She almost skips this one.
The title alone makes her stomach tighten — Cult of Body — and the care note is close enough to home that her thumb hovers over the back button for a full three seconds.
She’s not “that bad,” she tells herself.
She eats.
She doesn’t pass out.
No one has dragged her to a hospital.
It’s fine.
She taps it open anyway.
The first punch is stupidly simple:
“You’re my body type.
That’s the problem.”
Her brain does three things at once:
- flinches,
- preens,
- waits for the sting.
She knows exactly what he means by “narrow, delicate, compact.” It sounds almost flattering until her thoughts start filling in the edges:
Smaller than last year.
Smaller when stressed.
Smallest when things are falling apart.
There’s a part of her that wants to say, “That’s not me.”
There’s another part that remembers the secret smile the last time someone said, “You’re so tiny,” and how it lit her up in a way “you’re so kind” never quite reaches.
She keeps reading, jaw set.
The section about his own body throws her off.
She’s used to people talking about “preferences” from somewhere above her, like they climbed out of a catalog. Instead, he’s critiquing his own reflection harder than she’s ever critiqued his.
That line lands and doesn’t move:
“Most of the time, the harshest critic in the room isn’t the person seeing you naked — it’s the one living behind your eyes.”
Her brain tries to argue — “No, other people are the problem, other people are mean…”
but she can see the evidence:
The way she changes outfits four times and still hates all of them.
The way she zooms and crops every photo before it sees daylight.
The way a compliment can sit on top of her like a sticker on broken glass.
The critic is always there first.
Everyone else is just… confirmation.
When he starts talking about the “religion” of it — restriction-glorifying, thinness-worship, the Cult of Body — she feels weirdly called out without being named.
She was never deep in the obvious spaces.
No hashtags with skull emojis.
No “bonespo” folders.
Her version looked cleaner:
“Healthy recipes”.
“What I eat in a day”.
“Glow-up inspo”.
Fitness accounts that just happened to only piece one kind of body.
She remembers scrolling late at night, half-hungry, half-proud, thinking:
If they can live on that, so can I.
Except she never really could.
She’d make it a few days “perfect,” then crash into a box of something, then punish herself with more rules. All the while insisting to anyone who asked that she “just liked eating light.”
She used to joke that she wished she could “catch” an eating disorder for a month to drop ten pounds.
Now, reading:
“Sometimes it’s wanting your hips gone more than you want your next birthday.”
she feels a cold recognition she doesn’t want to name.
She has never said that sentence out loud.
She has, however, walked past a mirror, grabbed the flesh at her sides, and thought:
If this disappeared, everything would be easier.
Not better. Just… easier.
The line about it being a “nervous system problem” rather than a mirror problem sticks in her teeth.
She remembers all the times she’s said, “I’m not hungry,” when what she really meant was:
“I’m anxious,”.
“I’m overwhelmed,”.
“I need to feel like I can control one thing.”.
Food was just the thing she could say no to without anyone else having to be involved.
She thinks about the days where:
Numbers feel safer than feelings.
“I’m fine” means lightheaded.
Pride hits harder when she’s empty than when she finishes a meal.
She’s never written any of that down.
Seeing it described in someone else’s words makes it harder to pretend it’s just “normal girl stuff.”
The sex part is the weirdest relief of all.
She’s spent years assuming that wanting to be small, wanting to be held like she could bruised easily, wanting to be picked up and placed, made her broken in some way.
Seeing:
“My arousal map is my problem.
Your survival is not negotiable.”
does something strange to the buzzing in her chest.
It doesn’t fix anything.
But it pulls two wires apart:
“This turns someone on”.
“Therefore I should maintain it at any cost”.
She hadn’t realized she’d tied those together.
She thinks about every time someone has said “you’re so tiny” in bed and how it layered onto every “you look amazing, did you lose weight?” outside of it.
Nobody ever told her:
“If staying with me ever depends on you staying unwell, I’m the problem, not you.”
That idea feels almost… alien.
Her brain, which is very good at turning everything into homework, immediately tries to twist it:
“So you’re saying if I got better, you’d still want me?”
It doesn’t quite believe it yet.
But it wants to.
The part about larger bodies hits her too, in a different place.
She’s watched friends in bigger bodies get praised for “being good” when they’re quietly miserable. She’s watched them get side-eyed for eating dessert while she gets told to “enjoy it, you’re so small.”
It’s the same sickness, just wearing different masks.
Reading:
“The Cult of Body will punish you for being big, then punish you again for doing anything desperate to get small.”
she feels something unwind.
It isn’t just her cage.
It’s a whole system she’s been living inside without a name.
That doesn’t make it less real.
It just means the shame isn’t as personal as her brain wants it to be.
When the post starts talking about kink again — about not asking someone to hurt themselves so he can stay turned on — she feels this rush of equal parts anger and relief.
Anger, because:
Not everyone has played it that way with her, even if no one said it out loud.
Relief, because:
There exists at least one person out there who can hold attraction and ethics in the same hand.
She doesn’t suddenly decide to trust everyone.
She doesn’t suddenly forgive herself for every skipped meal.
She just feels a little less ridiculous for finding all of this hard.
She has spent years thinking that wanting to be desired at a certain size made her shallow.
Hearing that line in her head —
“You were a good student.
You learned the lesson too well.”
makes her feel less like a failure and more like someone who got tricked by a very convincing curriculum.
By the time she hits the section about “better gods,” she’s tired in that particular way you get when someone describes your inner life more accurately than you ever have.
She isn’t ready to throw away her rituals.
She isn’t ready to call what she’s doing “an eating disorder.”
She is ready to admit that some days, the voice in her head sounds less like self-care and more like worship at an altar that will never say “enough.”
That’s new.
The line that stays, long after she’s closed the tab, is a small one:
“My attraction is a footnote in your story, not the title.”
She thinks about all the times she has treated the opposite as true — revolving her entire day around what someone might like to see, what someone might want to touch.
What if the people who want her are just… side characters?
What if she gets to be the main one?
It’s not a vow.
It’s not recovery.
It’s just a small, stubborn thought she can’t un-hear:
Maybe her body isn’t a project she’s failing.
Maybe it’s just the place she’s living, for now, while she figures out what story she actually wants to be in.
She locks her phone.
The next time her brain offers, “You’d be better if there was less of you,” another voice shows up right behind it:
Better for who?
Cycle II · “The Hidden Life” · 03
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