«I don’t remember exactly when it all started, but I remember the freezing cold that never went away, I remember me trying to cover myself up but nothing in any way managed to warm me up. Here, if I had to start telling my story with eating disorders, I would start from here, from that feeling of cold that never went away». Talking is Aurora Caporossiwho at 16 fell ill with anorexia nervosa and at 24 founded encouragean association that deals with information and support activities for all those who find themselves experiencing an eating disorder and for those who “live next door”.
«After I got sick, and in the following years, I asked myself and I was asked, several times, what it means (really) to suffer from Eating Disorders. It took me almost 5 years to answer this question, and still today, after 7 years, I don’t know if the answer can be correct».
“The disease entered my house with full force and slowly began to contaminate everything,” he says. «Day after day she showed up with her intrusiveness in front of everyone, but no one could see her. The only person who noticed, first of all, that I was not well was my mother. We started making the first visits, I remember asking her if she wanted to lose weight, so I didn’t like myself anymore. We turned to expert nutrition professionals. The plan they gave me was always “too much” compared to what I wanted. CSo I started doing my own thing and the more I lost weight the more the others noticed me, the more they complimented me because now “I was really fine.” My mum told me some time ago ior between those comments I danced with itbecause things were starting to go the right way».
Rereading those moments with experience today, Aurora observes “I had the illusion that if I controlled the food and the body, I would be able to control everything else. And it was at that exact moment that they began to check on me. Every aspect of my life began to be contaminated by an obsession with the body and with food. The more time went by, the more this spot got bigger.”
No one noticed this “stain” until it became impossible not to see it again. «I still remember the eyes of the people I stared at me, I felt that they were capable of getting under your skin and reading every secret. No one noticed before because I wasn’t underweight yet, I wasn’t severely underweight yet. They treated it like an adolescent whim, like a fad that would pass. It was actually anorexia nervosa.” It is from this exact point and from the convergence with all the stories that tell of an eating disorder that Animenta was born. The goal is to deconstruct the stereotypes and false myths that have characterized these pathologies for too long.
«An eating disorder is a cry for help that cannot be expressed aloud, it is a silent cry that finds its expression, its missing voice, in the relationship with food. The problem is not in the food itself, but in the way it begins to be interpreted by those suffering from an eating disorder. Eating disorders are complex psychiatric pathologies that do not affect only the body, food and weight. These three aspects and their change are the symptomatological expression of a deeper discomfort », he underlines.