Elisabetta contracted osteoporosis which made her her bone structure fragile like that of a ninety-five years old woman. The doctors were clear to her: you must not fall, ever again. Feeling free for a few moments on a children’s toy, despite the risk of a disastrous fall that could cause her a life in a wheelchair, changed her mood throughout the day.

And right here, perhaps, Elisabetta began to let herself go more in front of my lens.

“The swing: a game that consists of placing yourself on a suspended table by two ropes giving them a pendular motion, that is, placing oneself at the ends of a balanced support and then making it rise and lower rhythmically.

Already its definition perfectly expresses its meaning and associating it with what my life was up to now, I would say that it has always been my favorite game, constantly in the balance, an alternation of contrasting moods, a swing of hopes and disappointments.

For all these years I have been playing with my existence as one does as a child, challenging danger at high speed. By suppressing hunger, by forcing myself to do what is humanly impossible to conceive: to live without eating. I was in control of the game. I was in charge of everything. Since the rest of my life was not going the way I wanted, disappointed and embittered by my own expectations, constant failures, missed and wrong love, I felt strong in my illness, hovering between life and death. I decided for myself. I was swinging.

I was swinging mastering myself, when instead I realized that that swing was a trap and that it wasn’t I who was holding the reins of the game, but anorexia was choosing for my life. At some point I couldn’t stop it anymore.

She pushed me behind her, cowardly, harder and harder and didn’t let me get off. I oscillated between fasting and binge eating, between hospitals and medicines. It had become uncontrollable and luckily I realized it. It took me too long to understand it, but when someone in that vortex held out his hand to give me a chance to get off, I gave myself away by throwing me towards what could be the last chance for redemption. Slowly I realized that the swing had finally stopped. Now for me there is only a game, a simple game, like the one you play as a child and if I get on a swing, I send my head back and the sky I see is a new sky.”

EATING

Going to a restaurant with an anorexic person can be a wonderful and at the same time disarming experience. I realize that as a photographer I am becoming a fixed point in the process of getting out of Elisabetta’s illness. As she says: “You tell about my anguish without having lived it and you can bring it out even if I am hiding it as much as possible to make myself see well, I don’t know how you do it and I swear this thing upsets me.”

She promised me that she would not throw up the food she ate that day. She also promised me that there would be other opportunities to eat together. And so, in fact, it was.

“You are too thin. You don’t want to eat because you think being thin means being beautiful, right?” “I am not. This message is wrong. But this is precisely what many people think when they are faced with a skinny person who lives her life in the vortex of anorexia.

I have always been a normal-looking girl, with a mostly showy, pleasant, attractive body, appreciated by others but not by me. The appearance I had created me discomfort, making me feel uncomfortable in a body that did not belong to me: at least not my shyness, my delicate and light being, my fragile spirit and my dreamer’s mind. I felt observed, annoyed by the eyes that looked at me on the surface but did not understand me deeply. That aspect gave no way to those who looked at me to be interested in anything other than that body that I wore as if it were a dress full of precious stones.

I had a world inside, made of dreams, hopes, expectations, skills, passions and I could not share it with anyone.

I couldn’t make myself understood. I always had to try to look like someone else to be appreciated. I have always tried to please everyone, especially the dearest ones, those I took as an example growing up: my mother. In my eyes she was a strong woman, who she knew and could do everything and I, on the other hand, had to look like others to be better because as I was at time, it was not ok.

I hated my body, I hated myself, I hated the inability to face the world with my head held high. So, not being able to manage any of this, I discovered that I could “not manage” emotions by focusing control on food and consequently on my body, the only thing over which I had absolute power.

Sport, work, study: I ​​began to commit every minute of my time to cover those gaps that I didn’t know how to fill. I ate less and less, I skipped meals, I only drank at dinner. Sometimes I had fruit for lunch. Within a few months, I was eating a peach for lunch and a yogurt for dinner. I felt able to control everything, I had my life in hand. Not eating and being able to do everything made me feel invincible, stronger, on a par with those who wanted to prove themselves superior, offending for my appearance which was starting to become unpleasant.

I was turning into the perfect opposite of who I was.”

THE PAUSE

Even having a tea and a chocolate can be an escape from the routine and a clear sign of wanting to get back on track with life. Outside the bar in his country, I noticed this wooden wall that almost reminded me of a Canadian chalet with the typical gloomy climate that gave my photos a unique mood, even sadder than the sense of guilt for the calories just ingested.

Elisabetta has recently regained weight and is making an effort to eat more, more often and better. The common goal of getting her out of this pathology seems to work.

“After finishing high school and arriving at university, a fundamental transition period occurred that weighed on everything else. It was the beginning of the disease for me. Anorexia arose at that moment when I was experiencing life, I was coming out of the cage of an adolescent relationship that clipped my wings, now that I had dreams and ambitions. I threw myself headlong into what was the world I imagined and, instead, I got it all wrong. Over time I became restless and needed to carve out some time and space for myself: I took breaks from people, from affections, I traveled, I was exhausted in the gym, I did not eat, I even took breaks from food. They were pauses to avoid facing problems and I did not understand that I should stop, face my pains and face them, instead of avoiding and rejecting them.

I found it as soon as it was casually, especially during quarrels with my mother, because I didn’t want to eat, or because she told me I looked like a skeleton, refuge in “tea breaks”: that’s what I called them. I would leave the house and for hours I sat at the bar drinking herbal teas, drawing. They were the only things that calmed me down, made me feel good about myself. There are actually many other reasons to take a break: to increase concentration on a choice to be made, to understand each other, to take a break from anorexia trying to fight it continuously. And then this break within the project, where I realized that nothing is worth more than one’s life.

