Translation of Laurie Darmon's "Mai 2018"

Translation of Laurie Darmon's "Mai 2018" from French: (CW for anorexia and eating disorders)

May 29, 2018. To finally say it. To say directly the word of which we hid the shape. To say it aloud, because it is important to tell it, because it is the story of another that allowed me to understand what happened to me.
The summer of my 17th birthday anorexia nervosa entered my life. It took over
my body, my unconscious mind, and my conscious mind as well, later. Quickly
my periods stopped and as the hours passed in a day
the list of things I had eaten stood before me, on top of me, everywhere, crushing me.
It was new, sudden, mind-boggling.
It began precisely the day after the announcement of the results of the French baccalaureate.
The failure, the shock, as radical and massive as it is secret and unconscious.
I remember a silent promise of a few seconds made at that moment
in front of a mirror: I will become the best and most powerful,
everywhere. I see my outfit, my hair, my face and my look.
There is someone other than me in my body at this precise moment. I would understand it
much later.
At the return of the summer, I attack my final year in science as if I were in the military.
Get up at 6 o'clock, have a half-biscuit with nothing with a coffee, and physical exercise
which is counted in seconds, then in minutes, then in hours, always further,
farther, and harder. A rage, an anger, the terrible sensation of burning,
and to extinguish the burning of the body after meals it is necessary to move like crazy. Transparent prison.
I'm losing a little weight, but not enough to be suspected of anything.
The year unfolds in a solitude and cold where nothing can comfort me.
I have my scientific baccalaureate and very good results but the sickness is there, deeply rooted.
I took a gap year in business school where I was bored and wandered around the 11th arrondissement
in the small bookshops of the neighborhood in search of I don't even know what.
Until now, the word has not yet been pronounced. And then I finally come across a book.
"Days Without Hunger" by Delphine de Vigan, the umpteenth back cover that I read.
But this time I found it. Anorexia. I am anorexic.
I integrate it little by little. I don't talk about it.
The following year, I start studying law at the Sorbonne.
I have a boyfriend. The way he looks at me makes me love myself a little more. At his side I eat a lot.
The curves and the excesses no longer have an impact.
But it's worse, in fact. I measure it after the breakup.
"Even in that you fail, you're not able to keep it, you're not good enough."
I am barely 20 years old, and the anorexia hits harder.
Unable to sit on the subway, I travel only by bicycle, even if it's windy, rainy, snowy.
To suffer, to take pleasure in the suffering.
All turned around in my heart.
And then I eat three apples for lunch in college, then two, then one.
To be hungry, to be on the verge of fainting, and to love it.
But I'm so tired, I don't have the strength to go to college anymore.
Continue schooling from home, in pajamas too large for me,
the anguish of the morning, repeated crying fits, the distress in the eyes of my parents.
“But we gave her everything, she has all she needs to be happy, she was so bright, what the hell is she doing to us?”
I'm 21, still don't have my period.
I'm starting psychoanalysis twice a week, that will last a year and a half.
It's hard but I'm holding on to something, a glimmer.
It is a work that takes up all the space I have.
The popular kids and the others, the looks others give me, my place in the group.
All that is linked.
Food is only the concrete manifestation of these wounds that took root in adolescence, in childhood.
I was predisposed, but I have to talk a lot before I see the work bear fruit.
I have to kill the link with my mother, my father, and exist alone and by myself.
I have to accept who I am, different from what they had expected, what I had pretended, what I had made myself believe.
I have to find the courage to get out of the pattern of my studies, to take a different path, to accept my own path that grows in every direction on the paper.
Lyrics, melodies, mock-ups, what do I do with all that?
I'm in my second year of law school.
I struggle to graduate, but I do.
It's the beginning of another era.
The healing is underway. It will last several years more.
I am 23 years old. My main occupation is now music. I give lessons on the side.
Food is still a central element in my mind constantly during the day, but I cope better with it.
I’m eating again, and what a joy.
I regain weight, I no longer disappear, literally as well as figuratively.
I become my true self, and if my body had not reacted the way it did, I might never have gone that way.
Anorexia as a savior, then? I ask myself.
I write it in my songs but it's still hidden, I’m afraid to talk about it.
The psychoanalysis is over. I am armed to fight alone.
I am 24, I am 25, I am 26 years old.
The years that are added to the counter do not frighten me anymore.
I am in my place. Anorexia is now only a backdrop.
But even still, again, it’s not so much the meals, it's more insidious.
Still no periods, no desire. I have to conquer myself as a woman, I feel it very strongly.
It is inhibited, somewhere buried, I know it, but difficult to reach.
I resolve more than once to give up, to pretend to be that woman without truly embodying her, but the frustration continues, on the stage, in my voice, in my eyes, in my private life, something is turned off.
The silhouette of a child. Tricks and gimmicks don’t help.
One is not born a woman, one becomes one, said Simone.
February 2018. I am 27 years old. I make choices that leave me hanging in the void.
I could view these decisions as failures, but this time it doesn’t feel that way.
I leave almost everything. No more landmarks, the apprehension of the anxious phase that will certainly come to envelop me.
But no. No! My desire is reborn, very strongly, everywhere.
A celebration of life as never before.
I feel intoxicated, weightless, the femininity, the joy.
I feel myself vibrating, I feel alive.
What is supposed to flow is flowing again, almost ten years later.
A creative breath takes hold of me, it's fast and intense.
The second album is born in a few weeks, so different from the last one.
It's wonderful to live.
Anorexia sneaks quietly away from me, I watch it become foreign to me.
It’s a long time, 10 years.
Maybe it’ll come back, I don't know. But for today, I am in control.