Eid Mubarak!!!
Triggering contents ahead 😪
Try to read the stuff that comes after the chapter ❤️❤️❤️
Song for this chapter: In Silence by Janett Suh. Song in the media.
KUNMI
I'm creeped out.
I kept getting even more crept even by each passing second.
This has to be a nightmare.
This has to be a nightmare.
A very terrible horror film.
Eating disorder and Aminah Abraham...
They should be like two parallel lines that should never meet and wait...
Multiple organs damage...
It affected her brain...
Heart failure...
How on earth can that be possible... For that kind of terrible thing to happen to her?
Just what kind of physical pain had she always been in for things to deteriorate this badly? For her organs... Multiple organs to damage?
She wasn't only in emotional pains, she was also in severe pains, and yet, she pretended to be fine.
She smiled that much, played that much, had that much vibrant energy.
How was she even able to do that?
How?
How was she even able to pretend that much?
How could she have pretended that much?
How? How? How?
That should have been the peak. There couldn't... There shouldn't possibly be more terrible things about her.
But I was just about to realize that there were even more terrible things.
We were currently sitting in front of a psychologist.
By we, I meant her and her two brothers.
It was already late in the evening, Gab had already gone back home and Mayowa had to go back to check up on Junior who we left with our neighbors even though he had wanted to follow us to the hospital.
Aminah's mom had to be heavily sedated so she'd calm down.
Her brothers and dad had arrived almost at the same time. Her dad came back from a business trip and her two brothers from their schools because they both school abroad.
And the both of them, her brothers, Zakir and Hassan just looked like life has been sucked out of them.
They just kept staring at her in that hospital gown, in that hospital bed with that many machines going into her body like they were seeing someone else, something else.
And not their baby sister.
Not Aminah, the ever-sweet and caring girl.
She couldn't possibly be the one lying on that hospital bed, barely alive.
In the end, her attending doctor told us to go and meet a psychologist hence the reason why we were sitting in front of this very dark young man right now.
I was still shaking, couldn't stop vibrating and my heart wouldn't stop shaking. I shouldn't even be here. I couldn't bear to be here, to discover more things about Aminah from this laid back psychologist but I had to be here because they had assumed I was her best friend and I'd be able to tell the psychologist things about her, irrational things that I must have noticed about her so that he'd properly diagnose her which that particular eating disorder she must have had.
So that they'd commence immediate therapy when she wakes up.
That was why I was here with her brothers.
One of them was sitting beside me on the two chairs in from of the doctor while the other one was leaning on the wall behind us.
The one beside me, Zakir, his hands wouldn't stop shaking on his laps, his hands wouldn't stop vibrating.
"So, you guys must have noticed something off about her, anything, it could be the smallest thing but before her disorder got to this point, there must have been recent changes in her mood or anything..."
That was this psychologist, Dr. Lolu from the tag on his chest and I started to shake my head.
I did not even notice anything.
She pretended... She had acted so perfectly that I noticed nothing.
"She became forgetful. She could be in the middle of something and she wouldn't remember what she was doing. She..." Zakir trailed off, his voice cutting from looming tears, "She almost burnt the house down recently because she forgot she was cooking."
"How's her academic performance?"
Oh, God! How does this? How would her academic performance affect her eating disorder? How?
"She has always been a straight-A student."
"Really?" Dr. Lolu sounded impressed and he glanced at his laptop screen for the briefest second before turning to us again.
"But she flopped her jamb."
And my heart sank. It was true. The rumors of her failing jamb were true but how? How did that even happen and why were we even talking about that right now?
"But that was because she had serious cramps that day. She said she had to leave the exam hall less than an hour into her exams because the pain was unbearable." Zakir was quick to explain and Dr. Folu nodded as if he was making sense.
"From the test result they've carried out on her, your sister hasn't seen her period since March so she lied about that so you wouldn't suspect a thing."
My heart dropped.
Again and Again.
March. April. May. June.
We were in June. She hasn't seen her period since March and she lied about having cramps on that day.
She already knew that she was going to flop her exams... She knew.
How...
Besides me, Zakir clenched his two hands together so tightly that I knew they must be paining him.
"You know, with her eating disorder, she starved herself that right now, she doesn't exactly have any nutrient left..."
My body started rocking back and forth on the chair.
Back and forth.
