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Quote by Insha Juneja

“It wasn’t like I had started magically eating two entire meals in a day. I would still survive the day with black coffee and apples, but it just seemed like I’d taken one step heavenwards. The mirror felt a little less frightening with each passing day. It was refreshing to talk to someone who was fully convinced that my eating disorder was as real as I thought.”

Quote by Insha Juneja

Work

Imperfect Mortals : A Collection of Short Stories

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Insha Juneja

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“Everything was going perfectly well until Dr. Roy paused for a long minute to stare at me with utter shock and revelation. I knew I had messed up. I should have just worn my black, full-sleeved dress instead. But again, I thought that the scars had lightened to an unnoticeable extent. But I guess I was wrong. That was when I realized that scars never went away entirely. “Did you do that to yourself?” he asked.”

“I wanted to be normal again. I wanted to be genuinely happy again and not just pretend. I didn’t want distorted mirror images to destroy and define my life any longer. I wished to breathe in the customary air, instead of the suffocating one people like me had accustomed themselves to breathe. I just wanted to break through these metal rods that I’d been caged behind for the last two years of my life. I wanted to feel plain, simple, genuine contentment again. I wanted to; I needed to.”

“I looked at my reflection in the glass door at the entrance of the house. For the millionth time, I saw something entirely different from what I desperately wished to see. But to be fair, what I wished to see was a replica of the skeletons I had come to worship. I often wondered as to why my eyes couldn't see what the world around me could. Why did my eyes see differently than others?”

“Every day, I saw this new distorted reflection of myself, and everyday, I despised it a little more than the day before. It was uncanny and delusional, my reflection, and I felt this urge to change everything about myself. 'What is happening to me', was a question that remained unanswered for a great amount of time because I was as unaware about it as every other person around me.”

“Whenever I looked at myself in the mirror, I always saw a morbidly obese reflection, while in truth I was achingly underweight. My obsession of looking good corresponded to wanting to look the way skinny models looked in television ads and fashion magazines, the personification of being attractive as described by the world around me.”

“So Amira Kashyap, what’s your story?” he asked as he set the big display stopwatch to a designated period of 59 minutes and 59 seconds. The perfectly tranquil way in which he asked me the question made me slightly nervous, even though I had spent the last few years of my life having imaginary conversations with an imaginary therapist. There were a lot of things I wished to tell him. From wanting to tell him about my first triggers to the very thought of me standing in front of a mirror haunting the living daylights out of me.These were just a couple out of the many thoughts in the archives of my brain. However, my mind went completely blank. I stammered and hesitated and managed to utter a total of seven words.“I don’t know where to start.” “Just say the first thing that crosses your mind,” he said. “I’m scared of food,” I blurted.”

“But although my body constantly reminded me that it was starving, the voices inside my mind never gave me permission to satisfy my hunger. At times, I would get affected when people passed statements like, “Why can’t you just eat?” However, I convinced myself that the only person who could understand anorexia was someone who had been through the eating disorder. I chose to remain quiet.”