Content warning: discussion of anorexia and body image.
She kept a sticky note on their wardrobe for each week left in the semester. Four rows, each a kaleidoscopic reminder of time; to Bethlehem they raced, relentless and undeterred by my ceaseless attempts to bargain. Spring 2022 was the spindle off of which I ran in one too many circles, ripping at the seams of long-held certainties that easily unraveled in my hands. The last one sparkled a sinister baby blue. My heart climbed out of my chest, into my eyes and I stared until the corners softened.
I’d sat in this chair before, to tilt my head back to laugh, or whisper when our suitemate Alma inevitably bid us a gentle, “I love you, please be quiet,” or tonight, to squeeze my eyes shut and force down an ounce of Pink Whitney. I watched the little squares glitter. Pink, yellow, blue. Promises of vignettes framed by the Christmas lights on the ceiling, of a place on the wall’s polaroid mosaic of memory. I earned my place between the Strokes and Modern Baseball posters two sticky notes prior. My walls were bare, with room to soak up the scuff marks from the same suitcase that I unpacked and repacked my whole life into six times in eight months, but their room was a snowglobe of amity that had long-since fastened its place on my brain. In the dials of their bass speakers, I saw that first night; giggling, wine-drunk on the two-train headed downtown, head-banging to Taylor Swift in a pizza place off of the fourteenth-street/seventh-avenue station. She sprung from their spot and scrambled toward their phone. When the song changed, their laugh rang out deeper than the bassline and she watched me double over, tears stinging, unequivocal recognition.
We were four songs deep in our detour. “Dude,” she shook their head over the tantalizing guitar riff, “if someone wrote a song like this about me—like, holy fuck.”
I agreed, “‘The horizon tries but it’s just not as kind on the eyes?’ Like, are you fucking joking?”
Shit was poetry.
An hour passed of our dissection of Alex Turner’s unparalleled ability to exact the enigmatic, whimsical Dream Girl of alt/indie rock. To mystify and serenade in the same lyric, maintaining that ever-reaching distance from the mundane and scratch love letters in diamonds with the audacity to call them imperfect. (Only as potently in AM and its predecessors, some would argue.) I gave a tipsy, impassioned speech to declare how this time around, I would wear thigh-highs with platforms and miniskirts under my leather jacket, sketch out the girl I’d always wanted to be in the flick of winged eyeliner and the curve of wine-red lips. In the haze of nostalgia and well-humored misgivings, I sobered up. The 2014-Tumblrification of grunge that is now coined “indie sleaze” was sprouting through the cracks of an already highly malleable age of style (if you can really call the aftershocks of the microtrend epidemic style). With it would bring the inevitable regurgitation of pernicious discourse situated seductively in leather and lace, soundtracked by the conundrum of the tragically, misunderstood, beautiful girl as told in poesy from Alex Turner’s peers.
***
I was four, seven, eleven years old. I could say there was a decisive moment when the scoreboard in my head lit up, when I perfected my zero-hour whittlings of myself, but that quiet terror steeped in my blood-brain barrier from the first time I stepped on a scale and remembered the number it spat back at me. I trudged to the living room of my grandparents house to report back to my mom, who looked me up and down and sighed.
It was, I thought, my secret. Shame pulling my shoulder blades deep into my bed every morning, thieving of oxygen when I shuffled down school hallways. As I grew into my body in teenaged girlhood, I started to run even further from it, deeply resentful of what spilled over the edge of the narrowing ideal.
I only ever took a breath alone. Anyone who walked into my bedroom in 2014 would be immediately assaulted by a flurry of Champagne Toast body spray gifted by wealthier friends, stacks of ruthlessly annotated young-adult fiction (the Hunger Games trilogy, of course) and a nest of neon peace-sign blankets for my cat. I paint this picture not to laud my definingly twelve-year-old interior design choices, but as a portrait of its contradictions; the marriage of prolonged attachment to fantasy and unbridled misfires toward sophisticated womanhood that defined my youth.