She starved herself completely.
Why? How? I hated food... I was starting to hate food and fear food because I was afraid... I wanted to lose weight.
I thought that'd be the only way to lose weight but Aminah?
She was perfect. She looked perfect. She wasn't fat. She wasn't even chubby... Maybe just a tiny bit chubby so why would she... Why would she have an Eating Disorder when she looked that perfect?
"To break it down, she starved herself to the extreme. She was... She had always been in extreme hunger."
Aah God!
Beside me, Zakir choked back on a sob.
"When the body has been starved of the essential nutrient, it invariably starts to affect all the parts of the body, the organs, even the organs of speech, some people who were in ED develop articulation problems too but that's not my specialty. Her brain has been severally affected because she was starving herself."
Can you all just stop and do whatever it's going to take to wake her up? Just bring her back.
Just bring Aminah back.
"Look at this," He tilted his laptop screen towards us, and on the screen were two different images. Images of brains.
"This," He pointed to the one that looked normal "Is the normal human brain and this," He pointed to the other image, the one that looked like it has two huge holes, "Is what Aminah's brain looks like right now. That's a scan of her brain."
"Subhanallah!!!" Zakir muttered beside me, eyes completely fixed on the screen. As for me, I couldn't even do anything, my body just kept rocking back and forth on the chair.
They can't be talking about Aminah.
They honestly can't be talking about her.
"Because of the damage to her brain, it must have affected other things, but it most certainly was affecting her memory, hence the forgetfulness."
Chills broke out on my body. Terrible chills.
It was affecting her memory, hence the forgetfulness.
Two different occasions, on two different occasions, she forgot she did some things, that day during The Olympia when she forgot she told me that she was going to tell me everything.
The other time when she forgot she came to beg me after the whole thing with her dairy happened.
But I did nothing... I just brushed them off.
"It's not like memory loss, it's forgetfulness and being hard, very hard to remember things so she probably couldn't remember the answers to her jamb questions even though she knew the answer to them."
Okay.
But how... How could she always have been so good at academics only for it to now deteriorate this badly?
But then, how could she have looked so healthy only for her to end up like that in the ICU?
"Did her attending doctor tell you they found drugs in her system?"
God!
A low scream tore out of my mouth and I found myself leaning my head on the desk. I couldn't... couldn't sit still, not after hearing that.
Drugs? Drugs? Drugs?
"Kunmi, I think you should just go and wait outside."
Hassan's voice, his gruff voice cut through my reverie and it was only then that I realized that I had been crying again.
I wiped away the tears before sitting upright. I wasn't going to leave. I was going to listen to the end.
To know every possible way we've failed Aminah.
Every possible way that I've failed her.
"What kind of drugs?" That was Hassan again, his voice sounding even gruffer.
"Amphetamine medications. It is majorly used to treat obesity. It's a weight loss drug..."
Okay.
I found myself nodding as if what he was saying was making complete sense even though it is wasn't. She was using a drug to lose weight. A drug. How did she even get it?
How?
"Amphetamine stimulants also helps in studying so even though her brain was constantly getting damaged from extreme starvation, the drug served as a stimulant for her to pass her exams."
Zero. Nothing. Nill.
I knew absolutely nothing about her. Nothing about her.
"It also..."
"Can you just please stop? Just stop!!" That was Hassan screaming maniacally at the doctor who did not even flinch at his words. He just paused, he just stopped talking, sat back on his chair while staring calmly at him.
"Is telling us all these going to help? Is it going to wake her up? Is it going to take away all the pain she had been through all this while? Telling us all these are so useless and..."
"You can leave if you're not interested..." Dr. Lolu interrupted calmly and Hassan did not even want for him to finish before he stormed out of the office, banging the door after him.
"I'm sorry about him. Just tell me everything, anything there's to know about the disorder."
The doctor sighed tiredly and he rubbed his forehead before continuing.
"The drug also doubled as an energy booster and when abused, gives a euphoric feeling. People that have chronic eating disorders are always tired and worn out and exhausted because they're not consuming any nutrients. Your sister was always tired."
That's not possible. That's not possible. It can never be possible.
Aminah was always energized, all vibrant, she could run and run for miles without getting tired so what are these doctors saying again.
