𝑰 𝒘𝒊𝒔𝒉 𝒊𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒔 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒍|2YEON|ENG

Disorders

some day in 2019

Jeongyeon was happy, she had just returned from an amazing trip with her family and her life finally seemed to smile on her. 2018 had been a bit of a sad year because she had lost two friends who were very important to her. She had met them both online but it had ended badly. One of them had been discovered by her mother and had been forbidden to write to a stranger; the other, however, had gone from calling her her online best friend to completely ignoring her, disappearing without ever giving any explanations. And then she had argued with her-secular best friend besides Nayeon. The girl had perhaps allowed herself to be manipulated too much by other friends and Mrs Yoo had never particularly liked her. Same exact story: arguments between mothers in which innocent little girls were involved.

Jeongyeon went to sleep after returning from vacation, letting herself be embraced by her soft blankets. But that night the girl could not sleep.

-Did you cheat on me?- asked Mrs. Yoo.

No response, just sobs, and Jeongyeon started crying from the other room, listening to everything that was happening in the other room, which was just chaotic silence. The next day she asked her mother if her father had cheated on her and her mother denied it. Jeongyeon, however, had forgotten that it was her own father who had confessed to her that he had fallen in love with someone else. She, however, hadn't paid much attention to it.

Months passed and Jeongyeon's doubts were now only certainties. There wasn't a pleasant atmosphere in her house at all. Her parents did nothing but fight because of her betrayal and they even did it at night, completely drunk, screaming, when their daughters had to rest to go to school the next day. And Jeongyeon felt obliged to protect her younger sister, Ryujin, so she got up and confronted them, ending up arguing above all with that now superfluous presence, that man who lived in her house and who she could no longer define as father because, let's face the truth, he had never acted like one. She didn't even call him "dad" anymore and he hadn't even noticed. Ever since she was ten years old, Jeongyeon had wanted her parents to divorce. The family dynamics had never been clear: the two had been arguing since Jeongyeon was little, that man was a violent being and beat her mother, locked her in her room... But Jeongyeon didn't remember it, Jeongyeon had suffered so much that she erased all her childhood memories of her family. However, she will remember the memories from 2018 onwards, but mixed, unable to place them in time.

The climax came one night, when Jeongyeon got up and found that man holding a knife. She didn't know if he would use it against her mother or not, but that memory remained imprinted in her mind. She can't say whether it was that night or one in that period, but she also remembers that that insensitive man, during a request for silence at three in the morning by the girl, had pushed her against the door with such violence that she she asked if she was the problem.

some day in 2020

The episodes of nocturnal arguments were repeated throughout the nights of 2019 and 2020 but the worst was yet to come. That year the pandemic broke out and Jeongyeon found herself living twenty-four hours a day with those two, in that situation. And one day she reached the extreme: standing in front of a window on the fifth floor, she wondered what the reasons were for staying alive, but she couldn't find any. She suddenly doubled over and began to cry: she had found a reason why not to die physically- she had already died morally. She couldn't leave little Ryujin alone in that situation, she couldn't. But her life had now begun to fall apart.

-Jeongyeon, am I wrong or have you gained weight?- the despicable one said at the table once.

Or maybe he used worse words that I won't bother reporting.

It's incredible how one comment is enough to make an entire world fall apart. But Jeongyeon was a little girl, she was fifteen, and in a situation like hers, even the slightest comment would make her feel insecure, as if she already wasn't. And from then on she began to look at herself carefully: her legs were enormous, she was no longer as thin as she used to be. And, no, it wasn't true, but she was convinced that she was huge, that that was a problem. She had always been very skinny, only at the age of ten she was a little chubby, but she had never noticed it, she was just a child. The dance teachers had pointed it out to her, but she didn't care in the slightest. Dance... Another chapter in her life. Jeongyeon had been practicing hip hop with her friend Momo for a while. In 2018, however, she abandoned it due to her social anxiety. Hip hop was everything to her, but she let her insecurities get the better of her.

From the day of that comment, Jeongyeon began to go through various phases of her life. She had discovered a blog about eating disorders and she fell for it. The Ten Commandments had to be followed to the letter or she would have been fat, she wouldn't have been like the others who followed that blog. And when she saw videos of people coming out of that tornado of eating disorders, she thought that she had to be stronger and not come out of it. And so she began to avoid eating in the evening. Sometimes she almost felt like crying from hunger, but she convinced herself to sleep, that she would definitely eat the next day and that twenty-four hours without eating wasn't bad.

Her psychologist once told her: "You would like to be invisible to others but maybe it would be better if you were invisible to yourself."