Despite her seemingly squeaky-clean adolescence -- especially for a person who came of age during the 1970s -- Jones says her unhealthy diet and exercise behaviors indicate that she was still an addict:
My drugs of choice were exercise and starvation: both gave me a high, both were illicit and frowned upon by adults. They involved huge amounts of deceit, and elaborate cover-ups; I hid my arms, not because of track marks, but so no one could see how thin they had become. My form of rebellion, my crutch if you like, was as life-threatening as if I were on heroin.
No one told me how to be anorexic, I came up with it all by myself: there were no pro-anorexia websites, and none of my friends were doing the same thing.
The reasons why teenagers feel the need to abuse their bodies, to experiment, are complex.
My particular brand of self-harm was tied up with low self-esteem, crippling shyness fear, basically.
Im pretty sure that fear is what drives most young people to dabble in dangerous things. We want to quiet that gnawing in our tummy, that churning.
[Source: www.dailymail.co.uk, March 22]
Labels: teenagers
Posted By: Aspen/CRC
