'To The Bone' Is the Most Real Representation of Anorexia That I, a Survivor, Have Seen

Trigger warning: The following contains language describing eating-disorder behaviors.

There are several images that have stayed with me after watching To the Bone—the Netflix film starring Lily Collins that explores the complicated process of recovering from an eating disorder. And I could talk about each of those visuals at length: the heart-wrenching scene where the protagonist Ellen asks her mother to feed her like a baby, or the thousands of emotions that flicker across Ellen’s face every time she steps on the scale to be weighed. But the image that has truly stuck with me, the one I can’t shake from my mind’s eye, is watching Ellen absentmindedly circle her upper arm with her middle finger and thumb throughout the film, constantly checking to make sure her limb could fit within those tiny constraints. It’s a little detail, one that other people might forget the second the credits roll, but to me, it was like looking in a mirror.

I was diagnosed with anorexia right after I graduated from college, but objectively speaking, my eating disorder began much earlier than that. For the longest time, I didn’t even realize I was sick—to me, my eating disorder was just something I did, part of my everyday behavior and habits. In high school, I kept my anxiety at bay by skipping lunch; I’d spend the 30-minute period in a practice room in the music wing instead, writing notes to my friends to be folded up like origami and passed in the hall later that day.

Once away at college, things took a turn for the worse, as my outer appearance began to reflect the ED voice that had been running rampant in my brain for the better part of a decade. Instead of skipping meals, I started meticulously restricting: 200 calories one day, then 400, then 600, then 800, then back down the ladder again. The patterns within the numbers soothed me; the control was the highest high one could imagine—better than getting drunk on the weekends at a stupid college party. Somewhere along the line, the pattern disappeared and the numbers started to matter less; the goal simply became to consume as little as possible.

During the height of my eating disorder, I desperately wanted to find other people who felt the way I did. I joined LiveJournal communities, scrolled through Tumblr, and read Wasted by Marya Hornbacher more times than I can count. But one thing I never found was a depiction of myself onscreen—the best thing I could find was Brittany Murphy’s character in Girl, Interrupted, but it wasn’t even close to the representation I was desperately craving.

With that in mind, watching To the Bone was a powerful and emotional experience for a lot of reasons. It’s been several years since my own days of treatment, and I am proud to say I haven’t relapsed in just as long. In a way, the act of viewing the film was like looking backward at my own experiences—but through a lens of reflection, as I am no longer in that dark place.