Rewriting Her Story: Filmmaker Eisha Marjara on the Imprint, Recovery, and Reclaiming the Feminine

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

I’m Cynthia Marks and I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation, established by my late husband, Doctor Bernard Bail. Welcome to And Now Love. Doctor Bail believed that we carry imprints, unconscious emotional patterns handed down through generations and absorbed in our earliest environments. Today's guest, award winning filmmaker and author Eisha Marjara, beautifully illustrates this in her powerful documentaries. One, Am I the skinniest person you've ever seen? And two calorie. Eisha joins us to discuss how her teenage battle with anorexia was deeply intertwined with the pressures of family expectations, transitioning from childhood to womanhood and the unconscious revolts against both.

We'll look at how eating disorders can act as a physical manifestation of an emotional imprint, and how Eisha ultimately rewrote her story. The two pieces of work that I've mentioned here are just a bit of what issues been doing, but these are the two pieces of work that are really relevant for our discussion today. Thank you for being here. We're very, very honored that you chose to speak with us and that you are so brave in sharing your life experiences with our audience. Hi Cynthia, thank you so much for inviting me. This is wonderful. Our pleasure.

So first of all, I think if you tell us a little bit about your journey and we can get to why these films are important and what all of us can glean from your personal experience. So I come from a Sikh Punjabi family. My parents immigrated from India in the early 97 1970s and then we, my sister, my two sisters and my mother followed shortly after we settled in a small town. My father was an academic, he taught the English and my mother was a housewife, but she was struggling to find work as a school teacher and since it was an all francophone town, it was really difficult for her to find work for me and my sisters.

We integrated really easily. We were kids. People were really receptive to us. I never experienced any racism. I never felt different. I felt special, in fact, for being different from the girls and boys in my classroom. But I was very particularly sensitive to how my mother was struggling. And I think that really shaped how I saw myself or my future self. And there was a lot of me that kind of was afraid that I would end up like her. That sort of went on. And as we grew older, my family moved to a bigger town. It was still hard for my mother.

I went to school, I went to university and to college. And during that time I that transition from the small town to the big town was very difficult. And I developed an eating disorder, and that's when things started going sideways for me. It was difficult for my mother as well to see me shrinking, and I ended up in the hospital. And while I was in the hospital several times, and during one of the hospitalizations, my mother and my younger sister decided to go to India for the summer to meet with family. And I was going to be on the flight and I didn't go, and they were killed on the plane.

There was a bomb on the plane and the plane blew up and everybody on board was killed. I ended up back in the hospital and was there several times. And so I had these this really difficult period in my teens grappling with the loss and the eating disorder. And in my final hospitalization, I finally got recovered. And one of the things that really motivated me to get better was that I had a passion for photography. I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker, and I thought, well, photography was a really good way to set way into filmmaking. So I took I had a concrete goal.

I got out of the hospital and, you know, pursued my career, which is what I do now as a filmmaker. It seems. Thank you for sharing that. It seems that your passion for your work, whether and you can tell me whether consciously or unconsciously was a way of talking about your anorexia, a way of talking about all that happened inside of you, outside of you, kind of relative to that. Was it perhaps a further release? I know you said that the nurses were very, very helpful, but was it some sort of further release, or were you feeling like this was a message you wanted to share purposefully because so many people contend with it?

I think it was bit of both. I understood things later, after being discharged that I didn't realize at the time, and so I was just bursting at the seams. And I think that's quite normal for any new and emerging artist that usually their first work is really kind of a coming out, and then they go on to doing other things and exploring other ideas. The world just expands. But I think there's always this need to get out all of these emotions and all of these ideas. I think the fact that the films were successful means to me that it really spoke to other people as well.

Yes, I think the process of the storytelling, which is very specific, also, paradoxically, does touch on universal themes of coming, of age, of turning, you know, going from being a child to a woman. And and I was also very conscious of those larger themes and understood how they integrated into this personal story. So the idea of coming of age for a woman that you're speaking about now and shared in your documentaries and other work, were you aware of that when you were dealing with anorexia? Were you looking at that? I can't imagine that you would have, but not sort of being afraid to grow up, being afraid to face all the things that come with womanhood, and looking around at society and what women are expected to be relative to what women really feel they are at heart as individuals.

