Perfect Imperfection

24.02.08 Sunday
Weight – 33.6
Diet – about 10 spoons of porridge (74 calories)
Burn - 125 crunches (- 100 calories)
Total = - 26 calories

“Seeing herself in the mirror,
Pinching her meatless thighs
Her reason for living: unclear
And secretly, for help she cries.”

She used poems to reveal her mental state. And her physically decrepit state was evident to everyone. “I was shocked when I saw her at the party the other day. I couldn’t recognize her as being the same person. She looked 12 all of a sudden. Her hair honeybrown, and thinning. Her bones protruded rebelliously against her pallor skin. Enough to help a struggling anatomy student,” he shivered, with an expression of repugnance. While this was the case of a far friend, her near ones understood no better.

26.02.08 Tuesday
Weight - 33.1
Diet - ½ orange juice (22 cals), ½ date (11 cals), ½ lemon juice with sugar (15 cals)
Burn - 1 hour tennis (- 213 cals)
Total = -165 cals

She wanted to reach out,
But had no true friend.
Because she'd always doubt
If her near ones would understand.

“I missed her,” her close friend confessed, while the rest of her classmates agreed. She remembers, “I didn’t see her often. Not in classes. Nor at lunch tables. I once was a vital part of her life but at the time, I felt like someone staring at a prisoner in a cell. She was scared, reserved. She couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. Tears would start to fall, like dewdrops from a moist leaf. For no apparent reason. I didn’t know what to do.” Evidently, her friends wanted to help her. But no matter how hard they tried, it didn’t seem like she wanted to help herself. She had built concrete walls around her heart. Not letting anyone in. Shutting out the world. Her world.

25.02.08 Monday
Weight - 32.9
Diet - glass of water with lemon (15), ¾ Plum (15 cals), fistful of rice crispies (20 cals)
Burn - Aerobic Dance (347 cals)
Total = -297 cals

But they could see her fading away,
And were frustrated by her excuses.
No more could she get her way,
For eating as little as she chooses.

Much to her parents ignorance, she had continued to eat lesser. Weigh lesser. Angles had started replacing her curves. “I could never tell what was going on in her mind. And she didn’t speak much either. She seemed thinner morning after morning. I felt desperate, yet helpless,” her naive mother ruefully recollects. Her parents asserted that she would cry every time they made her eat, claiming that she had terrible stomach aches even with the smallest morsel. That left them in a limbo. To feed her. Not to feed her. To feed her. Not to feed her.
Her father, although a very contemplative man, lost his patience one evening. The evening that changed their lives forever. Reflecting back on it now, he confessed “She was just not herself. No eating. No speaking. No laughing. I was scared I had lost her forever.” He had forced her to eat. Really forced. Not with pampering gestures but frustration and anger flaming in his eyes. She resisted. He forced. She resisted. He forced. She resisted. He forced.
And then, it happened. Just like that. But really, it was the accumulation of emotions from too long a time that led to that moment. When, with all the bravado she could manage, she did what she feared most: asked for help. “It’s anorexia!” she admitted, surprisingly calm. No one understood her.

27.02.08 Wednesday
Weight - 32.8
Diet - glass of hot water with lemon (0)
Burn - 1 hour Swimming (- 260 cals)
Total = - 260 cals

Books about anorexia she'd gather, 
As it was her only way to explain,
To her worrying mother and father,
Her constant endurance of pain.

And that’s when it began. The defeat of her anorexic voice. She always knew her anorexic voice was going to be her bane. But now, she was more sure than ever. She was not weak, not effete, not anymore. The voice had constantly insisted for perfection. In her body. In her deeds. In her life. But she had dawned to the realization that the voice didn’t solve any problems but just added to them. “When she finally reached her hand out to us, we all grabbed it. Did everything possible to pull her back on ground. Pull her out of the cliff that she was hanging on. She developed immense faith on God. She believed He was with her, through her recovery. And He made her stronger than we possibly could have”, her brother declares with pride. That was what was unique about her. What made her different from all the other girls the voice had haunted. Her self-righteousness. Her will-power. Her faith in herself and in God.
There were times when she lost grip and almost fell. Relapse. But she held on. Tighter and tighter. She fought back. They fought back. Harder and harder. And then, there came a day when she didn’t strive for perfection. No more. Because she finally realized, that perfection lies in imperfection. That she was not perfect, nor will she ever be. But she was perfectly imperfect.
“There was a time when every time I saw her, my stomach would naturally sink in. Words couldn’t reach my tongue. Tears would eke to stay within the lens of my eyes. But now every nerve in my body stands upright as if to salute her. My eyes shine with pride for her success. For her recovery,” her sister announces, contentment radiating in her smile.

15.03.10
Weight - perhaps 50 (doesn’t weigh)
Diet - doesn’t remember
Total - doesn’t count

“Now as she looks in the mirror,
And sees the reflection of her medium size,
She rids herself off her fear,
And cries “Goodbye, Anorexia. Goodbye.”

I like the hopefulness that this story ends with. Having some very, very good friends going through eating disorders myself, it's always nice to think that there will be happy endings like these.

Jut some small picks:

Much to her parents ignorance, she had continued to eat lesser. Weigh lesser.

She developed immense faith on in God.

[...]And He made her stronger than we possibly could have”, her brother declares d with pride.

Your verb was in the present tense, when most of this is in the past tense.

As to some other minor nit picks, your story lacks consistency here or there. Your first poem is in quotes, the rest aren't. On money a glass of water with lemon is "15" (no marker for cals) but then on Wednesday a glass of water with lemon is "0". Also, I'm assuming your units for weight are metric, but it might help to add those. Being an American, I first expected pounds but realized that couldn't have been it.

