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I Forgive You For Being a Woman Too.

or how my family supported my eating disorder

Anastasia Lebedenko
Human Parts

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***This text might be triggering to someone with an eating disorder***

Photo by Tamara Shchypchynska on Unsplash

Select the most vulnerable group of humans on Earth by gender and age. The answer is easy: teenage girls. These gentle, unprotected creatures, not yet ready to discover the amount of standards and expectations this world will dump on them the next minute they turn “…teen.”

I was one of them. And oh, the horror — I was unbelievably average in every way. Average height (I stood closer to the end when we lined up for PT lessons at school), average face (brown eyes, brown hair, although excessively curly for the standard), and most horribly, as it turned out — average weight.

A society cannot forgive women their weight. Even at that age. Look, she’s a little woman already!

So I became one at the gentle age of 13, when I first put myself on a diet.

Oh, to be a teenage girl on the Internet

Belonging to the group of kids born around the new millennium, I invited Internet into my life way too early. We were one of the last generations who knew life without it. Only later to be absorbed by its immediacy and vastness, stumbling in its darkness, without any adults…

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Anastasia Lebedenko
Human Parts

A human in war. Empathy-driven. Rediscovering what it means to be Ukrainian. Stories, reflections, and experiences of one human being. Find contacts in "About."