The world of dance, like that of fashion, they have always put us in front of a concept: the thinner you are, the more you will shine on your path. Today, fortunately, the story is evolving, the hasty judgments have left room for study, training, constancy, the real essential components to be able to break through in the various professional sectors.
But there are who, how Benedetta, got stuck in preconceptions that did not allow her to continue her dance path serenely. She was one aspiring dancerhe wanted to be able to conquer that world, but his eating disorder – anorexia first, then also orthorexia – did not allow her to progress. It took years before Benedetta was able to take back her life, to rekindle that light that had gone out and to regain the freedom that the DCA had stolen from her. She is now voluntary Feed and try to hold the hand of all those who, like her, have found more than one obstacle in their growth path.
“I wanted to be a butterfly, in the end I became one: small and fragile”
The story between Benedetta and its DCAtold through the pages of the Animenta website – the non-profit association created by young people to tell, inform and raise awareness on Eating Disorders – was born during adolescence. She wanted to be a dancer and her approach to the discipline, always so sunny and passionate, had brought a sense of first emotional stability with herself and with others. Growing up, the comparison with “the others”, however, has become more and more insistent: “day after day – tells – there have been people who pushed me to focus on many physical defects that I had never seen up to that moment. “From that moment, food, with which until then he had lived with serenity, becomes his worst enemy.” Every day was a take away. I also removed everything that I liked most. Everything”.
The months passed and “the others” began to pay her more and more compliments focused on her new physical appearance: “I was getting light “like a butterfly”. But the truth was that I I was not happy. I was suffering inside her, my soul was crumbling and my body with her“. The mirror, now an enemy, continued to show him a reality that was unpleasant in his eyes: “I saw myself getting smaller and smaller, even though the years were advancing”.
Anorexia and then orthorexia: “with the pandemic I tasted a sense of freedom and I am cured”
Years spent hiding his pathology, even from his parents who could not decipher his malaise. Arriving at the university, she Benedetta began to become aware of herself: she was changing too, and above all, temperamentally: “I was estranged, I did nothing but study and take exams, my mother didn’t understand what I had, I had left the dance for two years now why every slightest movement was a trauma to me. In short, I had realized that I existed but did not live“.
Everything begins to turn right when Benedetta autonomously decides to rely on whoever is competent. Through what it defines “the phone call of my rebirth” addressed to a medical expert, the girl was able to put together the pieces of herself that due to her eating disorder she had lost along the way. Beyond anorexiain fact, Benedetta was also diagnosed withorthorexia, a DCA characterized by an obsession with so-called healthy food. Once the correct awareness is taken, hers also begins healing path which, paradoxically, is amplified precisely during the darkest period of the pandemic: “Live it alone, away from home, it made me think even more: I threw away everything that these two diseases had left me and I can say that I have tasted the sense of absolute freedom“.
Healing and the willingness to help those who are going through their own darkness
“DCAs unfortunately have the power to split the person – explains: anorexia and then orthorexia have for many years made me do things as if I wanted to do them, but in reality it was the disease that acted, it wasn’t Benedetta“. She feels healed and alive, but “Only after so much self-analysis, awareness and thanks to the help received”. Now Benedetta has chosen to join Feed as a volunteer and to reach out to those who, like her, are facing a difficult path with food and soul.