ceteareth 5

Ladies
i am official. I have a user picture

this is actually a very large (approximately 3 feet high by five feet wide) charcoal and ink "self study" about me and my eating disorder...i drew it about four years ago when this nightmare was just beginning. I had no idea that it WAS just the beginning then. I hate looking back, seeing my hopes, my belief that "health" and "recovery" were "just around the corner" dashed so many many times to the ground. This drawing is basically a visual auto-biography. In the background are ink prints of specific journal entries of mine that i carefully chose, images that haunt my mind, including a picture of a scale and certain foods, crossword puzzles that my family created for me, about me while i was in treatment that first time and, of course, the figure itself, me, shadowed by a skeleton. Me and my eating disorder. I look at the girl in the drawing now and wish i could go back and save her, protect her from that skeleton that seeks to consume her. I am much closer to being that skeleton now than i was then. I look more like "him" than her. And the thing is, when i drew the picture i thought losing weight would make me happier. But the truth is, the more "skeletol" i have gotten the sadder, the more lonely, the more distraught i have become. This disease is evil, and though i hesitate to use words like "evil" and "devil" and "holy" and "god" i do believe that if there is a devil, "he" lives in the form of eating disorders and the power that food wields over us is an evil, lifeless one. Someday i am going to do another self portrait and it will be one of VICTORY. There will be no skeleton in the background. I do not know what that "emma" will look like yet, both physically and interiorly, but that second self portrait will triumph over the one that lives now.
ceteareth 5, ceteareth 33, ceteareth 30.