There's this interesting scene from Skins UK, S2E7 (or something).
Cassie is 43 minutes into her two-hour philosophy A-level exam. She hasn’t written a word. The invigilator urges her:
“So are you going to write anything?”
She hesitates:
“I’m not sure. What about how long I can put off starting to write and still get an A?”
They talk about power.
“I stopped eating, and then everyone had to do what I said. That was powerful.”
She asks if she enjoyed it.
“I think it was the happiest time of my life. But I had to stop before I died, because otherwise… it wasn’t fun.”
And she says what many of us have never had permission to say out loud:
“You wouldn’t understand.”
I’ve never correlated with a character so intensely in my life. I’m Cassie: dissociative, filled with tics, masking constantly, always tiptoeing along the edges of self-destruction--paradoxically, that’s what makes it bearable. It may be coincidental, but I’ve also found myself in nearly the same position within a near-identical friend group, facing many of the same dynamics: substance use, suicidal ideation, a disfigured sense of self-worth, philosophical isolation, deep knowledge juxtaposed with academic collapse, a dysfunctional network of family and acquaintances, compulsive agreeability.
You could change the names and call it a new season. The script’s already written.
Now, if you’ve seen the show, you’ll notice that Cassie doesn’t obsess over her body in the stereotypical way. But there’s that one haunting moment:
“I didn’t eat for three days so I could be lovely.”
I’ve thought that before, many times. Superficially, yes--skinniness aligns with dominant beauty standards, and xxs models are prized in fashion. But for me, and for many of us, thinness isn’t about aesthetics. It’s about clarity. It’s about a kind of self-erasure that feels like control. It’s the dissociative euphoria of watching your body disappear, finally becoming foreign to even yourself--finally.
[Note: I was diagnosed with an eating disorder at age eight--long before I had even heard of Skins (let alone absorbed it as cultural reference). So no, I wasn’t imitating a TV show from a different continent for a decade. I’m an English and literature nerd--acutely aware of how authorial decisions are crafted for thematic resonance, not just to build a show’s reputation. To assume otherwise is both lazy and ahistorical. The choices in Skins--like many in enduring fiction--are deliberate, symbolic, and layered, not mere bait for teenage mimicry.]
#AnorexiaNervosa #ED
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