"She must have pretended to have the energy she did not even have. The thing when you're using a particular drug for a long period to treat something, it becomes less effective then you have to increase your dosage, then it becomes less effective again till it stops working altogether. The drug stopped walking for her after causing damages to her organs and nerves, complicating what her eating disorder was already causing."
"But how?" Someone asked in a very tired and broken and sad voice and it was only when the doctor turned to me that I realized that I was the one. "Why? How did she even get a drug like that? If the drug is this deadly, how was she able to get it without a prescription?"
The doctor shrugged and stretched his hands akimbo, "The only thing that I can assume here is that someone was getting it for her and this person must be a medical practitioner because you can't access the drug if you're not one. Whoever the person is must be giving it to her illegally and at the expense of his/her license. He/she must have been getting something else from her, something big for the person to risk their license for."
A medical practitioner was getting her the drug. Illegally. And the person must have been getting something in return. Something big for the person to risk their license for.
What?? What could it possibly be?
The only thought that came to my mind was enough to fill me with even deadlier terror.
What did... How has Aminah been living all this while? How was it possible that we had no idea?
How possible was it that we only saw and believed just one thing about her?
How?
"Have you seen the sole of her feet?"
What's it again?
There's more?
I heaved a sigh before running my hand through my face and hair.
"We've seen it." That was Zakir, his voice barely above a whisper.
"What extracurricular activity is she into?"
"She's the best female sprinter in our school, second-best female swimmer and she's like..." I felt the tears brim in my eyes and the knots tighten in my stomach as I said those words because the reality of those words was dawning on me, "She's the unofficial captain of the choreography team."
"Has she ever been irrational when it comes to any of these things?"
"She strictly follows a routine to run for more than an hour every morning and night and she... She..." Zakir's voice trailed as if he too, like me was starting to realize something, "And she... She also likes to skip..." His voice dropped to the lowest minimum and he started to sink lower and lower on the chair till he was practically falling off the chair. "For fun."
"And you people did not think for once that someone as young as 15, 16, and 17 running for an hour both morning and night every day without a break... You did not think it was abnormal?" That was Dr. Lolu and for the first time since we got here, a frown crossed his face but he was quick to replace it with that impassive expression.
"From the looks of things, those extracurricular activities weren't hobbies or favorite past times, they were compulsions."
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Can we just stop now?
Can we please just stop now?
"Compulsive exercises. It's a part of ED. She probably picked running, swimming, and dancing because they're like the quickest exercises to lose weight and she must have overworked herself to become the best. You'd be surprised to know that she never enjoyed any of those things. She never picked any of them because she liked them, she picked them because she had to."
When you've heard too many heartbreaking things in less than 24 hours, it'll get to a point that it won't affect you that much again because I just kept staring at the doctor.
Aminah never liked running.
She never liked swimming.
She never liked dancing.
They were all compulsive exercises to lose weight, to keep herself from gaining weight.
"So because it was a compulsion, that's the reason why she'd keep practicing even if she doesn't feel like it, even if she feels tired and exhausted and worn out and that's how she must have been feeling every time and still, she wouldn't stop running or exercising."
Beside me, Zakir just started crying, sobbing heavily and pathetically like a child.
"That's why despite being in chronic pain because she injured her feet probably while dancing or running or skipping, she still wouldn't stop exercising. It's not like she doesn't want to stop, it's that she can't stop. It's a compulsion. It's not up to her to stop or not. It's like an interface between Obsessive Compulsory Disorder and Eating Disorder."
That was why she was found unconscious in a park that late at night running when her feet were so damaged.
That was why she was dancing and practicing that much in the studio till she was so worn out even though her feet were in such terrible conditions.
Aminah Abraham? Just how much have you suffered both mentally, emotionally, and even physically?
Just how much?
And why did you never speak up? Why? Why did you not seek help?
"So with everything that we've just discovered now," Dr. Lolu started at the same moment he started to scribble something on the file he opened for Aminah, "I think I'd have to diagnose her with Obsessive Compulsory Disorder and Anorexia Nervosa."
I couldn't breathe...
"We can't be sure that it's Anorexia because her gum shows sign of extreme 'induced vomiting' which is a symptom of Bulimia Nervosa but there's also major symptoms of extreme starvation and malnourishment which is a major symptom of Anorexia Nervosa."
Beside me, Zakir still wouldn't stop crying, crying wouldn't cry hard.
