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Janus sat on the floor of his bedroom, looking down at an old picture of himself from high school. The image made him uncomfortable- not because he had never seen the picture before, but because he was looking at it in a whole new light.
A few weeks ago, Janus had been talking to his mother at the table while they drank their tea. After a while, his aunt, who he didn’t see very often, had come up in the conversation because they were going to visit with her this summer. That led to a brief reminiscing of things, and it reminded Janus of an interaction with his aunt that had been confusing him for years.
Back when he was a teenager, both his and his aunt’s families had met up at his grandparents’ house, and Janus, as usual, had his sketchbook with him so he could sit in the corner and draw. As tended to happen at family gatherings, though, his sketchbook quickly became a topic of conversation. In this case, his aunt had asked to look through it, and he handed it to her, not wanting it to become a big deal or anything. She took the book, and she looked at the page he had been working on, and asked him a question that, to him, had seemed to come out of nowhere:
“Oh, is she anorexic?”
He didn’t understand why his aunt would ask that. To him, he’d just been drawing a girl, standing on the beach with a smile. Nothing about the drawing had anything to do with eating, and the girl was supposed to be happy. She was smiling , after all. In fact, as far as his art at the time went, it was one of the only ones that wasn’t somehow related to a mental illness. That day, he’d just wanted to draw something happy, and he didn’t know why she would say something like that.
So, he’d had to shamefully explain that he wasn’t that great with anatomy yet, because apparently the girl was too skinny, but he was only about 15 years old, and he was trying his best. He didn’t need her to rub his lack of skill in his face. He wished he hadn’t handed her the book, if she was just going to judge how bad he was at drawing.
He wasn’t really upset about it anymore, not now that he was an adult, but he was still confused, and the conversation reminded him of it. And so, he asked his mother if she knew why his aunt asked him that, thinking his mother would say something about his aunt’s tendency toward eating healthy foods or something.
Instead, his mother decided to reveal something that Janus hadn’t even really thought about.
Instead, his mother decided to inform him that his aunt probably thought he was anorexic.
And that… That surprised him. Because, he had no idea why someone would ever think he was anorexic. He was, in fact, pretty overweight, and in his mind, he always had been. He’d been a chubby child, an overweight teenager, and now, he was a fat adult. It was just how he had always been. But when he told his mother that, she denied it. She told him that, in middle school and early high school, he’d been so skinny that people asked her if he had an eating disorder frequently . That people were worried he was sick, or even that his parents weren’t feeding him.
And frankly, that was news to him. No one had ever suggested anything of the sort to himself, but he also didn’t exactly talk to that many people, and when he did, they were mostly his classmates. But if that was the case, why hadn’t she ever said anything? She never told him that people believed he had an eating disorder, and if she thought he did, she hadn’t really done anything about it.
Really, he didn’t believe her. He thought that she was exaggerating, that other people were exaggerating. He knew he was somewhat thinner when he was younger, that he’d gained a lot of weight over the years, so people just must be remembering him as skinner than he was.
But then she took out her phone and showed him a photograph of himself from high school, and the picture shocked him.
He was so skinny that he looked like you could snap his arms if you wanted to.
And that realization… was uncomfortable, to say the least.
Because Janus really had always thought he was fat.
He’d tell himself that he knew he was fat, but he wasn’t upset about it (even if he frequently was) because he was just being realistic . He told himself that he wasn’t putting himself down if he was just stating facts. And after all, numbers on a scale didn’t lie, right (even though he was ignoring the fact that he didn’t really weigh himself often, and when he had to calculate his BMI in gym class, the teacher insisted he was three inches shorter than he really was, so it wasn’t even accurate)? And he also told himself that it was okay if he was fat, because he wasn’t the only one (again, pretending as if he didn’t hate his body and wishing he was skinnier).
His mother told him that thinking he was fat when he was unhealthily skinny was exactly what someone with an eating disorder would think.
And after that conversation, after seeing that photo, Janus began to think.
He wasn’t really sure whether he had an eating disorder or not, or at least if he had one.
Apparently, he had a very much distorted view of his body in the past, but he didn’t really think his experiences quite lined up with what he’d learned about eating disorders over the years of psychology classes and personal research.
To begin with, although he didn’t like being overweight and felt bad about it, he wasn’t afraid of gaining weight. At least, not in the way he’d heard people describe. In fact, he very frequently knew that something had far too many calories and ate it anyway, pretending that he didn’t know and just feeling bad about eating it later. He didn’t monitor his weight or weigh himself, and he didn’t track his calories.
Sure, he’d always had a habit of calculating how many calories were in something and feeling bad if the number was too high, but it wasn’t like he wrote it down or anything. He’d just keep the numbers in his head for the day, trying to keep track of the goal. At some point, he’d learned in health class that 2000 calories a day was the average amount someone needed to eat, but that people who had a sedentary lifestyle needed closer to 1600. And sedentary described him rather well. By that logic, he told himself that eating about 500 calories per meal was appropriate. Even still, though, he didn’t always stop himself from eating more. He’d just feel bad about it. And he didn’t get upset when he didn’t know how many calories something was, like at a restaurant (even though he’d cringe at the number when calories were listed on the menu). He was perhaps more restrictive in middle school, but that was mostly a rules thing rather than just a calorie thing. If a box said a serving size was only two cookies, that was just how much he was supposed to eat. He still ate the cookies.
