By Uttama
“Have you ever read Sweet Valley High?” Zahra asked me innocently.
Of course I had: the famous series about two American teenage twins, long blond hair, their bodies a perfect size six, who attended Sweet Valley High School and fluctuated between levels of popularity.
I remember those two girls distinctly because even today, decades after reading those childhood books, I find myself comparing my dress size to theirs. At completely unexpected moments, I will pick up an item of clothing and think, “I can (or cannot) fit into this size six” and then immediately find myself either happy or unhappy because I am a smaller or bigger size than the twins.
It’s absurd. It is years later, and I am not fat. Neither is Zahra. I am sitting across from her at a coffee shop, and all I can think at first is how petite, delicate, and precious she looks. I almost wish I could protect her from her past, one that involved a culture shock, an eating disorder, and a feeling of isolation that took years to dissolve.
“I blame books like that,” she continues. “All you want at that age is to fit in. Because you’re a Pakistani girl that doesn’t fit in with the clothes, and has an accent, and boys are making fun of you, and girls are making fun of you.”
Zahra moved from Pakistan to Canada when she was 11, and struggled to fit into an alien culture (often encountering racism) while her parents were busy working long hours to sustain a new life for the family.
“You start reading all this stuff, and then you’re like ‘OK maybe if I got a little thinner’, you start creating an image in your head and want to be that image, and at that age I guess you just convince yourself that if you become skinny and thin maybe people will like you.”
Zahra was 85 pounds (38 kilos) when she developed the eating disorder bulimia nervosa. She was 15 years old at the time.
“In middle school we saw a video on eating disorders to raise awareness, but it actually ended up giving me an idea of how to lose more weight ‘cause the girl in the video used to throw up. I didn’t even know what that was. I was like, ‘Oh she can do it, then maybe I can find a way too.’ So then I decided to start eating and throwing everything up, and after that it got progressively worse.
“I used to eat a large pizza to myself and just puke it all out as a release. If I ate lunch at school…I would just go and get rid of it after. That’s usually how the food pattern works.”
Zahra says she felt lost at that time in her life, not completely fitting into her new environment, and not knowing how to change or control that feeling.
“Control is a huge factor in eating disorders,” she says. “Every single person likes to be in control of themselves, but the minute you think that there’s an aspect of your life where you feel so helpless, you immediately move that power shift onto another aspect of your life (in this case, controlling her food intake).”
Zahra never told her parents about her problem, and now, ten years later, they still don’t know.
“I don’t blame my parents at all,” Zahra says, “because when they moved here they moved here for us…they started struggling to sustain us…but were basically never really home, and you got that feeling of being very, very isolated…I didn’t really have anyone to talk to.”
Looking back, Zahra admits she would have done things differently.
“In retrospect I would have told my parents. But we never had that kind of home environment. It was hard to tell them. And I was very protective of them.
“I’ve noticed this about South Asian parents: if their child is going through something, majority of the time they’ll look at themselves and be like ‘How did I affect the situation?’
“So you know as a child, if you ever see your parents get hurt, the guilt of that, especially if you’re somebody causing it, and somebody who has an eating disorder—like I said it’s based on control issues—if you can’t control your parents getting hurt you’re going to end up getting more sick than you were before. ‘Cause its like, ‘what do I do? What do I do? How do I control this?’ and the next thing you know you’re in the bathroom throwing up.”
Zahra says it’s crucial as a parent to turn that self-pity around, and instead ask your children, ‘How can I help you?’
“You can see what you did wrong,” Zahra says, “but you don’t need to let the child know that.” What is most important is to find what kind of mental space your child is in, and try to understand the underlying factors causing the eating disorder.
Zahra believes the problem is as much mental as it is physical.
“A lot of people are so ignorant that they’ll say anything without realizing that an eating disorder is a manifestation. It’s not a cause. There’s something else causing that act. And that something else, the causes…are based on a really broad spectrum. To each their own.
“But I think as parents or friends don’t have that stigma of seeking professional help, and by professional help I don’t mean a therapist or a psychologist. I mean there are tons of alternative therapies out there closer to certain cultural practices you may have.
“I’ve always been into natural healing,” Zahra says. “It’s a very holistic way of healing. I’d like to mentally and physically take care of myself, and that’s something people don’t realize that you really need to do. A lot of the times in traditional psychotherapy, you talk about and analyze and identify your past issues, but people need a purpose to move forward. If you don’t give them a purpose, or the tools and skills to go towards that, then they’re going to get stuck in the past.
“Also a psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychotherapist, they’re really Westernized terms so when you’re coming from a South Asian background, it’s just like ‘This doesn’t fit with my culture’.”
But how did she, at such a tender age, manage to get herself out of the problem without her parents’ help?
“I was sleeping one night and I couldn’t breathe,” she says. “The biggest condition people who are bulimic die from is actually heart conditions, because your heart starts to get weaker and weaker as you’re depriving yourself of the necessary foods and nutrients for your blood to flow…And I remember that night I was sleeping, I felt like I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t breathe. Fear is a very powerful thing. It can scare you out of anything. And after that I was just like, “Do I want to die or do I want to live?” It was a conscious decision, and I have never done it after that.”
Zahra did eventually try different methods of therapy, and took some time to solve the underlying causes of her eating disorder, but after that episode, something in her had changed.
It is evitable even to me, a stranger in her life up until this conversation. There is no denying she has come out of it stronger, and in a subtle way, somewhat fiercer. She wants to protect others from the pain she has always fought on her own. She wants parents to trust their children so they are able to talk to each other openly. She wants society to change the messages they’ve been sending naïve youngsters about the way they should look and act. But more than anything, she wants to comfort those who are still suffering from this mentally and physically exhausting disorder.
When I ask her for the single most important message she wants to give, she says instantaneously, “You are not alone.”
“You should really learn to lean on people. It’s really important.
“You’d be surprised if you went to an adult figure and told them; you’d be surprised at their reactions. A lot of things are just in your head. We make our own perceptions. It’s your own reality. It’s nobody else’s. But you are not alone.”