But how... How would she even develop an eating disorder? Why would she be that afraid of gaining weight? Of becoming fat? How did she become that obsessed with her weight? How?
"Eating disorders are serious mental and physical illnesses that involve complex and damaging relationships with food, eating, exercise, and body image."
The definition of the disorder was still fresh in my head. After her attending doctor had told us her exact disorder, I had to go to Google to check up on the definition.
Body image. Aminah, of all people, had body image issues.
Of all people, Aminah Abraham just had to be the one with body image issues.
"We can't be sure of the reason why she developed the disorders because they're both very complex mental disorders that don't have a single cause but has she ever been made to diet? I mean, was she ever plus-sized? Has she ever been forced to diet? I'm trying to see what could have..."
I started to shake my head. She hasn't...
Zakir stopped crying abruptly and when I turned to look at him, he was looking straight ahead at the doctor with a look of total dread.
"She used to be fat as a child, very very fat so she was made an outcast in school and in our area too. It started to affect her self-esteem, she wouldn't come out of her room for days so mom..." He sat up. "Mom made her diet to lose weight."
I clamped my hand over my mouth. She was made to diet as a child?
She was...
"At what age?"
"She was 9." Zakir's voice was solemn and inside me, I could feel a volcano building up, it felt like something huge was going to crawl out of my body.
She was made to diet at the age of 9. She was that young. She was very young.
Mom never made my diet. She'd make me feel bad for eating too much and drinking carbonated drinks but she never... She had never stopped me from eating or drinking whatever I wanted.
"She must have had obsessive thoughts as a child so when she was made to diet, it worsened her OCD and she became obsessed with her weight. Making her diet than with an underlying disorder like OCD was communicating to her subconscious that she must be slim, she must keep getting slimmer and slimmer to be accepted by herself and society. She must have had an unhealthy obsession with slim people and an unhealthy and irrational dislike for fat people."
"Is there hope? Can she ever fully recover from these things?" That was Zakir and the doctor's eyes brightened up.
"Of course, she can. Once she wakes up, once she pulls through this, she'll recover. Self-love is the underlying and the most important thing in ED recovery. She never liked herself so now, to recover, the first thing is to learn how to love oneself but don't worry, she'll be fine. I'm sure of that."
She'll be fine.
She'll be fine.
She'll be fine.
I'll keep repeating it to myself.
And it'll come true.
It'll come true.
*************
Zakir just decided that he wanted their driver to drive him home so he'd be able to pick Aminah's clothes so she'd have something to wear whenever she woke up.
Which was irrational.
But no one and nothing was making sense.
Not with Aminah lying down on that bed like that with no form of improvement.
Not with everything the doctor just told us.
Nothing. Nothing. Absolutely nothing was rational again.
Which was why I volunteered to follow him too so I'd be able to pick up whatever she would need.
The drive to their house was painfully quiet.
Painfully quiet.
I was lost in my thought, lost in my head but Zakir, even though he was no longer crying still, couldn't even look more worse and horrible than this.
His eyes were baggy, swollen, red, puffy and his whole face look sunken half its size.
His reaction to everything was breaking my heart even more.
He must have always thought he had a sweet little sister, someone who had no worries whatsoever but instead, she had the biggest worries, the biggest problems.
But no one, absolutely no one knew a thing.
"You should go to her room to pick her things, I'll pick the things mom will need when she wakes up."
That was what Zakir said to me immediately we entered the house, his voice hoarse and barely audible and he just started to climb the stairs and I followed him, my foot trudging one after the other until I was standing in front of her room.
I stopped in front of her door, suddenly wary of entering. I thought... I've always thought that I knew the owner of the room.
But it turned out to be that no one knew her.
No one knew her at all.
Gathering myself, I turned the knob and I stepped inside.
The room... The room I've gotten used to, the room that I was used to coming and entering at least once a week. It suddenly felt alien even though it looked the same.
Her bed was well laid, everything looked well arranged but I still couldn't stop looking around, my eyes wouldn't stop roaming over the room.
I didn't know what I was looking for but I knew I was looking for something.
Something... Anything that could have prompted her to go out to exercise that late at night.
But nothing was looking out of place.
Everything was perfectly in its place.
Until I saw something sticking out from under her bed.
I was kneeling beside her bed and pulling whatever it was out before I could even think twice.