When he heard people describe what it was like having an eating disorder, he often heard things about how it had consumed their lives, how they always thought about food. But he didn’t think about food all the time- he might think about food quite a lot, but not always . And frankly, he had a lot of other problems to focus on, and food wasn’t anywhere near the top.
And the thing is, he liked food. He loved watching cooking shows and trying new recipes. He liked to cook and bake and help out in the kitchen. And he liked food itself, liked the way most of it tasted or felt in his mouth.
He didn’t make himself throw up, either. He was sure he would have realized that something was going on if he did that . Of course, he knew that you can have an eating disorder without forcing yourself to throw up, but he thought he was eating normal amounts of food, and he wasn’t throwing it up, so why would he have been so skinny? It wasn’t even like he ate food that was particularly healthy- it’s not like he was just eating lettuce all day.
But maybe he wasn’t always eating as much as he supposed to, even though he felt like he was? He could remember, even back in sixth grade, that people would sometimes comment on his ‘self control’ when he denied cookies or pie or something. The comment had always confused him, because he would primarily deny desserts when he wasn’t hungry and he didn’t particularly like whatever it was. In his opinion, apple pie wasn’t good enough to justify the calories, so he didn’t usually eat it, with the occasional exception of his mother’s pie because it was good enough to justify the calories sometimes. To him, it just seemed to make sense to not eat something he didn’t want.
That, however, also reminded him of the time, also in sixth grade, when he ate so much that he threw up unintentionally. He hadn’t done that since, but maybe that wasn’t so healthy, either. After that, he had definitely told himself that he didn’t want to experience that again.
Back then, he’d also been confused by the fact that people thought he looked like his best friend at the time. He’d been confused primarily because of the fact that, although their hair was the same color and about the same length, she was skinny. And again, he believed he wasn’t. Did he look more like her than he thought he did?
The more he thought about it, the more little things he remembered. He remembered finding his old shirts and not understanding how he ever fit in them. He remembered that time he’d been told that, if he actually put effort into his appearance, he could date almost any guy in the school (which was confusing on multiple levels, but again had that thread of feeling like he was fat and ugly). He remembered that time his sibling called him fat and he spent the rest of the day crying. He remembered all the drawings that somehow involved appearances, and all the self portraits that made him look dead. He remembered feeling like he would pass out in classes, but he’d always attributed that to his lack of sleep. Was that what it was? Or was he really not eating enough? He remembered always being the slowest in gym class, always thinking it was because he was the largest, but what if it was a combination of not exercising and not having energy?
And as he remembered, he looked down at this old photograph.
Usually, he didn’t look back at old photographs of himself very often. Partly because thinking about the past made him sad, and also because he never seemed to like how he looked in them. But when he did look back at old photos, he wasn’t usually focused on his weight in them. Sure, sometimes, he briefly noted that he looked skinnier, but he was usually more preoccupied with things like his hair- how long it was, how feminine he looked- and he found it uncomfortable enough to preoccupy his attention. He didn’t like how he looked with long hair. Even when he’d been forced to grow it out again because he couldn’t get a haircut, he’d tried to style it more masculinely and still found himself hating the way he looked. The hair made him feel worse than the weight.
He wasn’t sure whether he had an eating disorder when he was younger or not. He did , however, know he didn’t exactly have the healthiest relationship with food now.
Because, regardless of whatever his weight may have been before, he knew he was overweight now. After all, every time he came home from the doctor, he came home with a packet of papers about weight loss and healthy eating. He could also compare how much larger the piles of food on his plate were compared to everyone else’s. He still calculated calories, and even though he continued to eat things even when he knew they were too much, he also damn well knew that he was eating more than he should more and more often, eating junk more and more.
He knew that he would sometimes just keep eating and eating because he just felt hungry even when he was full and he felt like he had to search for something else to eat. He knew that he would keep eating even after he felt so full that he was sick because he’d already put the food on his plate, so he felt like he had to eat it. He knew he sometimes ate something because he usually ate a certain amount of it, so even though he wasn’t hungry anymore, he still had to eat the same amount. He knew he’d eat things solely because they were going bad soon and he felt too guilty to throw them out. He knew he ate things simply because there was a lot of it present. He knew that, even though it wasn’t every day, he did skip meals sometimes, and that he sometimes got too anxious to eat. And that he would then follow those skipped meals up with even more food than he would have eaten if he’d just eaten normally. He knew that, sometimes, he’d tell himself that he shouldn’t eat and just did it anyway.
He knew that he sometimes felt like he had to sneak food, even though his parents had never denied him when he wanted to eat something, and even when they struggled the most, there had always been food (so why would he ever need to act like he couldn’t have it?). He knew that he hated it when people were in the kitchen with him when he cooked, feeling like they were judging how much of something he put in, tense with anticipation for someone to express their disgust with how much cheese he’d put on something (just like everyone used to joke about how much Parmesan he’d put on his spaghetti as a child). He knew that he calculated how much of something he could eat with there still being enough for everyone else, feeling guilty if he accidentally cut into someone else’s share. He knew that he looked up the calories for things like eggs so he could multiply and add up how much he was eating, trying to ignore it when the number got way too high.
