Moral Autobiography

My Moral Autobiography

Junior year of high school I was diagnosed as having an eating disorder; I was anorexic which can be defined as "a serious, potentially life-threatening eating disorder characterized by self-starvation and excessive weight-loss" (http://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org). This definition does not mention that the effects of this can range anywhere from death to the inability to have children. This medical definition is broad and does not really encompass any of the mental side of the disease. In my struggle with anorexia I was faced with both the moral issues that anorexia inevitably brings about such as lying, self destruction, and societal pressure and the distorted body image that the disease causes. Anorexia itself is not the moral situation I plan to discuss; I will explain how throughout my illness how I was challenged morally and after I came to terms with my illness how I had to examine my beliefs and morals. I can not be one hundred percent sure that I will be able to because of the damage I did to my body. What I will discuss in this moral autobiography is the journey through my illness and I will connect this to my own moral character and how it changed and progressed.

Anorexia, although a disease is somewhat of a choice, or at least in my case it was. My Junior year of high school I was starting to develop as a woman. My whole life I had been extremely thin due to my fast metabolism and my tall lanky frame. I was used to this role, and enjoyed it. I used to enjoy when people would tell me I was skinny, and it came to the point where I felt this characteristic almost defined me as a person. When I was fifteen I finally went through menstruation; it was the summer going into my sophomore year of high school when it happened. This is late for most girls and especially for my family because both my sisters had gotten it by the age of ten. This late start had caused me to grow to about five foot seven or so and gain minimal weight to go along with the height. As sophomore progressed into junior year this weight started to catch up with me. I was still growing into my current five foot nine height, but the height growth had leveled off and the weight had started to catch up. Right before the illness began I had gotten up to about 135 pounds and was about five foot eight. I can remember a few days before Christmas my junior year I tried on a new skirt that I had gotten a few months earlier to wear to church to our Christmas Eve mass. As I was pulling it up I realized that it was too snug to get up all the way and I looked at myself in the mirror and for the first time ever felt fat. Now granted in reality I still looked thin because I was tall and could carry the weight well because of my slender frame, but something inside me wouldn't accept that and all I acknowledged was being too big to fit into the skirt. Over Christmas it just so happened that my entire family got food poising the night after Christmas at my grandparents house. This involved throwing up almost the entire night and not feeling well the next couple days. As I recovered from this ailment my appetite did not. This is where morality starts to play a role in this autobiography of this illness I had.

The first moral aspect I will be discussing is the lying that goes on in this illness, not only to yourself but those that care about you the most. This lying is so desperate and complicated that it can eat away at the moral standards you once had and make it seem okay to lie to those who love you. The most surprising thing with this is how easy it becomes to lie to those around you and to yourself. It can be comparable to how it is said that once you kill someone it is easier to do it the second time and keeps becoming easier every time after that; obviously on a much smaller scale. These lies were personal acts I chose to do as an individual "the ordinary and extraordinary things we do which have an impact not just on ourselves, but also on those around us"(McCormick 45). In Character, Choices & Community Connors and McCormick discuss how personal acts can ripple out and affect others whether we intended for them to or not. This also relates to the three font principle and my intentions for lying to those who I love and even to me. The intention for lying was that I did not want anyone to know I had a problem and I did not want those who cared about me most to confront me or help me. The means would be that I would lie. I would lie to everyone saying that I was just not hungry or tell my parents I had eaten earlier and tell my friends I would eat later. The ends of my act would be that people would think I had eaten and they would not know I had a problem. I would also do this through the clothing I would wear. My choice of clothing may not seem like it would not be moral or immoral, but the fact is I would wear sweatpants and sweatshirts pretty much everyday to hide my shrinking size, and in doing this I was making a choice to not let my friends or family know I was sick. Towards the "breaking point" of my illness the lying got more and more out of control; I found myself lying even when I did not have to. I would tell people how much I had eaten for dinner the night before when they would not even ask to try to prove to them that I was indeed fine. The lying began to rule my life and my sense of being a moral and truthful person had started to become nonexistent. This is also when I started to go out and party as well. Although this may be common for most juniors and seniors in high school it had never really been my ideal way to spend time. I would go to a few parties and have fun but I would normally only have a beer in my hand for show and not normally drink it. As the lying continued I started to experiment more with drinking (hard alcohol seeing as beer had so many calories) and would enjoy the way it could make me forget the general unhappiness I felt about my living situation at the time. Around this time I began to take long naps after my lacrosse practice, and never could really shake the feeling of being tired. It was hard work lying all the time, and I was losing more weight then I could afford to which also left me weak and tired.

My junior prom was when my entire school was alerted to my problem and is the next moral situation I encountered in my illness. At the time of junior prom I had dropped down to about 110 to 115; it would change from day to day (and I would go on the scale and check about three times a day). For my now five foot nine frame this was about 30 pounds or so underweight. In my prom dressed my problem was exposed for all to see. About two weeks after prom one of my best friends called to confront me about the problem, and she was told to do this by a fellow classmate who had also had an eating