I became a woman, then nothing else ever again.

Learning how to no longer think my obsession with shrinking is the most interesting thing about me.

For the first time in my life, I think I am sick of talking about myself.

When I first started posting essays last September I could only ever write about how badly I wanted to be beautiful. All the hopelessly pathetic things I was doing for it, how devastated falling short made me. I only wanted to talk about getting picked. About every man I’ve ever met. How all of them ruined me.

I could only write about my sense of inferiority because it was all I knew. The definition of femininity is completely oriented around smallness. We are “just girls.” We’re meant to shrink, eat “girl dinners” of celery and rice cakes. We’re meant to live with heads empty, turn our brains off to be passenger princesses.

A small brain and body is the standard of perfection that I never questioned. When I was 14 watching Little Women for the first time and heard Jo say, “I am not a poet, I am just a woman,” I didn’t understand what she was going on about. I didn’t see the inescapable curse placed upon women the second they left their mothers with female anatomy. I thought the pain was something I invented myself.

I grew up in American suburbia. I went to high school in John Ghalt linens with a Frappuccino. I swore every curly haired white boy I ever met was the love of my life. I wanted a thigh gap more than I wanted to be alive. I thought this all made me profoundly interesting.

When I realized I was not the only teenager with an eating disorder who was positive that she’d die alone, I was devastated. How could my desire for smallness not be mine? How could my suffering not make me unique?

At some point it became clear to me that I became a woman, then nothing else ever again. Smallness was a goal I was sold that was going to take immense effort to find undesirable. Integral to me letting go of it was no longer seeing my obsession with shrinking as unique and fascinating.

I was being limited. When I wanted to be small and perfect and picked I left no other space to be anything else. When I kept smallness on the altar I assured myself that no other goal would match it. I thought it didn’t matter if I became a writer or a runner or if I traveled the world. If I was single and ugly, who would care?

There was so much time between thinking this way and realizing I was hurting myself. Understanding that smallness would truly do nothing for me took a lot of convincing. I was in a cult I felt I’d sunk too deep into. But at some point, after I told the story of me being sad and lonely and disordered enough times, I realized it was boring. I realized I was made to believe my suffering was sexy so that I’d stay in it. I realized it was time to move on.