It's the early beginning of fall, the weather is getting crisper in the morning and cooler at night, we're starting to see colors in the green leaves and pull out our favorite fall outfits and boots to wear. Amidst the fall comes holidays, such as Halloween. Whether you celebrate it or not you know that's it's the time of year that little kids get all dressed up as their favorite characters from movies and TV shows. As of late, it's also the time where you begin to see skimpy Halloween costumes for adults. Amongst these costumes is one in particular.
The costume comes with a sexy black mini dress with a skeleton printed on it, which seems normal for Halloween. The black skeleton dress is paired with a measuring tape to go around the waist, a choker and a badge that reads "Anna Rexia." This costume is matched with the tagline, "you can never be too rich or too thin."
"Want to dress as 'Anna Rexia?' Just go as a vampire or a zombie. Because one-third of us are dead." Jessi Davin, an anorexia survivor wrote this after the costume caught her eye. Her eye wasn't the only one it caught.
In the United States, 20 million women and 10 million men suffer from a clinical eating disorder in their lifetime. I am one of them. With eating disorders having the highest mortality rate of any mental illness, it's something to be taken pretty seriously.
Fighting an eating disorder is eternally exhausting, stressful and difficult. The eating disorder doesn't just effect the sufferer it effects anyone they interact with. The dinner table turns into a battlefield, the mirror turns into your worst enemy, and food, the very thing that keeps you alive becomes poison. You begin to resent yourself, every little inch of you. You slowly begin to decay bit by bit by bit. Your skin turns yellow, your nails chip at the slightest touch, your hair falls out, and you slowly take on the smell of death. You'll either find yourself six feet underground or in a hospital bed, hooked up to an IV filled with life and a tube forcing you to eat. There is nothing sexy about having an eating disorder, there is nothing glamorous about becoming so afraid of yourself and life that you give up completely and let yourself decay. So, my question is, why? Why was this costume ever a thing, and why can it still be purchased today?
If you want to dress up as "Anna Rexia" for Halloween you'll need a hell of a lot more than just a little black dress with a skeleton printed on it and a measuring tape. If you want to go as "Anna Rexia" put a white sheet over your head because we are ghosts with barely beating hearts, and find the scent of death and spray the whole bottle on you so anyone you walk by will stop and stare and whisper. Paint bags under your eyes and put chains on all of your limbs making you exhausted after each step you take. Put yourself in a bubble, so anything you want is so close but so out of reach. If you want to dress up as "Anna Rexia," I honestly envy you, because you clearly have no idea what anorexia looks like, feels like, or is. You must have never been impacted by watching someone you love waste away. You clearly haven't been through the hell that is an eating disorder, that I would never wish upon anyone on this Earth.
You would never see someone dress up as a person with cancer for Halloween so why is this even a thing?
