Does an Eating Disorder Make You Special?

One reason for the rise in eating disorders in recent decades is the fundamental need to be special in modern life. As longterm health improves, lifespan lengthens and basic life essentials are taken for granted, first world populations have much more time and energy to expend elsewhere.

Striving to be exceptional appears to be one of the most common ways people have found a life purpose. Not infrequently, this common desire to be special is diverted to particularly unimportant goals. One such goal is thinness.

For many people with eating disorders, the goal of thinness feels paramount in life. Achieving it often leads to overwhelming praise, increased opportunity and the promise of a greater life. Whether or not this goal promotes obsessive thinking about food, eating disorder symptoms or extended misery is besides the point.

The idea of giving up on thinness as a primary goal feels like failing on many levels. Not only does surrender mean disavowing the collective fallacy that thinness has true meaning in life, but it also allows for the difficult concept that we are all average.

Ultimately, being human implies being one member of the large dominant species on earth. We can find special parts of any person, especially anyone we are close to, but with eight billion people on the planet, not one of us is truly unique. Using weight and thinness as markers of being special looks absurd in light of the larger scope of humanity.

Past the immediate horror of admitting mediocrity is the relief of just being a person. The incredible pressure to be something more than yourself makes each day so much harder. The unnecessary goal of manipulating food in order to weigh a certain amount only limits how fully a person can live.

If living means developing relationships and trying to develop meaningful activities or work, then expending energy on food and weight has no true purpose. None of us are remembered for how we eat or what we weigh.

The drive for thinness is linked to the drive to be special. Rearranging our priorities, even in a world where so much is given to us easily, is a critical step in limiting truly unimportant goals from dominating our experiences.