I mean, that's a lot for all of us as women to contend with, and it's something men should contend with, too. Did you consciously contend with any of that? I guess since I was 11 or 12, I just felt it was really unfair. I think that was when I got my period. I think I don't remember experience such rage and how come girls have to deal with it and boys, don't you know, I felt this inequality deeply, you know, in my body and and I saw it all around me, you know, misogyny, sexism, it was all it was there. And I just felt this simultaneously shame and disgust for my female body and at the same time, need to prove that I could be better than boys, you know?

Yeah, yeah. So there was this kind of battle with my feminine, my my womanhood, my femininity and and seeing how my mother was always struggling as well. And the inequality in the, in, in my parents relationship, you know, he was well respected. He was a university professor. He was an academic. He was worldly. People looked up to him. And my mother was a housewife. She was struggling to adapt. She didn't know the language as well. So, you know, I wanted to align myself with my father. I admired him, I wanted to be like him and deny everything that was female and feminine and associated with my mother.

I think that that I understood that while I was in the hospital, I think through therapy. And then as I grew older, I think I just became more I became more articulate and understood that the gender part of it was a huge part of why anorexia just seemed so perfect. Because I you look at the anorexic body, the first thing that goes is your period. Yeah, yeah, that was the first thing when I, when I turned 11 and I had my period that made me female. Otherwise I could look like a boy. Well, I had long hair and did look like a girl, but that really begins the process of differentiation.

You know, the curves, the breasts, the development, developing body and happens so rapidly, which is shocking. And people realize how shocking puberty is for a girl. Oh, I don't think so. And I think what you're speaking to, you can run through all of us as women. I mean, I can say the same thing. When I first got my period, I thought to myself, well, first of all, I cried and I thought to myself, okay, life as you know it, it's not the same ever again. And I started to look around as, what am I going to contend with now in this new existence?

It's as if one day I was a little girl, and the next day I had a whole new world in front of me that no one had really prepared me for, and no one was really going to prepare me for. And it was scary. And you, as you're saying, you look at things that are happening to your body, the curves, the expectations, you look at what fashion wants you to say. You look at what you know, womanhood to be based on the people around you, like your mom. And what do you do with all that if if that's not sitting with you, but yet you feel like you're running towards that full steam, how do you stop it?

And you found this kind of tragic way to go there. Yeah. I felt like I could stop my body from growing. I could stop my body from from that transition, have, like, absolute control over it. I remember walking down the street one time. I had shortish hair like this across the street. There were a bunch of guys and they were staring at me and I had like short hair, like a big baggy t shirt, jeans. And they were looking at me and laughing and smile, and I was. And I turned to them like, why are they looking at me like? Anorexia is about self erasure.

Like I want to be invisible and especially sexual attention. Like, no. And so they looked at me and they said, we can't figure out if you're a boy or a girl. And how did you feel about that? I remember I said, I did it, I cheated. What I wanted to achieve is to erase my gender. And so I was like elated. I was on cloud nine. I said, I, am I going to give that up? It was very empowering for me. And I always, you know, admired those thin bodies because these women didn't show the curves and they looked more like boys. And yeah, even some of our top couture models, they're, they're sort of stick figures.

Yes. Yeah. So when you had that revelation, I've achieved what I hoped I would achieve did. That didn't mean that you considered that a stopping place, that you would try to lose more weight? Or did you reach a point where losing weight was something that just was happening to you because you were unhealthy? When that happened, I had been discharged, so I was already quite thin, but and probably had lost a bit of weight. But I wasn't, you know, low enough to be admitted to the hospital. It was between hospitalizations, like the cycle would be.

I would lose a lot of weight. I'd get hospitalized. I'd put on weight, be discharged, drop the weight again and be admitted. So it was somewhere in between those two hospitalizations. That's happened. But it was always I was always very conscious of my weight and so were the staff because they weighed me every day. And so it was hard not to think about it in my short film and my skinniest person you've ever seen, I was writing it and I said, yeah, it was a revolt. Anorexia was a revolt against nature and against society. And that's how I framed the film.

And I think people seem to relate to that. Women at least. Yes, very much so. And, you know, sort of whatever tack you take, you most of us can relate to that on some level, because I think a lot of us as women feel a push to be something different than what we're told we're supposed to be. And however you act that out, you act that out whether it's healthy or unhealthy. But a lot of us don't like this model that we've been presented in terms of what it is we're going to be for the rest of our lives. When you were hospitalized and you said to your doctor.

