I choose the eating disorders, the cutting and the vomit to identify my anxiety.
- To be someone, having a reason to be down, and sad.
I guess it’s hard to understand for those who never felt it, for those who don’t have to achieve to confirm their rights to exist.

It’s nothing I do with my own free will, but it’s the only way, as I see it, to survive.
Not being smothered by my anxiety.
I don’t choose to slit my wrist, my legs, and the desperate attempts to burn the pain away.
It’s not me, time after time, forcing my fingers deep down my throat, spitting blood.
And if I shall be honest, I don’t know who does it, he, she, it?
The voice inside my head, it doesn’t really speak to me. It is a silent thought, whispering, telling me what to do. Helping me to hate myself even more.
I appreciate it, I do. Because sometimes I get this feeling of happiness, peace
And there it is, smothering all attempts to get away. Helping me understand that I’m not worth anything, anything at all.

I don’t know why it’s in me, why I’m so worthless, disgusting.
All I know is that I’m stuck, that I’ve always been, and the more I try to escape, the harder she holds me, willing to destroy everything that’s taking me further away from her.
I love her for doing that, making me understand my mistakes.
Making me understand that I am a mistake.

They, the people who are trying to “help” me, tells me she, the voices doesn’t really exist, and that I have got to try to let them help me. Believe in them.
But I can’t, of course.
So I lie, I lie until I don’t know what’s real and what’s made up.
It’s the only way making them calm, to take away the worried looks in their eyes.

As long as I can remember I’ve been a failure.

When I was about six years old I never really understood what made me different. So I had to hide the panic and the anxiety behind laughter and too much talking.
They saw me as the one who always smiled, ever so happy, with a lot of energy, often too much which made me feel like I was always in the way, disturbing other people, my parents, my friends, the teachers…

It hurts so much to read the things I wrote when I was younger.
My diary: full of self-abnegation, tears and the desperate loneliness inside of me.
Pages, full of a little girl’s ugly handwriting: I hate myself, I hate myself, I hate myself.

I’ve tried so hard to forget, telling myself that the problems came later, that I was happy at that time.
It’s so painful trying to understand that the little Julia, smiling so happily on every picture already was full of broken thoughts and to so much loneliness.
Even though all her friends were there for her, she couldn’t tell anyone, afraid of losing the only security she had.

I became someone else, and the person I really was (the person I am?) hid behind the books; the words became a shelter against the surrounding world.
To forget, to handle the emptiness that tore me apart, and the screaming world inside of me.

It worked, for a while. But I became so tired, when I was eight it was so overwhelming that I couldn’t hide it anymore. So I complained about the little things instead of showing what I really felt. Showing how I just kept falling deeper and deeper down in a black hole without a chance to get out on my own.

And as time went by I was unable to control the struggle inside of me.
I don’t know when it all started, when I began to cut it all away.
The thoughts had been there for a long time, nails scratching, longing to destroy my dirty skin, the filth beneath it.
Perhaps it doesn’t count; perhaps it was first when the blood really ran, when the gashes on my legs became deeper and the blood on my sheets wouldn’t go away.
I was twelve when it was for real, when it became a fact
- I’m one of these pathetic girls who can’t appreciate the life they are given.

The scars on my thighs became more, and I was ashamed, but at the same time I loved it. The more I had to hurt myself, the stronger my anxiety grew. I could stand a year, without doing anything else to reduce the desperation.

I tried, but the summer, or in the end of sixth grade, I had to find another solution; throwing up the growing panic inside of me.
(It’s ironic, the whole year I had watched, and tried to help and support Kathrin to get well, overcome her anorexia. I remember her pale face, how skinny she was.
How afraid I was when she slowly faded away. And how happy I was when she started to be the girl, the friend, I’d known for such a long time. )

I can’t remember the first time I put my fingers down my throat. I just know that it was so realising. Feeling the hunger, how it made me feel real, in a surreal way. It’s confusing, I know.
Everything about me is.

Losing 20 kg, it’s strange, you can’t see it, can’t feel it. And when my friends started to worry about my weight loss it made me feel even more stupid and fat.
But it’s not about being fat or thin, not about the outside, not about the appearance even though I know and have always known that I’m uglyuglyugly
- It’s about insecurity, being lost in a world where you’re unable to breath, to think and live.

I don’t know why I’m doing this.
Writing down everything that is so dangerous to talk about.
I’ve never done this before. I write a lot, poetry about feelings. But never like this.
It’s the first time my fingers dare to build the words, try to explain it all without metaphors and too much talk about nothing.

I want to explain why I have to continue trying to make the disgusting, unwanted filth inside of me go away but, at the same time, on the outside becoming more and more happy, and healthy.
But I can’t,
Thoughts are screaming in my head, always the same question, never, ever an answer.

- Where can I run to escape from myself?