to all my hospital friends

tw : ed talk, no numbers mentioned. violence (?) mention?

i doubt any of my hospital friends are on this site, but i need to just get my thoughts out- god, i hated them so much. anorexia is so competitive. i used to stare at their bodies, desperately wish i was them, desperately thought about smashing glass bottles into their heads, so angry i didn't have the skin tone they did, so frustrated about never fitting the beauty standard (i mean what?? i'm ruby, of course i fit the beauty standards. beauty standards don't apply to anyone - not even my pokemon team. but that's a completely different topic.) i stared at their gorgeous long hair and thought about strangling them with it.

and then i decided to send them letters. I think my first time in the hospital, i was desperate to make friends. I only moved here (hoenn) from johto a short time ago. i wanted to meet someone else anorexic. not ana buddies, just... a support system. and so I did. we weren't allowed to talk - I made my mom the middleman, made her pass the letters that the doctors ended up being furious at. 

we made a group chat. no ana tips, surprisingly. just supporting each other, chatting, having conversations over phones and looking up to see the others laughing at the gc messages across the room. carefully stifling it, so the nurses wouldn't notice. we sent paper airplanes across the ward when the lights were out. it was hellish, but they were there. 

my second and third times, i remember, were somehow worse. the only thing holding me back was the fact I'd be warded for a longer time if i attacked anyone. but I still sent letters to some of them, no matter how much I hated them. A hello, a i'm sorry you're in here, something for them to feel understood. 

this doesn't even cover the mental hospital stuff. but i just read through the letters they sent back, if we ended up not getting each others' numbers. there is so much desperation in them. so much frustration of our situation. and yet there is hope. and we're all out now, so! and from the people whose numbers i have, they seem to be recovered. from what i know we've all survived, which is crazy, but im so glad for them no matter how bad it hurts. there will always be this love for them. god i definitely wrote something like this earlier im just thinking about it again. it rotates in my brain like a microwave. 

if you got this far, thanks for reading. <3