Aly began to cry as she took a sip of water. For years, she was afraid of anything — food or liquid — passing her lips. The 34-year-old Californian had spent more than a decade in and out of hospital since developing anorexia as a teenager. Now she felt something new. As she drank, she discovered that the usual sensation of fear was completely absent. Instead, she felt a curious affinity. “It was just this beautiful moment where I was like, ‘Oh, I’m water,’” she says. “It was so strange, but really healing.”
Quietly spoken, with large dark eyes, Aly is talking to me on a video call. (She asked me not to use her last name.) The hood of her jumper is up and, as she recalls the decades during which she suffered seizures and damage to her heart and kidneys, her tone becomes flat with exhaustion. She became anorexic at the age of 14 in the wake of a traumatic event. “I found restriction was my way to just try to be invisible and try to control my thoughts,” she says. When she refused treatment in her twenties, courts ordered her to be force fed.
