[Me23]

Omg, I am soo cringing right now. I just had the most embarrasing encounter with my bedder (staircase/room cleaner in my college). I find it really hard to talk about weight/control outside this forum, and after this I just wanna sink through the flooorr....

Ok to understand this, you have to know that I've been both v. fat and clinically anorexic, spent too much of my young life starving or stuffing, and right now my goal is to maintain without doing either. Actually I'm trying to lose 2lb cos I had a bit of a blow out the other day and it hasn't really gone, also TOM is coming.

So to weigh myself, I have to take my scale up to the bathroom (a few steps up from my room, hardly worth calling a flight of stairs) cos my room is carpeted and so I can use the loo first. I go into the bathroom and there's the bedder (who is new, and being super-nice to me as I embarrasingly had to compain about staff absences leading to substandard cleaning, which I felt awful about anyway, because the individual bedders are lovely and doing their best). When I'm washing my hands- and holding my scale under my arm - she comes up and goes 'You've got, um, anorexia, haven't you?'
My brain goes - whaaa?!! For one thing, I look *nothing* like an anorexic anymore. I mean I'm still slim (minus the 2lb!) but slim is not what an anorexic looks like! And how did she know? I mean, I have written a book, which some people in college know about, but I didn't know she even knew my name! So I say 'No - I mean, I used to -' (And I'm there holding the SCALE, ARGH!) and she says - 'Cos my god-daughter's got it' and I say, 'Oh my God, I'm so sorry' and she says 'Well she's much better now, in fact she's just had a baby'. And I'm thinking 'but anorexics are infertile' so I babble some stuff about how I hope that will make things easier for her, having something else to focus on etc, because you need other things in your life (whilst still holding the scale) and get out of there as fast as I possibly can. All this before my first cup of coffee!

Now I'm going to have this bedder all year! And she's lovely - and I make an awful mess in my room which makes it worse - and she probably sees me as thin, even though I'm just slim, because she's kind of overweight - and yes I do weigh myself a lot! Omg, I'm going to be the bedders' subject of gossip for the next year!

2lb hasn't budged, btw. All this for one blowout, followed by two good days? TOM, TOM, what are you doing to me? Lol.

[CousinRockingChair]

No, you arnt. I don't..I mean, perhaps if I'd have *been there* I would have had a different perspective, and I am just a weirdo, but I'd have felt supported and pleased someone had an interest in me, especially if she was nice (well, I got that impression from your post :-) )..and if shes pleasant, its unlikely she'll be like *ooooo guess what, X on X floor has anorexia!! maybe!!*

...I reckon shes just a nice *shares a lot (its quite something to spill the beans about your goddaughter randomly to a stranger!)* kind of person who is open and cares about people. I reckon, perverse as this sounds, you were sorta lucky to run into her.

dont flame me! im not invalidating you if you felt terrible at the time, but i dont think you have anything to worry about. I've had EDs for 6 years and have felt weird but in a good way if someone has picked up on it.

Emily
xxxxx

[kaplods]

I don't think she was commenting on your weight, but on your behavior, a lot of people confuse anorexia and bulimia, and even people of normal weight who "used to be" anorexic may still call themselves anorexic, just as an alcoholic in recovery may consider the term "alcoholic" more accurate than "former alcoholic." Some people consider the anorexic tendency to be incurable, like alcoholism, so you might hear someone calling themselves a recovering anorexic, rather than a former anorexic.

I think she probably was just someone who wanted to reach out and make contact with someone who might understand or might need to be
understood.

When you're a person who is very open about your own personal life (which sounds like she is, I sometimes tend to be one too), it's very easy to ask questions or make comments that other people might find overly personal.
We don't mean anything hurtful or negative, and I've found that we're actually much LESS likely to "gossip" about it than people who keep many things very private (some would rather talk about someone else's problems than even admit they have any of their own).

I know when you're embarassed, it's very hard not to have those feelings, but you can at least give yourself a little pep-talk about why it isn't a big deal, rather than find reasons that make the embarassed feeling worse (like imagining her gossiping about you. If you start to think that, remind yourself that it isn't very likely that the lady has nothing better to do than gossip about you).

I really do know how hard it is. Even though I often find myself telling people very personal things about myself, that doesn't mean I don't sometimes get embarassed when I realize I've spilled my guts, sometimes to a perfect stranger. In fact, there's a good chance that she might have been just as embarassed about it later. The only thing to do though, is move on and try to forget it, or "talk to yourself" as needed about why it is a smaller thing than it seems.

[Me23]

Thanks. I feel better about it today. I think you're probably right that she's just one of those people who talk about things easily...the thing is, outside this forum I'm private to the point of weirdness (my uncle used to call me 'Miss Spock' when i was younger!) as a kind of defence mechanism. So it kind of just threw me that she should know that. When I see her today I'm just going to smile and say hi. Smile and say hi, that' the way