New art based on my murder of crows…

January has proven to show that 2013 is going to be an epic journey for myself. Perhaps it’s the fact that I am one of the lucky 583,000 Student Loan of Canada users whose critical personal information that anyone could use to become me, was stolen from Government offices in Quebec. ( Although, the “upside” of this is the curiosity to ever run in to “myself” down the line…I hope she will like me. ) Or maybe it’s the underlying journey too achieve this summer when I plan to BIKE ACROSS CANADA ( Halifax to Vancouver Island ) in honor of my father, arriving in my hometown on what would have been his 59th birthday, to celebrate his life with family and friends. See, he died 10 years ago this September, and for many reasons it seems crucial, as well as fitting, to be making this ride. Another post for another day. So, in short, I feel as though 2013 has opened by presenting two sides of a very stoic coin; identity theft, or reconnection with my primal self and dominating a 3,500 km bike ride to celebration.

I am really hoping that if I stay positive through January into February, then my birthday in March will have me showered with gummy bears while I ride in on my pony Clip-Clop, who has been late to my party since I reached out to him back in 1989.

Here’s what I want to chat a bit about today: Why are we so quick to silence the youth of today from speaking about genuine concerns they face? Last Monday I was invited to sit in on a session with The Comox Valley Girls Group while they discussed their experiences with eating disorders, and our culture which preys on the notion that to be “beautiful” you need to be thin. Thanks to Skype I was able to hear their accounts. Now, I always feel so out of place in talks like this because I don’t quite know how to share my own experiences with my eating disorder, self-harm, anxiety, and depression without making it into one long gargle of useless information, this despite having been a very vocal advocate on the topic for years ( I could be wrong. I may be making all the sense in the world ).

As I listened to the girls share their experiences with researching pro-ana and pro-mia blogs online, their dieting skills, how they felt like the biggest failure in the world for not being able to purge ( Honestly, no child or teenager, or ANYONE should be made to feel like a failure because they can’t induce vomiting to curb weight gain. The fact this group of girls were nearly brought to tears from frustration by this is EXTREMELY concerning ), to trying out varying starvation tactics, to overdosing on cleanse drinks, and on and on was nauseatingly tragic. While every account was different with troubling honesty, the one point that they all shared that really affected me was how they had told teachers, counsellors, therapists, as well as their parents about all this, and no one accepted it more than a teenage phase or angst. No one responded positively. Parent’s reacted in anger at the thought their daughters were doing this to their body, showered negativity, and moved on, leaving their kids even more lost in disarray to figure out what eating disorders were, what was happening to them, and why they couldn’t stop. When you’re lost at sea the last thing you want to see is a rescue team circling in a helicopter above you yelling “You’re an idiot for being stranded in the first place,” and flying away. But, that’s the problem here isn’t it; no one understands what an eating disorder really is because we don’t talk about the issue. We don’t educate the public about it. We continuously hear the words “Anorexia”, “Bulimia”, which have now become as common place as “War”, “Murder”, “Rape”, and have become a desensitized society on all fronts of horror. I promise you all that to see the ritual of an eating disorder, to actively SEE and EXPERIENCE what an eating disorder truly is, the last thing you would do is react in genuine anger. Heated emotion through frustration because you have no idea why a person would do that to themselves, absolutely. But you would no longer be so active to sweep the problem under the proverbial rug and keep on with your daily life.

You’re officially on the ED conference circuit when you get a badge…

So I told these girls what reality was here; their parents were not told about this, did not experience this so ferociously like youthful generations today. Even myself attending high-school in the late 90’s to 2002 was never told or educated on what an eating disorder was, nevertheless told anything about mental illness. I was left to discover it all out on my own the hard way. What terrifies me the most about hearing these girls reveal their concerns so openly was knowing that they are communicating a HUGE problem and a willingness to educate, to help support and advocate change, and we the adults are still encouraging them to remain lost and sick because we have no willingness to understand or consider their words as legitimate. They are kids after-all. What do they know, right? Truth is they know more than me, they know more than you, they know more than the medical teams who spent countless years researching the eating disordered mind.

I was honored to have been invited to hear their valuable perspectives on an illness that I am still trying to comprehend. I was educated. I was empowered. I was moved that here sat so many young women who had already faced hell and are learning to stand tall and walk away from the mental and physical self-abuse they have been adopting as a mechanism’s to survive this toxic world we live in towards body image. It would be a shame to keep screaming at these girls to “Know better” and move on, because we as the lost generations on what mental illness is, on what eating disorders are, don’t know how to handle their honesty’s. Silence our youth and we damn our future. Here was a group of highly intelligent minds already pinpointing dangerous sites, unhealthy diets, and scolding a culture which encourages self-abuse, who had experienced the backlash of bringing forth their concerns to the elders whom are meant to protect the young. Truth is we are failing our future generations by not taking a stand on the harsh penalties we have acted onto ourselves because we struggled in a society that continued to remind us all that simply being us was never worthy. We needed to be better. Stronger. Faster. Slimmer. Prettier. Successful.

Bird woman…

I know that these young women will be the voice of change, so long as we stop living in a world where our mentalities is to be superior to those “Beneath” us; adults will always know more than the youth of tomorrow. Bullshit. In one hour of listening to teenagers I learned that me, a seasoned veteran of bulimia, anorexia, self-harm, anxiety, depression, has so much to learn. As adults, as parents, we need to suck up our pride and realize we don’t know more than our kids sometimes. We need to be willing to learn, to listen, and not quick to judge when they come to us with openness about their concerns, problems, and fears. We need to encourage them to have confidence in their bodies, their minds, than to silence them from being honest about their lust to binge, purge, starve, or mutilate their bodies. It’s hard to hear, but even worse to encourage through our fear of not understanding, or our lack of willingness to learn.

HUGE thank you to the girls of The Comox Valley Girls Group for being so courageous in sharing their own experiences with eating disorders, and helping to educate the masses of us adults on what really is happening to our young generations. Please never feel as though your words are falling on silent ears.