Shani Raviv - Being Ana: A Memoir of Anorexia Nervosa

Praise for
Being Ana

A fascinating window into the frightening and relentless world of anorexia and, equally, young womanhood.

Katherine Boyle, Veritas Literary Agency

Ms. Raviv is a fabulous writer and did an amazing job of simultaneously showing how her eating disorder functioned to keep her from being conscious of the underlying issues while in the depths of it, and showing the reader how all of her behaviors, thoughts and feelings were directly related to those underlying issues.

Susie Roman, MA, former programs director at the National Eating Disorders Association

Shanis openness and clarity in sharing her experience with anorexia gave my students a unique opportunity to gain empathy and understanding for the living of an eating disorder. I know it will make them better therapists.

Dr. John Deninno, eating disorder clinical psychologist and adjunct faculty in counseling and health psychology, Bastyr University

Shani Raviv is a great inspiration to the many millions out there struggling with eating disorders. Being Ana is honest, sensitive, witty, brutal, and so much more.

Graham Alexander, eating disorder clinical psychologist and director of Crescent Clinic Eating Disorders Unit, South Africa

Being Ana is not only an insightful, raw, and thought-provoking memoir detailing a subject most people know little about, it is also a work by an author who understands how to present a difficult subject with humor and aplomb. Even though the book took her eight years to complete, there is an aching immediacy within these pages.

Leighanne Law, Elliott Bay Book Co.

Being
Ana

Copyright 2017 Shani Raviv

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-63152-139-3 pbk
ISBN: 978-1-63152-140-9 ebk
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936164

Book design by Stacey Aaronson

For information, address:
She Writes Press
1563 Solano Ave #546
Berkeley, CA 94707

She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

To my mother, for loving me always.
To my sister, for being a guardian angel.
To my father, for accepting my forgiveness.

This six-lined hexagram is derived from an ancient Chinese text, The I Ching, or The Classic of Changes. It is the 27th hexagram, which symbolizes nourishmentsomething that I would eventually desire to guide my life.

And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.
Anas Nin

A s a little girl, anorexic was not what I hoped to be when I grew up.

And yet, for a decade, anorexia was my path. For a long time thereafter I wished it had been otherwise. I wished I had dedicated those years, and the years that followed in recovery, to feeding the hungry, helping the poor, or teaching the illiterate to read. Something important. When I admitted this to a friend, she said, Anorexia is about life and death. What could possibly be more important?

While I was living it, I had no idea what anorexia was about. When I started recovery, I was full of questions: Why did I become anorexic? Where did anorexia come from? Why did I almost sacrifice my life for anorexia? So I set out on a mission to find answers. I needed to make sense of what I had been through. I was desperate to understand why it began. I decided, when I gave up anorexia, that I would work hard to find meaning in it.

Two years into recovery, I was attending a support group for anorexics and bulimics when a woman in the group said, Please tell us how you healed. I laughed and said, There is too much to say; I would have to write a book. I was only half serious at the time. I had no idea how to write a book. But I knew I had a lot to say. And I believed in my writing talent. I always knew in the back of my mind that I wanted to write a book, but I never knew it would be a book about my life. In the same way, I never knew that, for a long time, anorexia would be my life.

As a teenager, I had dreams. I wanted to become an actress. Make movies. Save the world. Then one day I got lost in a system that backfired on me, and what happened instead was the evil of a starving mind. Although I was never hospitalized, I reached a point where the madness in my head, the malnutrition in my body, and the deprivation of my soul should have killed me. Instead, it took me on a wild ride. I searched for love in promiscuity, happiness in drugs, comfort in cutting, peace in alcoholism, ecstasy in overexercising, and, above all, salvation in starving. I finally surrendered. It took years of therapy to work through the negative emotions that had accumulated in a decade of self-destruction.

During that time I committed myself wholeheartedly to writing and completing this book. A dear friend said to me that some people feel compelled to climb mountains, and that this is my mountain. At the end of this decade-long process, I believe he is right. I worked on the first draft on and off for five years. Then over a period of three years, I wrote, rewrote, and edited many more drafts. Then I rewrote and edited some more, until I finally put my perfectionist tendencies aside and decided to call it complete.

In my third year of recovery, I went to see a homeopath, who asked me a very simple and wise question: What did anorexia give you? Without thinking, I said, An identity, a friend, a purpose, a mother, structure, success, and strength. She answered: Now you see why it was so hard to let go of it! It was then that I realized that I had never meant to harm myself. I have since learned that anorexia was, in essence, a desperate attempt to save myself from my overwhelming emotions. Anorexia was never my failed attempt to starve myself to death. That is a common and grave public misconception. Also contrary to the popular belief once an anorexic, always an anorexic, I believe I am since recovered.

This is a story about my fight to find strength in vulnerability, truth in my identity, and meaning in being me. I have personified anorexia to show that she was much more than a diet gone wrong, a coping mechanism, an addiction, or a girls vain attempt to perfect her image. I did not just flirt with her as a teenage pastimeshe was my life, my vocation, my truth.

I have come through this ordeal with the ability to express my experience of the complexity and nuances of anorexia and to create what is essentially an entertaining narrative about a heavy subject. In it I do not blame society, the media, my dysfunctional family, or my peers for my anorexia. I dont elucidate the role the media plays in perpetuating the cult of thinness because it would contradict what anorexia is really about to me. I was born and raised in South Africa, where I was not saturated with images of thin. Nor did I grow up in a household of dieters and weight watchers. And before my anorexia started, I was always the thin kid. When it began, no one I knew was anorexic. And I had no idea what it was. So why me? This book answers this question and many more.