'You Mustn't Love Me'

This is a phrase that has been said to me by my family, telling me that in my prolonged suffering from anorexia, I mustn't love them enough to recover. And, Dolls, I find it malicious, manipulative and wrong on so many levels that this blog post will be dedicated to investigating.

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This phrase projects the false narrative of eating disorders being a choice. 

To make it clear, Dolls, nobody choses to wake up one day and begin suffering from having the severe, deadly mental illness that is an eating disorder. 

One may choose to actively engage in eating disorder behaviours but from the disorder itself? That is a choice every sufferer is robbed of from the moment it develops and every moment thereafter that it manifests. So if an eating disorder is not a choice, how is it then that a person could be choosing not to love their family by simply existing with one? 'You mustn't love me equates to 'If you have anorexia, then you are choosing not to love me', does it not? The two are completely separate from one another: The love one does or does not have for their family doesn't correlate to whether or not one has an eating disorder.

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This quote narrows down the manifestation of one's eating disorder to being an active act of lovelessness: 'If you have an eating disorder, then you mustn't love me.' In reality, these are some of the appropriate, realistic and factual fill-in-the-blanks:

• If you have an eating disorder, then... you must be experiencing low self-worth and self-hatred.

• If you have an eating disorder, then... you must be suffering from body dysmorphia.

• If you have an eating disorder, then... you must be suffering from co-morbid mental illnesses such as depression.

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An eating disorder can't be caused by one thing, so how can this isolated and simplistic saying that lacks the body mentioning other critical components such as societal factors and family history in any way be a credible phrase in the realms of eating disorder discussion? Dolls, in my opinion, the only relationship that needs to be in question of love is the most important, horrific, and terrorising one, the one between an eating disorder and its sufferer. How can you expect a person who is quite literally dying to be reassuring you of their love for you when they are being abused every second they're alive living through the hell of being sick with an eating disorder? I hope this puts things in perspective. It is only an eating disorder that doesn't love its sufferer. It is hard for a sufferer to think about your feelings when they're being so fiercely abused emotionally and physically that they're becoming the weakest version of themself.

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I hope that this post has highlighted the atrocity of accusing those who have eating disorders of being neglectful of their love for the people they care about. To me, this phrase just induces more shame and weight on the person's shoulders who is going through more than enough hardship as a result of enduring one of the most complex, fatal mental illnesses known to man. I hope that in moving forward, we can move the discussion to one that stems from recovery and support, rather than from blame and accusation.

Kisses,

COS x