The TRUTH About Pro-Anorexia Forums

If all you know are the dark, sinister stories that circulate in the media, here's the truth. If you were one of the early generation of forum users, you may well have known me by my old net-handle. If you're a modern era user, you've probably seen stolen pictures of me in thinspo threads - they're happily too old & too bony to be recognisable, but 15 years on I still see them posted! While I am fully recovered now, for many years the pro-anorexia board was the one place I felt accepted, loved, & understood - it shaped my latter teenage era so much, & while there is undeniably an alluring darkness to disappearing into a world where insanity is normalised & everyone gets what you mean about purging marshmallows, or a thousand other silly-gross in-jokes that no one in the outside world would think were funny - despite all of this, the forum did not MAKE us sick. We were the first generation: our EDs started YEARS before the internet booted up, & we finally found each other. We knew what it was to suffer alone, & we were the last generation to experience that depth of loneliness in disorder. Banning & censoring a vast swathe of people is never the answer to anything; just look at the war on drugs. I will very likely talk more about the differences between original forums and the modern day, because the culture has really shifted from the Prozac Nation, Girl Interrupted era to the modern world of neo-grunge models, Instagram & Generation Anxiety. And maybe talking about that will rev me back up to unearth my started manuscript & actually finish it! Instagram – ofherbsandaltars FB – www.facebook.com/ofherbsandaltars My book of horror stories, yayyy! – search Amazon for The Putrescent Vein, available in print or on Kindle Angry Vampires – ofherbsandaltars.wordpress.com Short stories – theputrescentvein.wordpress.com Music – Amazon, iTunes, Spotify: 4am Vampire Blues by Neon Midnight, iTunes linkiepoo is here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/4am-vampire-blues/id1055369459 And album number 2, Retribution, is here: http://itunes.apple.com/album/id1162784834?ls=1&app=itunes PO Box: Dorian B 290 Moston Lane Manchester M40 9WB UK --if sending anything to PO Box, please mark as 'gift' so I'm not hit with customs charges! I appreciate everyone who takes the time, but customs charges are super hard to sort out via a PO Box and can sometimes result in the item being returned to sender before I get it sorted :-/ so yeah, mark as gift and all should go smoothly!—