My heart sank a thousand times when I saw what it was.
A scale.
A weighing scale.
My heart sank even more.
I've never seen a scale before in her room. I've never seen it before. She must have been hiding it away from us, from everyone while she must have been obsessing over it.
Only God knows how many times she checks her weight in a day.
How many times does she rejoice over it when the numbers on the scale reduce?
And just how many times did it affect her mood, her self-esteem, her mental health whenever the numbers increase?
My eyes were suddenly drawn to another thing under the bed and I pulled it out.
It was a bum-short and a crop top. They looked crumbled together as if she had hastily put them under the bed.
I held the clothes in my hands and I looked in the direction of her study desk. I walked towards it to see that there was an opened accounting textbook on the desk and an opened notepad where she had been doing some calculations.
Her study lamp was also on.
She must have been studying... She must have been trying to study and she must have suddenly felt compelled to check her weight.
She checked it... Didn't like the numbers she saw on the scale and she must have felt compelled... Her disorder must have convinced her to go out in that cold, that late at night to run to shed off weight.
Hence the reason why she had to change hastily into her workout cloth and to leave the house that late, in that kind of cold, with her feet in that very bad condition.
The sadness that took over my entire body was enough to shake me to the core, was enough for tears to well up in my eyes.
Aminah. I'm so so sorry.
I'm so sorry.
I looked around the room, wondering just how many times she'd curled up in the corners of her room to cry, just how many times she had cried herself to sleep.
I could picture her, sweet little Aminah curled up in the corners of her room and crying.
Crying herself to sleep.
Reading and having a breakdown, a mental and emotional breakdown, that kind of breakdown that Gab had witnessed.
Only God knows how many times she'd have had that kind of breakdown and just go downstairs pretending to be a happy and carefree little girl.
Or show up at our house to beg me to go out with her while smiling and laughing out loud.
When she was dying inside.
When...
A son tore out of my mouth.
The door strung open immediately.
"Have you picked her..." Zakir started to say but on seeing the scale on the floor and her clothes beside, he must have put two and two together because his hand tightened around the doorknob.
"I'll pick her clothes... You can help me pick..." He did not even finish his sentence, he just pointed towards the bathroom and he just walked into the room and her mini closet.
I honestly felt like sitting still and crying my eyes out.
I don't know why we were here picking her things while she was just laying there on the hospital bed, still unconscious.
I don't know why I was entering her bathroom, why I was picking her sponge and toothbrush and toothpaste and scrub and soap and...
What am I doing?
My eyes drifted towards a small container on the small shelf where she was keeping all her bathroom needs, soap, scrub, turmeric, bleach, everything.
It was just a small container but it looked out of place because the container doesn't even look like any other thing on the self.
I picked the rectangular-shaped container from the self and I opened it.
They were razors, scissors and gauzes and bandages, and methylated spirit.
Things to treat inflict wounds on yourself and to treat those wounds.
I closed it, returned it to where I had picked it just as I turned back to leave the bathroom with my heart barely functioning in my chest.
I needed no soothsayer to tell me what that box was all about and just what she had been using it for.
Aminah...
***********
The feeling of dread and terror crept up to my spine immediately as the car drove into the hospital's premises.
It caused chills to break out on my body.
Hospitals had always smelled of disinfectant and antiseptics and drugs and pains and death and sadness and everything bad and painful.
But the feeling of that smell became more pronounced the minute we entered the hospital.
I could see and feel doom everywhere, on the Gate-man's face, on the little girl that bumped into my face, on the receptionists' faces, even the flowers adorning the pathway that led to the hospital's main entrance looked and smelt like doom.
I could feel it deep within me that something had gone wrong.
I keep getting a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach.
I quickened my footsteps till I turned the corner that led to Aminah's room and my steps faltered.
She was in the second room so I could see everything going on in that room clearly from where I stood.
The bag I was holding dropped from my hand and a small gasp left my mouth.
What... What's this?
The machines in her room wouldn't stop beeping, beeping loudly as if they were doing some sort of countdown.
And there were doctors in her room, trying to...
They were trying to revive her, I guess. There was a doctor whose two hands were pressed against her chest and he was pressing, he kept pressing up and down, he was doing CPR but the machines still wouldn't stop beeping.
She wasn't responding.
