In my sophomore year, once I finally felt confident that I was heading towards recovery again, I decided to update my tattoo. Adding a simple outline of a rose to the top of my NEDA tattoo was an easy choice for symbolic and nostalgic reasons. Adding a rose felt symbolic for my new phase of recovery and my promise of health to myself, as I vowed to bloom into the next phase of my life without the shadow of an eating disorder clinging onto my back. Beauty and the Beast was also the only movie I watched with my dad for various years and continues to bring me back to moments full of warmth and love, so I made sure to choose a design that was modeled after the Beast's enchanted rose. 

 

The different stories on this website are all slightly different from one another. They don't have entirely cohesive voices because they are all written from different points in my life, when I was going through various stages in my recovery. This project includes pieces of my story that I don't know how to put together in a cohesively bound book; with a mood disorder, changing family dynamics, different living spaces, and varying time periods, each of these pieces have shaped me. I don't necessarily know how these stories are supposed to be put together, but when they're not bound in a single narrative, it brings light to the distinct challenges and behaviors that were presented in each place as my eating disorder tested me time and time again. 

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When posed with the task of spending an entire semester crafting a project around one topic, deciding to write about my eating disorder came naturally. I wanted to explore the gap between the tattoo I'd created over my past few years and the tattoo in the ethnography I had made the year before. I also wanted to write about the connection between tattoos and eating disorders, since I understood the point of them myself, so this was the perfect opportunity.

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