I’d liken my first encounter with Tumblr to a jarring, albeit formative meet-cute, but that would give overdue credit to its cunning enticement. As with all social media rendezvous, it was entirely by (algorithmic) chance. I was slumped over the edge of the trundle bed I shared with my little sister—the best part of my parent’s separation, not counting the separation itself—refreshing my Instagram explore page. (I will not dissect the ethos of my having an established personal Instagram account three years in the running at twelve years old here.) For the first time in my fleeting existence, my deepest suspicions about myself were the writing on someone else’s mirror. (I wonder why even now I refer to my body as myself.) I followed the watermark on the screenshot to a Tumblr page christened by the holographic, Halsey-ified theme that defined an era, and fell down an infinite rabbithole of image after image that glamorized, sexualized, and aestheticized my open wounds. Things I had never told a soul, or ever deeply examined on my own, were splashed across the internet in pastels and fishnet tights. Interaction with these pages left me feeling empty, ashamed, and alone, but I was addicted. I spiraled with the helpful instructions of internet strangers who were also in way too deep to ever understand the repercussions of their preachings, and by high school I was anemic, lost the period I had gained only months before stumbling across ED Tumblr, and moving the goalpost for myself with every daily, weekly, monthly deterioration.
While I don’t credit ED Tumblr entirely for my development of anorexia nervosa—my situational, mental, and genetic odds made it near impossible to avoid—its influence and power over my adolescent emotional life was undeniable. To say it didn’t act as a catalyst for long-held, dormant poison to overtake me would be a blatant lie. Tumblr’s encouragement of harmful—at best—belief systems was thinly veiled as an anonymous space to express oneself, a community of “freedom” lurched further and further into the restraints of judgment, cynicism, and competition that characterize eating disorders. I knew it intimately, resentfully, parasitically. ED Tumblr titillated naive outsiders with the intermittent fulfillment of understanding, only to rip it out from underneath. More pandemonium than a representation of the persecuted. It floodlit the underpinnings of a culture that deified thinness and cast aside all else, lacked introspection insofar as to be a self-proclaimed mainstay of “counter-culture.”
Tumblr’s endorsement of restrictive criteria in femininity politics, desirability, and fashion masqueraded as a pivot point for the same beauty standards it so vainly upturned its nose to. At the apex of advocacy for diverse body type representation in fashion, championed in the early 2010s by brands like Aerie and Dove, Tumblr’s take on indie sleaze glittered off the mainsprings of its engagement in what only appeared to be counter-culture. The beauty queens worshiped between overexposed images of Diet Coke and cigarettes deviated from misogynistic archetypes—Victoria Secret’s Bombshell Blonde, the All-American Cool Girl—spotlit in every form of popular media in the early-to-mid aughts. The appeal of this new glamour arrived in its inherent protest to itself—the cynicism, the curation packaged as unintentional—an effortless beauty that, inevitably, arrived at the same self-contradiction and impossibility as its sun-kissed counterpart: contingent on whiteness, thinness, and the social capital associated with both. The vehemence of the Tumblr standard to contrast and protest the bleached-blonde and spray-tanned standard served only as a superficial axis of difference to disguise its tired Not-Like-Other-Girls-ism. Still entrenched in consumerism, in the values of whiteness and thinness, the ideal curated in the Internet’s regurgitation of these decades-old aesthetics served the same message to young girls, only in slightly modified packaging.
Suffice to say, at twelve, all I recognized was the contrast. I didn’t understand the axes by which I was different, or how close I could skate by the standard without ever reaching it. Of course, this would never be attainable for me either, but I didn’t know better at the time—and I was privileged to be deluded into thinking I could ever embody it. The fact of the matter was that, despite my fervent efforts, Eurocentrism meant it could never be a reality for me. A curvy, curly-headed Chicana with zero understanding of the insidious ways these images lured me, I immersed myself in this ideal; desperate for that rebellious, yet still entirely conventional, beauty.
