Mirror, Mirror on the wall,who's the skinniest of them all?""Not you, Amir, not you.

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.

Days and weeks passed by with changes in seasons and the phases of the moon. But the one thing that remained unmoved and constant was something I told myself every single day, "Amira Kashyap, you are fat!

As it turned out, an apple a day did not keep the doctor away, especially if that happened to be the only thing I ate for an entire day.

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.

My life was now determined by the number on the scale or the digits behind food containers. But I was completely okay with it as long as my 24” waist size never felt even a tad tighter. But if it ever did, hell would freeze over, resulting in 21-day fasts until I felt thin enough.

Soon, everyone around me had come to terms with my peculiar eating habits and started accepting me for who I was. It felt peculiar at first, but when someone said things like, “I wish I could resist eating all that,” in whatever parallel universe I existed, I felt powerful.

My days began and ended with my fear of food. Even though all that was left of me was skin and bones, the only thing I could think was, Still not thin enough!