The story itself is a hopeful one, like I said before. I do like it, but I think you could show a lot more and make it more of a powerful piece by doing so. Right now it's part food diary, part statements from those who knew the main character. If you really want to wrench our hearts out, give us something more, something personal. If you're wanting to only give an indirect look at things, you can still add a lot more power to it.

Additionally, not to be cynical or anything, but I feel like it would take a lot more struggle than your main character seems to face to overcome anorexia, just from what I know in my personal experiences. Anorexia is usually (not always) a symptom of a greater emotional problem within the person, since it can show the desire to control some aspect of one's life. I think, to make it more realistic, you might want to add some struggle to it. Perhaps you've personally experienced this, but if you haven't maybe you should try to find personal accounts of anorexia/bulimic survivors online. Also, wouldn't her parents and others be able to guess its anorexia? It's not very easy to hide these kinds of things. Even if you can trick people into thinking you are eating regularly (a friend of mine did this) it's still easy to tell someone is too skinny, too sensitive about their personal appearance.

I do love the message that she found hope in being perfectly imperfect. This has a lot of good base to it, and just needs a general boost of emotion and reality. Best of luck with it.

Hey Suzanne,
Thanks a lot for your review.

The small nit picks you pointed are very true. You have a good eye for details. And with the lemon water, hot lemon water has no calories but room temperature lemon water has 15 calories, hence the difference.

I do agree that it is not nearly as powerful as I could have made it but I still do not want to change the concept of this piece for anything in the world. This is because this is my ditto experience of anorexia, with my actual food journals and accounts from my actual loved ones. I know it does sound very quick of a recovery but that was really how it was. I really did get out of it faster than I got into it, which still surprises me and everyone around me. Anyways, this piece was more of a personal catharsis than an actual attempt to write well, but thank you for your advice. I can use it for any future stories.

TC

Oh. Wow.

I didn't think much of the title, but thought I'd give the story a go anyway. And since it was told in such an innovative and intriguing style, I was hooked. It's intense, it's engaging, it's almost clinical in the way it proceeds, with the facts that constantly bother the girl appearing first, then a rhyme about what is to follow, then a few lines of sharp prose, almost like a newspaper or a medical journal/report about a difficult patient. It grabbed me and strung me along from start to finish, with its rather detached style that gave an interesting objective outlook on the whole situation.

You know the topic is not new. Many people have dealt with it before. But that's what I loved about this - you took a common topic, and explored it in a different way. And I think it's important to think about as well - you capture the mindsets of everyone perfectly (pardon the pun!). The girl is obsessed with weight and calories and diet etc, so that's all we really need to see of her. The others are worried constantly, but you give an almost humorously painful edge to this - without going overboard with expanding on what we already know they feel - with the poetry. And the doctor's report-style prose at the end adds to this in some bizarre way.

So, I'm going to disagree with Suzanne here (as much as I respect her opinion!). There is something very powerful already about the way you've written it - in three parts - and this experimentation is something I like to see in all writing. Of course, I'd love to see another dimension (other than anorexia) added to this - but I feel you've already slipped it in with the religion-theme. The thing is, for anorexics, they really don't see past the weight/image problem for some 'bigger emotional problem' to become apparent. And neither do their parents/friends etc see it - they only see the anorexia. So...I am not really sure how you can incorporate a bigger issue in this, other than at the very end like you already have (God etc). If neither the parents, the friends, the doctors see the bigger problem, where exactly are you justified in pointing it out to us?

And about the idea of 'wrenching our hearts out' and making us feel something more...firstly, just like to state that in general, I like a good healthy balance of head and heart; some intellectual stimulation and some emotional stimulation to aid it. But in this case, the feeling is horrifically raw, horrifically unbalanced, terribly lacking in self-confidence of personal identity. There is no way that an 'average reader' is going to identify with that. However, everyone, including anorexics, will see past the simple diary notes on 'weight, calory...' and realise there is a bigger emotional issue going on.

Or is there?

Not that I have amazing experience with the subject, I will hazard a guess: for the anorexic, the numbers and data values become a sort of safe haven, a way of quantifying perfection. It's cold and clinical, and that's where the 'satisfaction' (mentally) comes from. So...there's little emotion there. This is something you captured well. Instead of agonising over their weight and image (a 'heart' thing), they substitute the feeling of powerlessness with the intellectual list of numbers, and this makes them feel in control, in some way. So - well covered.

For the fam and friends of the anorexic, they see something they are not used to, get worried and tear their hair out, and so they are the ones who make it a bigger problem by crying about it, nagging, whining - at least, this is how it must appear to the anorexic, as being on the verge of ridiculous. But of course, they're completely justified in their concern. This feeling of slight ridicule was something also captured well in the poems, as well as the element of 'overreaction' on the part of the others in the prose part of the story.

I'd agree that the speedy recovery was a little...speedy...but I guess if you say it felt like that, then that's what it felt like.

So...I haven't bothered with grammar or spelling or punctuation or anything - you're more than capable of fixing it yourself. And...while I don't think it would be tactful of me at all to say that I enjoyed the story, I certainly thought it had a very tight flow going on with it. I would have liked to have seen the 'perfection-imperfection' idea surface a little more throughout the piece, than just at the very end, since it should have been there all along. I mean, sure, I can see it in the numbers etc - I'm just not sure anyone else would.

Overall, a good piece. Thank you for the read. And PM me if you have questions, or would like me to take another look at it, or if I might have been completely off in my hypotheses about things. PM me if you'd like to discuss the topic itself further, and I would be happy to talk.