I was talking to my friend last month about how, in my first year of uni, I kinda had a stint of anorexia. "Stint" is a mild way of putting it, but honestly my case wasn't that bad—which is to say it was so sudden and extreme that within a few months I was unable to function and needed to go into treatment.

When I told my friend this, he replied, "I have the opposite problem. I eat too much when I'm sad."

And you know, I've been through enough therapy not to be triggered by this, but it still frustrates me. Because I see this kind of attitude everywhere. A guy confesses to me that he shouldn't be drinking his iced coffee because he's supposed to be on a diet. My friend refers to herself as a "big back" on the regular. And on social media, I see gym-bros, I see people talking about unseasoned chicken breast and how hungry they are from going on a cut. All of this is becoming normal and I am concerned about my generation.

I took ANTH20001 this year and I wrote this essay about the trend in neoliberal medicine which treats ill people as exceptions and extremes. In reality, however, pathology is usually the extension of wider culture trends. The anxieties people around me express, regarding their bodies, their eating, their health, are axes of society to which anorexia is the natural endpoint. These cultural trends I see are the root course.

And I think my friend's comment still bothers me because he doesn't get this. He treats my illness like something extreme and alien to him. Anorexia is an abnormality, and he's just a normal guy. It's as though he cannot fathom becoming me.

But when I was younger, I was like him. I had friends with anorexia, but I never imagined it would happen to me. I mean, I was just an overweight kid. I was a boy at the time. I would wish I was anorexic, though. I knew it was bad but I wished that that was my problem; that I was skinny, that I was able to deny myself food. I remember a text conversation with a fellow trans girl where she expressed how "once I move out I'll be the anorexic girlie I was meant to be," and I... didn't disagree.

Maybe me and this friend were on the extreme end of the spectrum, but still, it's a spectrum. Nowadays whenever I tell someone about my history with anorexia, they may have concern, but they never apply that concern to themselves. When they go on a diet, or loathe their bodies, or excessively exercise, it's normal, because, you know, they're not anorexic.

I thought the same way back then. As I slowly killed myself, the whole time I doubted myself and called myself dramatic. It was as if there was some secret society of anorexics which I did not belong to.

In my anthropology essay I talked about Büscher's idea of "diagnostic work"; the processes by which people come to identify and label problems in their lives. As I spiralled, I was aware that there was a problem; I had bruises from sleeping. I couldn't concentrate. I was freezing all the time. But I refused to admit it. I was stuck in this pre-diagnostic state.

And I feel like as a society we're stuck in pre-diagnosis. Our culture is ill. People are getting progressively more anxious about their bodies and yet we're unable to imagine this being a problem. People cannot fathom that we might be in an anorexia culture.

I actually found the whole experience a little akin to that of transitioning. Growing up as a boy, I imagined the female experience as something completely alien to me—and nothing I could do would make me a woman.

Of course there is nothing essential to gender. Like Judith Butler says, Gender is performative; it's a series of behaviours, something you do rather than are. Anorexia is also, to some extent, performative. It is something you do rather than are. It was never about whether I was or was not anorexic, because I was already doing all the anorexic behaviours. In both cases, I had the same kind of imposter syndrome.

Some people don't agree with this performativity. In some transgender spaces, there are transmedicalist "truscum" policing who is or is not a real man or woman. Correspondingly, there are pro-ana communities online policing who is or is not a real anorexic. And it sucks. When internalised, it makes people deny their own suffering and, ultimately, deny themselves the right to treatment. I hate that this is how young people are made to think about eating disorders.

But it's baked into the notion that "normal people" don't get eating disorders.

Even once you admit you have a problem, it remains key to your identity. So it's very difficult for me to let go of the idea of being anorexic. Literally right now I am writing an essay about it.

At best, I transform it into a rejection. I build my identity around pushing against anorexia culture. I want people to realise that they are not so different, that eating disorders are not these unspeakable things, that I am not an alien to you. Because there are kids and adults out there right now developing anorexia and this cannot be allowed to continue.