He knew that there were some foods that he almost never ate because they weren’t ‘his’, even if they were technically purchased for everyone to eat. Janus wasn’t really picky- he’d eat literal garbage so he didn’t have to throw it out, eat things that were burned or old or just plain gross so he didn’t have to feel guilty. But he couldn’t eat the tortilla chips or waffles or breaded chicken because Roman was picky, and if Janus ate the things he liked, then they would run out of them and Roman wouldn’t want to eat something else. He couldn’t eat the mac and cheese unless it was made from scratch for the same reason- the boxed kind was easier for Roman to make, and Janus liked to cook, so he had to leave the easier stuff for those who didn’t want to. He couldn’t eat the fancy yogurt, because Virgil was the one who liked it, and that made it his (even though their mom technically bought it for everyone, the one time he’d tried it, he only did so because his mom explicitly told him he could. But when he did, it wasn’t even that great, and Virgil yelled at him and told him he shouldn’t have eaten it anyway, so it didn’t matter if he liked it. So, even though he felt guilty throwing it away when Virgil never actually ended up eating it, he couldn’t bring himself to eat it again).
So perhaps, if he did have an eating disorder when he was younger, maybe he had the opposite problem now. And ironically, at some point, when he started to gain weight, he had begun telling himself that it was okay, because he was already fat anyway, so why did it matter if he was more fat (which, yet again, was an attempt to not feel as bad about himself even though he very much did )? But had he actually been fat at that point? Or had he just thought he was, and he’d made himself actually fat in his attempts to feel better about gaining weight?
He didn’t like this. To begin with, he felt like he already had enough problems. He had so many issues to work out already, and he didn’t want to add something else to the list, something else to solve and ponder about. Sometimes, he felt like he was filling out a bingo card, stamping new problems as they arose, and he was tired of it. He’d used to think to himself that he was glad he didn’t have an eating disorder, actually comforting himself with the thought that he wouldn’t have to worry about the problems he knew having an eating disorder could cause, not having to worry about fixing something like that.
But was he wrong? Did he actually have yet another thing wrong with him?
Sometimes, he felt like his laundry list of problems was fake, like he was just lying and tricking everyone around him, including himself. Surely, he couldn’t possibly have all these problems, right? His life wasn’t great, but he had it better than a lot of other people, and he shouldn’t be this messed up. Maybe he was just exaggerating, or making things up for whatever reason. Maybe learning about these disorders put ideas in his head. Maybe he’d become a hypochondriac of sorts, collecting disorders he didn’t actually have.
Except he wasn’t the one who came up with this. He hadn’t been the one to bring it up- his mother did, and according to her, so had a lot of people. So he couldn’t just be making it up, right? And yet, he still felt like he was anyway. Just because a bunch of people, none of whom are medical or mental health professionals, thought he had an eating disorder didn’t mean he actually did . And as he thought about it, maybe he was simply exaggerating the past, allowing this false lens to color his memories in inaccuracies.
He couldn’t remember his younger years well enough to say how often he did certain things, or exactly how he felt about them. In high school, especially, his memories were often fuzzy. He could remember more recent years with more clarity, but that didn’t help. He’d already been at the point where he over-ate constantly by then. He wasn’t sure what an appropriate comparison point was, so he didn’t know if the amount he ate was really enough to consider it bingeing, or if he just over-ate.
The worst thing, though, was that, at the end of the day, whether he had an eating disorder or not, he knew his memories were faulty. In his memories, he was fat, but photographic evidence proved him wrong. And if he couldn’t even trust himself to know what his body looked like, then what else could he potentially be seeing wrong?
It was a scary thought, and he didn’t like it. He knew, of course, that memories were malleable, but this was too much. He didn’t like having years of memories that were all incorrect in the same detail, and he didn’t like only finding out about it years later. He didn’t like thinking that he might have to solve something else, that he might have to change what he was doing because it might be wrong. He didn’t like feeling like he was any crazier than he already was, and he didn’t like having to question whether this was a real problem or not.
Things would be so much easier if his mom just hadn’t said anything. Or even if he hadn’t asked about his aunt’s comment. If he’d just kept his mouth shut, he probably wouldn’t have been looking down at this old photograph and wondering what the hell was wrong with him. He could have just continued on with his life, knowing he was fat and feeling bad sometimes but having bigger fish to fry.
He wanted someone to tell him that he was fine, that he just ate too much sometimes, but he wasn’t sure if he should bring this up to his therapist. After all, lower body weight was more immediately dangerous, right? Sure, being fat set him up for things like heart disease later in life, but he wasn’t so scarily skinny now. So, wasn’t the big problem technically solved? Was there even a point in figuring out whether he had an eating disorder? Maybe there was if he still had one, but he wasn’t sure if he did. Maybe his anxiety and depression just made him weird with food.
He didn’t know. He really didn’t.
But he really wished he did.