My heart dropped a thousand times.
Some other doctors and nurses wheeled a machine past me and Zakir, who had frozen into a state of total shock beside me.
They wheeled the machine into Aminah's room and the attending doctor was quick to start using the machine.
I recognized the machine for some sort of form of shock to revive a failing heart in medical dramas.
A defibrillator.
"Charge 150 joules."
That was the attending doctor before she pressed the two mouths of the machine, the one that looked like a pressing iron unto her chest.
She jolted straight out of the bed before the body fell back limply on the bed.
The machine still wouldn't stop beeping. The beeping intensified and I saw the resignation start to take over the doctor's and nurse's expression in the room.
"Her heart rate is still dropping." That was one fear-filled voice from someone in the room and the attending doctor's shoulders slumped.
I was still staring at the room, unseeing and not believing anything that was going on in the room.
Everything was unfolding as if I was in a trance as if we were in some sort of fog. There was also a distance humming somewhere in my ears that was trying to anchor back to sanity but it wasn't working.
I couldn't be anchored back to sanity.
"Charge 200 Joules."
That was the attending doctor to whoever was handling the defibrillator and I saw a skeptical look cross the other doctors' faces.
Another doctor stepped closer to the attending doctor to whisper something into her ears.
"Dr. Ahnika, I think we should just give up. She's too young and her body is too worn out to handle that kind of..."
"200 joules." Dr. Ahnika repeated sternly and directly ignoring the other doctor's words.
"All set!"
The doctor pressed the two irons against her chest again and her body jolted with even more shock and intensity before falling limply to the bed again.
Still nothing.
The ground gave way beneath me.
Just as the heart monitor started picking up again and I watched as the doctors' shoulders all slumped in relief and congratulatory and happy smiles lit up their faces.
My shoulders slumped in relief too and I staggered back till I slumped on one of the waiting chairs.
Thank God.
Thank God.
Thank God.
God, please heal Aminah, let her wake up, Let her recover from her Eating disorder and the other disorders. Let her heal so she'd be able to live and laugh genuinely.
God, please heal her.
The doctors came out of the room then and I heard the attending doctor tell her dad and Hassan whom I did not even know were standing there initially that "She has pulled through the major risk." with an encouraging smile on her face before she walked away.
I felt my heart smile a little too.
She'll be fine. Aminah will be fine.
Zakir who was still staring at Aminah's room suddenly turned back to me and I almost stagger on the chair at the intensity of the raw pain in his eyes and he just wordlessly dropped the bag he had been carrying beside me.
And a phone too before walking away.
"Aminah will be fine."
I thought that was my inner voice convincing myself that she'll be fine until I felt a bigger hand clamp over mine and I looked up to see Adam now sitting beside me with eyes so full of worry.
He squeezed my hands gently.
"She'll be fine," He repeated, "I'm sure of that so you don't worry too much."
I nodded. I could only nod. I did not trust myself to open my mouth to talk without breaking down.
I knew I was going to break down once I open my mouth to say anything.
"Sophia will be back tomorrow. She said she'll ditch the show to come here."
Again, I could only nod.
I did not even know when Adam got here, how he got to know. It was probably Gab. She probably told all of them.
And Kunle...
Feeling suddenly compelled to look up, I looked up to see Kunle standing right beside Adam and left looking at the room, at Aminah that was laying down on the bed, at all those horrible machines that were connected to her body.
He was looking at all those with an expression so impassive, so vacant, so blank and so numb.
My heart broke a thousand times for him.
And I knew that no matter what I was going through right now, no matter what I was feeling right now, he was feeling it ten times than I was.
She was his girlfriend who was never his girlfriend. She was the girl he adored but never truly adored and now she was laying down there.
This whole situation was just so messed up. Extremely messed up and I had to wonder how...
Just how quickly the days that were supposed to be the brightest and best days of our lives were gradually turning into the darkest and worst days of our lives... Into this dreadful nightmare?
Just how and when did it all start to go wrong?
He was still staring at the room with the blankest expression, with his eyes not giving anything away at all and I wondered again just what could be going on in his head?
What...
A phone vibrated beside me and I turned to it to see that it was the phone that Zakir had left behind.
It was a message notification... A message about an unused data bundle expiring soon but that wasn't even what caught my attention.
