Eating Disorders, Fairy Tales, and Evil Queens

When eating disorder thoughts start to occupy more of our time, the things we used to care about slip away. The time that was once given to drawing or being creative is suddenly dedicated to working out more or planning meals, and before we know it, we're serving a voice that is not our own.

As a child, I was obsessed with stories. Myths, folklore, legends, fiction, non-fiction . . . I absorbed them all enthusiastically. Some made my heart leap up and others broke it, but they all inspired me, and many of my fondest memories have to do with bedtime stories with my mum and brother. 

Illustration by Alexander Koshkin (Vasilissa the Beautiful)

But as soon as I stopped reading stories and started creating myths--myths about calories, about reps, about myself--I lost who I was. In Caroline Myss's Sacred Contracts, she talks about the "inner child"--that archetype within each of us that enables us to connect to innocence and wonder and enthusiasm. The eating disorder feeds off of anything that is wounded or fearful, and it totally crushes anything divine or hopeful. In other words, the eating disorder is a bully! 

Illustration by Kinuko Craft

We can see certain elements of eating disorders in the story of Sleeping Beauty. Eating disorders typically develop during adolescence, and surely enough, Sleeping Beauty's tragedy occurs on her sixteenth birthday. She is supposed to be in a period of growth, maturation, etc., but her adolescence is cut short by a seemingly-innocuous needle that pricks her finger and sends her into a deep, endless sleep. Similarly, eating disorder behaviors don't present themselves as evil or dangerous. There is actually a genetic component to developing an eating disorder, so, just like Sleeping Beauty's needle, the eating disorder "waits" silently for us, ready to be triggered by some sort of stressor. We come to it just as Sleeping Beauty did to the needle, and then it takes over and sends us into our own sort of sleep. 

We fall asleep to trust and to the process of life. 

The eating disorder in Sleeping Beauty can be paralleled to the Evil Queen. For some of us, separating ourselves from the eating disorder helps to recognize our authentic voice, and viewing the eating disorder as the Evil Queen may make it easier to push negative thoughts away. When the eating disorder says, "You can't do __ because of ___," think of the Evil Queen. Does she have Sleeping Beauty's best interests at heart?  No.

Of course, one major difference between eating disorders and Sleeping Beauty is that there isn't going to actually be a knight in shining armor coming along to save the day. There are definitely people and tools out there that can make eating disorder recovery easier--therapists, family members, yoga, etc.--but in the end, we're responsible for rescuing ourselves. It's empowering but scary at the same time, and it starts with a choice.

We have to choose to tell the Evil Queen to get OUT of our heads so that we can take our lives back. Don't let her be stronger than you are. I promise you that she isn't.

If you're interested in learning more about how stories and myths can relate to healing, I've heard that Eating in the Light of the Moon by Dr. Anita Johnson offers beautiful guidance for eating disorder recovery through myths and metaphors. I haven't reading Eating in the Light of the Moon yet, but I hope to at some point. What makes stories such powerful healing tools is the fact that humans are designed to relate to and learn from stories. Cave drawings, parables, fairy tales . . . we need stories for our own survival. But now that so many of our culture's stories center on "this diet" and "that workout plan," we're putting pressure on ourselves to live up to what the modern hero is presented as: someone who is successful, physically attractive, athletic, and "disciplined." What about the healers, the dreamers, the poets, the artists, the intuitives? Please don't sacrifice who you are for the glossy, photo-edited "ideal" that we see everywhere nowadays.


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