This Is What It Feels Like to Have Body Dysmorphic Disorder

(Content Warnings: body dysmorphia, eating disorders, sexual violence, alcohol consumption, hospitalization, mentions of suicide and imagined self-harm, idealization of thinness, childhood sexual abuse)

Sometimes a mirror is just a mirror. Sometimes my reflection is just a reflection and not a reflection of me.

Sometimes Im just getting ready for a shower. There are even moments I admire the uninterrupted plane of porcelain that is my skin, the elegant curve of the bend under my knee, my cascading red curls.

But sometimes I catch a glimpse of this flesh at the wrong angle and Im shaken.

Its like swallowing the butt of a gun – that feeling. Like Im on the brink of an end, there, naked in my bathroom. How close I always am to some end.

I see the way my body bulges and slopes, not an angle in sight, and I cant stomach it. I look down. I picture a knife in my hand. The big kind, for chopping. I can use it to carve myself down into something easier for society to swallow.

I picture my other hand grabbing chunks of unwanted flesh and the knife slicing them off. Gone. Thin. Beautiful. Theyre all the same, arent they?

The thought doesnt hurt. How badly I want to disappear. How badly I want for no one to see me. The pain doesnt scare me. The blood doesnt scare me. I would do it if it were that simple. But the knife would leave scars.

I squeeze my eyes shut. I turn on the water, scalding hot. I step into the shower. A girl doing her best to burn the thoughts out, to forget she has a body to hate.

I touch myself in the shower and disbelieve the animal force of myself.

I get out of the shower. Sometimes I get out of the shower someone else, but that someone else is still somehow always me. There are words for this. I stand in front of the mirror, nude. I do it often. Not out of vanity, but trying to reconcile that this is my reality.

My body: the realest thing I know. What it is capable of. Such pleasure. Such pain. It is the reality I live within, but reality is something Ive always wanted to escape.

Tonight, I want to escape. This flesh. These curves. The world – how it goes dead still when I look at myself. There are words for this.

I know that others see this reality differently than I do, but I still just see that flesh, those curves. Our culture has had to create words for people like me: Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD).

But its impossible to believe that thats real and what I see when I look in the mirror isnt. My body. How many times I have tried to leave it. How many ways. This is one.