It was the phone's wallpaper that looked familiar but I couldn't see properly because of the message notification.
I swiped it away.
And a tear rolled from my left eye when I saw the picture.
Of course, it was a picture of us.
Aminah, Sophia, and I.
I remembered the day Aminah snapped that picture.
It was the day we got to the Olympia and she wouldn't stop gushing over how beautiful the place looked, over how awesome everything looked like, how she wanted to live here, how she wouldn't stop running around, stop bouncing around.
The day, less than 2 hours that we got to the Olympia, she had already found the best locations for pictures and she had dragged me there to take her pictures, and afterward, she had pulled me in for a selfie, a selfie that just when she was about to press the snap icon, Sophia had jumped it out of nowhere to photo-bomb us.
That was before everything started to fall apart.
But she had used that picture of us as her wallpaper all this while?
We were probably all she had.
She had probably liked us in her way.
But? What did we do?
We just...
We all just comfortably failed her.
Just like more than 90% of the readers trivialized Aminah's feelings and made her feel so irrelevant 😪💔
So you've seen it, Aminah's head is probably the darkest, bleakest, saddest, and scariest place to be. That girl is so damaged that probably no one will be able to handle her thoughts... She was nowhere near energy personified, she was just sadness personified
And the doctor that was mentioned in this chapter. It's a whole sad story on its own but you'll see it in Alex's story and even much more in my next book, Birds With Broken Wings.
Running. Dancing. Swimming wasn't her hobby. They were compulsions. She never liked any of those three and that's not even all, that's just what they've discovered about her. Compulsive exercises, something that almost coexists with eating disorders are a nightmare on their own. This explains why Aminah was always running at night during the Olympia, she wasn't practicing, she was only following a compulsion and that's why she did not feel bad at all when she did not win.
So I feel the need to explain what Eating Disorders are and well, eating disorders are complex mental health disorders that are mostly characterized by an extreme, irrational, and bizarre fear of gaining weight. There are six diagnosed eating disorders and they include Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Binge eating disorder, Avoidant Food Intake Disorder, Pica, Rumination Syndrome, and Night eating syndrome. The first four are significantly about weight, about irrational fear of gaining weight, an extreme fear of gaining weight that the people that have one of the four will go extra miles to lose weight, to stop themselves from gaining. These four disorders are the deadliest of all the eating disorders and they're also the ones that people have the most.
These disorders are significantly caused by Fat-phobia and Fat-shaming. When you fat-shame, when you treat fat people as if they're criminals for being fat as if they've done something wrong for being fat when you glorify being slim, you're telling fat people to become slim by all means, you're triggering them into eating disorders, you're setting them up on a path that will deprive them of the simple joys in life, you're killing them.
Some people will see food and just see food, fried rice, chicken, plantain, ice creams, cakes, pizza, shawarma, milkshakes. You know the simple joy that comes from seeing food, from knowing I want to eat this kind of solid and good food and you know the fulfillment and happiness that comes after eating that food.
Some people see food but they don't see food, they see calories, they see fat, they see what the food will do to their body, the kind of fat that they'll be adding to the body, these people are deprived of the simple pleasure of eating and enjoying the food. Aminah is one of those people, from the time she was made to diet to now that she's lying on that bed, she has never got to enjoy a meal. The mere sight of food is enough to make her skin crawl, to make the voices in her head louder, to make her want to have an anxiety attack. She hates food, she only learned to mask this intense hatred by pretending to be a food lover in front of people only to take laxatives and induce vomiting to get rid of that food from her body immediately.
Aminah was always hungry, always tired, always exhausted, always cold, and always sad.
Eating Disorders are the among deadliest mental health disorders with the 2nd highest fatality rate of all mental health disorders but still, it is the ONLY mental disorder that's actively promoted.
The world tells people in ED not to recover. Everything thing around them promotes slimness and losing weight. When you fat shame, when you glorify weight loss, you're actively telling people in ED not to recover.
Eating disorders as deadly and as fatal as they are, are disorders that'll probably not exist at all or would be reduced by more than 95% if there was nothing like fat-shaming and if the world treats people in bigger bodies like it treats people in smaller bodies.
See, I have so much to say about this whole thing so I'll publish a rant that's specially dedicated to this conversation.
And writing this chapter made me feel so sad 😭😭😭😭
See you when I see you ❤️❤️