In reality, it was predatory, and, I’m sure, lethal. All pro-ED spaces are. My use of this word is not for theatrics, or to draw emphasis to any personal appeal it’s objective fact. Anorexia nervosa claims the lives of 1 in 5 people that suffer from it after 20 years. Eating disorders are not pretty. They are not an “aesthetic” nor are they a force to toy with. There is no way to circumvent it, no outsmarting it. I know. I tried. To combat the resurgence of its romanticization that has already begun taking place, it is necessary to clearly outline the consequences of a culture that worships thinness at all costs. No frills.
Anorexia took whole summers spent toeing the edge of a tide whose depths I once knew intimately, too scared to strip down and swim. It took first dates and birthdays and graduation pictures, took long-held friendships in my fatigue and irritability and refusal to leave the house. {A/N: I want to talk about my eating disorder here in the ugly light. I don't want to glamorize it. I think, culturally, we are well past the point of the endless euphemisms and niceties when it comes to eating disorders.} Anorexia wrung out my selfhood until I had almost nothing left to give. My hair, the only feature of mine that I ever truly adored as a girl, my defining silhouette of auburn curls, began falling out in clumps. I loved running—or, convinced myself that I did—and while at first, I got a little faster, as I fell further and further down the slope, my rankings in races followed suit. I spent three years trying and failing to run like I used to, sputtering a tear-stained walk through finish lines that once saw boundless joy.
I was not thin to begin with, so when I got sick, everyone congratulated me. I was a bragging point at the dinner table, at family reunions across the country, at award ceremonies for the sports I chose which were contingent on my rapidly-weakening, “lean” body. Family who didn’t know better swapped my childhood nickname, gordita, for flaquita. My mom updated her Facebook banner from a group photo in which my cheeks pillowed a goofy, gummy smile to one that I can’t look at anymore. That’s not who I am. You look great, she tells me, whenever I ask her to take it down from public view, stunning, in-between anecdotes detailing her body mass index from high school to her wedding day. My partner, who met me a year before I got sick and has loved me inside-out through recovery, winced when he saw the picture. I asked him, What’s wrong? and he said, You can see it on your face, and held me to his chest for a long time.
I never had to do any convincing for the people that truly saw me. My best friend in high school brought me baked goods fresh from her mother’s oven, didn’t ask or tell, a silent exchange of love and trust. The first boy I ever fell in love with would just slide a bag of cookies across the lunch table mid conversation, no pause or broken eye contact. My cross country coach let me keep my spot on varsity even though my times didn’t hold up.
Everyone else just saw what they wanted to. They told me they always knew I would turn out to be beautiful, asked me about my exercise regimen, taunted my affinity for salads. When I tried asking for help, they said I was just desperate for attention, that anorexia is a gringa thing and I would never be skinny like that anyway, that I was ungrateful. So when I got sick, I didn’t notice for a long time. All I knew about anorexia I learned from movies and books, and then from Born to Die sad-girl textposts and angst/hurt/comfort drabbles. Just as suddenly, all I knew about anorexia existed in the moment after I powered off my iPod each night and turned away from my own face on the black mirror, or in the breath I took as I convinced myself that if I wanted it bad enough, I could outsmart gravity on the bathroom scale. The lines between curious observation and unconscious belief blurred until my thoughts competed with the pace of media I consumed telling me to just try harder. Adequacy in the eyes of the eating disorder is pure meritocracy, one for which nobody ever qualifies. I wish I had known that if I kept going as I was, I would only ever get sicker.
It wasn’t until I almost drowned that I chose recovery.
For my eighteenth birthday, my boyfriend Joey signed us up for sailing lessons. I’ve always been a strong swimmer. I was raised on an island, where the Savannah river kisses the open mouth of the Atlantic. My childhood soccer coach was a Coast Guard pilot who taught our entire team how to parallel-swim riptides and extract tourists from the undertow. So much of my time with Joey until that point had been spent going far past where our feet could touch, surfing to skip calculus exams, and running out to the water under a blanket of stars. After a minute, then two minutes passed when we capsized and I didn’t surface, he knew something was wrong.