Is it so important to sit over a cup of tea and take a break? Yes. There are breaks that can sometimes save your life.”

THE THERAPY

Psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists. But also diet and medicines, infusions. Often the latter are done against all indications and in total autonomy. Physiological, antibiotics and other supplements to keep alive those who no longer want to hear about life. I accompanied her during one of her routine visits to try to understand reactions and moods in front of a specialist.

“I enter the room of a doctor’s office, I should be used to that smell and colors, silence, cold after so many years. But no: every time it always makes me go back to old pains with memories. The first few times that my parents “decided I was sick” come to mind. But I already knew it, I didn’t admit it yet, but I knew it. It was they who had not yet noticed my change, how I was destroying myself or worse, they were doing nothing. Over time, I realized that doing nothing is not a fault but a self-defense mechanism for those who do not want to see, for those who do not want to know.

At that time I was studying, working, living together and it was my partner who alerted my parents, worried about me and exhausted from being near me. It was not fair that the burden of my illness was only he to carry it on his shoulders. He had always helped me but he couldn’t protect me and save me from this. I fainted frequently at that time and I said to myself “it will be tired, a bit of stress, maybe I have to rest I do too many things”. But no, I ate little. Too little. I wanted to be thin, thinner and thinner and every kilogram I took off was one less weight I carried on my shoulders, but no one had thought that losing weight meant this to me. Elisabetta is sick. Let’s take her to the hospital, for sure they will be able to help her. Thus began analyzes, visits, doctors, opinions of specialists, psychiatric sessions, psychologists, meetings, paths, waits, specialized centers, hospitalizations, flaps, needles, tubes, plates, medicines, psychotropic drugs.

What these rooms remind me most are other sensations, other moments that I sincerely would never want to relive. During the hospitalization in Brusson, in a clinic specializing in eating disorders in Val D’Aosta, there was the day of the weight where they put us early in the morning along a gray corridor, in front of the door of a room that concealed the nutritionist and his damn scales. We, most of the girls in terrified panties, humiliated out there waiting, looked at each other with tears in our eyes, big eyes: those who trembled with bony and nervous hands, those who looked into space, those who bit their nails but all waiting of the judgment of that heavy needle and where it would land, what number it would indicate. What number would we belong to until the week after.

Sometimes I stayed outside the door of those rooms, I didn’t want to go in. I didn’t have the courage. I waited hours before stepping forward. I cried in front of the people outside those doors. I was hysterics, I threw myself on the ground, I passed out, I ran away.

It is not only this aseptic room that reminds me of all the torment: that bed, for example, with its so insignificant appearance, reminds me all the times that I have felt safe, when the doctor told me “everything will be fine”, when at first aid helped me and I felt protected, understood, at home. I even realized that during my last hospitalization, in the hospital, I often sat on the beds along the wards and drank tea, my beloved tea, to kill time watching the people go by. Then I went back to my bed and I was able to eat more, perhaps because no one was there to point the finger at me, hardly noticing what and how much I ate.

So on my bed I was able to feel free to be myself.”

HEALING

I would never have believed that in a few months Elisabetta would improve so dramatically. She quickly went from her usual thirty-five kilograms (July) to fifty-one (December), forcing herself to eat without throwing up, to look at life from a different point of view even if initially difficult and painful to accept. She was ashamed of going out for weeks, unable to accept shapes of an adult woman who returned with overwhelming naturalness: after years, the menstrual cycle is back, the quadriceps are toned as well as the buttocks, the breasts have plumped up, the face filled.

She is well again and it is not passed long before the exit requests from guys interested in her have arrived. The real difference that I notice from our first meeting is the more determined approach to life and the dynamics that face them every day. She is more casual, less worried about showing herself around, knowing that her current non-acceptance of the new body shapes is about to end everything.

“Am I out from anorexia? It is a question that I have asked myself a million times and it is an answer that I wanted to give to all the people who have asked me for years. I went through many paths to get some answers, to try to understand how to deal with all this and, finally, even if now I am better and I have reached the awareness of my suffering, of who I am and of what I have to do to be able to live a happy life, I’m not completely healed yet; I am not able to “cure anorexia” with my experience, but I can share what was useful to make progress: it is hard work, constant, individual, introspective, painful.

I am not out of anorexia, but I have taken steps that project me towards a new light made of healing. I do not think to be completely cured of an eating disorder in the proper sense of the term: although the correct weight can be regained, there will always remain something of this disease, a voice in the head, a non-spontaneous approach to food, a temptation, a fear, that insecurity.

It is a disorder that can be kept at bay, you can learn to live with it but it never disappears completely: it remains like a shadow in your head.

I learned that you have to fight for what you want, because rediscovering the joy of tasting food, not being afraid to eat, sharing a lunch with friends was an unexpected joy and I earned it by working hard. Only now I have understood the dirty game of anorexia and will therefore continue to fight harder and harder, certainly starting to have good results; I will try to be stronger so that the life I want will soon be back in my hands. I will take back my dreams and my passions. I have met wonderful people who, despite their anorexia, have always believed that I could do it: here I am.

I thought I would never try this again and instead now I’m “hungry for life” again.

Thank you all. Thanks to me.”

If this Anorexia Documentary Photography work resonates with you, I encourage reflection, awareness, and dialogue.

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