The Pro-Ana Morse Code of Ariana Grande

Content Warning: Eating disorders, body dysmorphia, anorexia. If you or someone you love is struggling with an eating disorder, support is available. You can contact the National Alliance for Eating Disorders at 1-866-662-1235 or visit allianceforeatingdisorders.com

I’ve watched Ariana Grande grow smaller with a perverse sense of nostalgia. I was thirteen when my best friend and I developed anorexia together, and I remember how quietly it took hold. When I think back to the beginning of my eating disorder, it felt almost ordinary, so mundane that it never occurred to me I was becoming sick.

Now, as my screen fills with image after image of Ariana’s increasingly skeletal frame, one memory rises above all the others.

My best friend Zoe and I lay on towels in my backyard, wearing only our newly-purchased summer bikinis, our bodies slick with baby oil as we lick the sticky, sugar-free popsicles I’d begged my mom to buy. Usually, after carpooling home from ballet, we’d peel off our leotards and go straight upstairs to do our homework. But with only three days left until 8th grade ended, we allow the heat to make us lethargic.

Zoe lowers her sunglasses to look at me, her nose crinkling.“I feel like that’s enough. Ready?”

I nod, my chest feeling that exhilarating lift the way it always does before our ritual.

We walk inside, instantly chilled by the AC. My mouth aches for cold water, but we never consume anything, not even gum before what had become the ceremony that was now etched into our muscle memory.We climb the stairs to my parents’ bathroom and lock the door. From the closet, I pull out my mother’s clear glass scale.

We never step onto it wearing anything, even the thin fabric of our bikinis will alter the results we so closely track, so we strip until we’re naked. As I assess Zoe’s bare form, I feel a strange sense of pride in how well I’ve come to know her body, the exact curve of her hip bone, and how much more pronounced it’s become.

Zoe always goes first, As she steps onto the scale, her face still flushed from the sun, she looks down at the number, then back at me. A slow smile spreads across her lips. She’s a full pound and a half lighter.

When it’s my turn, the cool glass presses against the soles of my feet. I close my eyes and take inventory of the day as though reciting a prayer: one packet of oatmeal for breakfast, ten baby carrots and a granola bar for lunch, one sugar-free popsicle, three Altoids.

I open my eyes and glance at the number on the scale before looking up at Zoe. Her smile lingers for only a beat before it slips and I know why.

I’ve lost more weight than she has.

Our game has never had rules or a winner declared aloud, but beneath our whispered confessions and shared rituals runs a silent competition. As much as Zoe loves the intimacy of our secret, she hates that I’m the one winning.

Now, I need you to stop here for a moment, because that opening wasn’t something I wrote this year. It wasn’t even something I wrote as an adult. It’s an excerpt from a pro-ana post I wrote when I was sixteen.

And if you’re uncomfortable with how romantic, even erotic, I’ve made my adolescent anorexia sound, I need you to know that’s intentional. Because I think what’s been lost in this conversation is just how seductive starvation becomes when it’s wrapped in the language of romance.

At the beginning, that’s all I was: a little girl who loved love stories. I lived on Kate Hudson rom-coms. I tore through Pride and Prejudice, convinced my life would someday feel that grand and consuming. Instead, I found boys who didn’t like me, or even worse, boys who didn’t notice me at all.

Zoe and the pro-ana websites gave me the romance I’d never found in the male gaze. Suddenly I was experiencing the very feeling Jack gave to Rose in the Titanic, the devotion to an irrational feeling at any cost. The intoxicating thrill of throwing every ounce of mental energy into a single fixation.

Looking back, I can separate myself from my illness enough to admit an uncomfortable truth: every lie I told to protect it sharpened my ability to tell a story. But if a starving sixteen-year-old could convince thousands of girls that starvation was beautiful, imagine the story an entire entertainment industry can tell when it’s invested in protecting a pop star’s eating disorder.

I know the current consensus is that we shouldn’t comment on women’s bodies. That we can’t know what someone is going through just by looking at them, but as someone who was hospitalized for malnutrition before I ever got my first kiss, I’m calling fucking bullshit.

Ariana Grande is speaking in pro-ana Morse code. And I’m going to show you exactly how she’s doing it.

Disclaimer: I am not a therapist. I’m not a mind reader, and I don’t know Ariana Grande personally. What I do know is what anorexia feels like from the inside and it begins with what I’m about to explain.

At the height of my illness, there was nothing I feared more than becoming a woman. I wanted to live forever on the precipice of girlhood because, more than thinness, what I craved was suspension. Each change toward puberty pulled me farther from the small, androgynous body I believed could keep me safe. I wasn’t rejecting sexuality so much as adulthood. I wanted to be desired, but only in the way our culture romanticizes girls: passive and unknowing. Becoming a woman was about having agency. A woman carries desires instead of simply provoking them, she makes choices instead of being chosen. Girlhood makes you feel passive in the gaze of others, but womanhood demands you to participate, and that terrified me

Puberty felt claustrophobic, and the closer womanhood came, the more violently I fought it. I starved away my curves, my breasts, and eventually the small amount of body fat required to maintain a menstrual cycle. By doing that, I wasn’t just delaying puberty. I was delaying womanhood itself, sexuality, adulthood, and in many ways, the male gaze.

By simply not eating, I deferred all my bigger fears. I was so hungry that I genuinely couldn’t tell the difference between hunger, horniness, and exhaustion. The more disconnected I became from my body, the less responsible I felt for it, and who takes care of a body without agency?

…A parent. Anorexia rewards infant-like helplessness. As the anorexic becomes less able to function, she also becomes easier to care for. She gets to be fragile like a baby. She is fed, watched and worried over.

Long before the public conversation turned to Ariana Grande’s appearance, I recognized something unnervingly familiar in her. It wasn’t simply the weight loss. It was the softening of her voice (and even lyrics) into something far more childlike. The exaggerated, wide-eyed expressions. The tiny, apologetic posture. The almost cartoonish “Oh... who, me?” energy that seemed to shrink an undeniably accomplished adult woman back into the performance of a little girl. She built her entire identity around becoming smaller, not just physically, but psychologically. Because anorexia doesn’t just ask you to disappear. It asks you to become a child again.

Watching Ariana dissolve into tears throughout the Wicked press tour confused a lot of people. The way she seemed to melt into Cynthia’s presence within prolonged embraces, hand holding or just sheer adoration felt either queer coded or blatant attention seeking. But when I watched it, I saw something different.

What you get behind the paywall:

• Why anorexia can breed the kind of public fawning we saw between Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo on the Wicked press tour

• The psychology behind clothing choices that emphasize extreme thinness, and how I interpret Ariana’s

• My theory on how this may connect to the intense scrutiny surrounding her relationship with Ethan Slater

• What we can actually do in response to the grotesque media landscape that has formed around one pop star’s apparent struggle