When my vision went red, when I was forced to swallow down lake water in a panic so that I didn’t inhale it, when I ripped the mainsail from the mast and pulled myself through the gap, when I heard him calling my name from the other side, I breathed for the first time in years. I could chalk those moments up to carelessness, to my reputation as a klutz that preceded me, but that familiar, treacherous pause in my thoughts, that breath between my brain and my body moving, was a force I can’t take credit for. Then I came up for air.
***
Some nights as I lean over the sink to wash my face of the day, water engulfs my nose and lips like it did then. The scrapes and scars long since faded, when the New York wind cuts through my cheeks and cracks my lips, they always bleed from the same spot. My body, who has only ever wanted to keep me here, fights to ensure I don’t forget, leaves little notes on the mirror and in the rasp of my voice, reminds me there are much worse games to play. Even if I come up for air with a bloody lip and a bruised arm. Three years in, recovery dares me to defy my perfectionism, encourages radical acceptance of its nonlinearity, and myself. Confronting the reality of the weakness I had so long romanticized forced me to face a difficult truth. If I wasn’t recovering, I was dying.
ED Tumblr magnified the cultural dissonance affording a woman the illusion of humanity only if she maimed herself in the psychological bloodbath to attain beauty—and made it look effortless. Ironically, over-corrections that insist on unflinching positivity and confidence in one’s body are equally harmful. They are rooted in the same bedrock of misogyny requiring a woman to first be beautiful to be “tragically beautiful,” to first embark on the uphill climb towards perfection before critiquing it. (Culture offers more understanding and respect towards a woman stabbed in the back by patriarchy if she first appeared to be working for the knife.) The counterbalance to worshiping thinness demanding that all women love their bodies at all times was a well-meaning shift that ultimately lacked the nuance to provide tangible support. In later stages, it crucified women hesitant to accept themselves due to lifelong messaging promoting bodily shame as personally vindictive enemies of feminism.
This overreach, like many incentives that arise with the perpetual pendulum swing, forced the issue as a moral responsibility, bar any acknowledgement of its cultural origins. If you couldn’t be a personal spokesperson for body positivity at all times, then you were part of the problem. Body neutrality as a concept accomplishes what body positivity aimed to, without the impossible standards attached. It proposes radical acceptance of one’s body even when celebratory self-love cannot be achieved, a sustainable temperance; humanizing the movement to center respect and care towards all bodies at all times. In decentering the body and valuing the human person inhabiting it, body neutrality is the avenue towards authentic change; achieving equity without forcing people who may not be ready to single themselves out as public figures of progress.
Now, fastened on the wings of social media discourse and its impetus to swing the cultural pendulum, the overcorrection of our shortcomings places us back on the grounds of lace-trimmed camisoles, Lana Del Rey, and the losing game of thinness as a fixture of fashion. The regurgitation of debates long-buried in archived Tumblr blogs saturates the soapboxes of today’s teenagers on TikTok, only now with an added conundrum. How does an aesthetic rooted in thinness and whiteness adapt to our contemporary context? This question is one that falls far beyond my ability to definitively answer—but if nothing else, my years on Tumblr necessitated that I gain the propensity to fuck up, and to learn from it. The comeback may be unavoidable, but it can absolutely be reshaped.
A true spirit of counter culture would require radical accountability, and refusal to succumb to the mainstream proclivity of exclusion. This starts in real life, in choosing to act in fearless compassion rather than comparison, in deconstructing our personal reservations to live exactly as we are. A revision of 2014 Tumblr begs the question: what is stopping us from posing cheesy introspective inquiries to conclude an essay that is a critique of a culture at large? Where and why did we draw the line with publishing our stoned thoughts as if they merit a Pulitzer? How trite is it to fence off a subculture whose entire purpose is to welcome those that exist on the fringe? Responsibility starts in the same hands that could easily damn an entire generation to hell with a keystroke, the only difference is where our fingertips land.