Am I the skinniest person you've ever seen? What were you thinking you would glean from his answer? Well, I'll give you a little bit of context. Like there was. I had just been hospitalized when that the, the that video was taken, which is in, in my short film. Which is, by the way, really precious that that exists and that you were brave enough to put that in there. Thank you. Yeah. I you know, it was a part of the therapy. They had the patients come in posing a bathing suit or a bikini and look at themselves and talk about how they saw their bodies.

I mean, they obviously. But I had been so far gone, like, as I understand what you're trying to do. You want me to say I look fat and I need to lose weight? But I'm not going to say that I know I look skinny, I know it's ugly, but that's the whole point. You know, I don't want to look pretty. That's not doing it for beauty. And so I was kind of being I was kind of pissed off with the doctor. And so and I wanted to one up him and say, well, you know, am I, you know, am I the queen of anorexia? Yeah. And he says, no, I've seen skinnier. And then I say, oh, shucks, which I think put in the film.

But I was just being cocky at that moment. It comes across even without you speaking it. But that was what I was wondering when I watched the film. Is she like one upping him here? Is she pissed off? It comes. It's clear in your, you know, your attitude and there's there's a confidence about you that I don't know if that is if that was the real you or if the confidence was a way of kind of saving yourself. You know, one thing is just occurred to me is how we don't really understand how behind anorexia, there is a lot of rage. I think part of that confidence is, was rage was a sense like, I know what you're trying to do, I know what I want.

I'm going to do what I want anyway. Go to hell. Yeah. You know what was happening at that moment? Because in order to recover, you have to get vulnerable. I didn't get vulnerable. I wouldn't, and I did, and at one point, I did, and everything switched. Switched. And. And what brought you to that vulnerability? You mentioned how helpful the nurses were. Oh, yeah. My, I'm getting goose bumps because I remember that moment I was in a eating disorder clinic. You know, there were other patients. It was an inpatient unit of the hospital under supervision when I was having my meals because I was not eating and I was hiding and I was throwing and I was, you know, so I was in the nursing station when I had my meals.

And one of the nurses just she just got so soft and so maternal with me. And she said, I'll be very proud of you if you really finish this, this meal, like, you know, and when I ate something, she was she gave me affirmation. She said, good for you. I'm really proud of you. And she just hugged me and she broke me. Basically, she broke that hard, angry part of me. I just gave up. I just like and I think it felt so, so good and it felt so powerful. I couldn't resist it. And I had also lost my mom. Yes. So I had all of these women who were like moms, like aunties to me, you know, and I have to say, you know, in all of the hospitalizations, it's the women.

It's the nurses who heal us. You know, the doctors, we see them once in a while. They're in their offices, they come in, they go, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. You know, I mean, they they do their therapy and but it's it's the it was the nurses. Not really. The male, the intellectual, the female, the the feminine, the feeling. Yeah. The nurturer. Do you think that was there all along, that love and care from the nurses. But it took you as long as it took you to be brave enough to invite that in. I think there was a combination of things. I got close with a lot of the other girls at the in the clinic.

You know, when you see another patient gain weight and leave, they would do us. We would do a party or celebration before they were discharged. So there was a kind of it was a flip of what I had experienced in the regular hospital, where it was just numbers. You know, you get in a certain way and you get discharged. I see. No fanfare or anything. Right. And there was there was their particular treatment given to you emotionally or therapy, or were they just trying to feed you, to get you to a certain way, to get you out? Yeah. It was just, you know, get the weight.

And there was some therapy as well. I was the only anorexic patient on the ward. They were that was it was all mixed. And this was a specialized unit, you know, people with eating disorders. And so I would see other girls who became friends, you know, getting better and leaving, and there would be a celebration. And so, you know, when you're seeing other people getting better and people feeling happy around it, you want to be a part of that, you know? And so that that was encouraging for me to to see that, to see Alyssa get out and giving her presence.

And that was a part of it. And so when the nurse came at me and started showing me, you can also do that, you can you can live, you have you have control over your life. And at the same time, I was also I had a camera on the ward. I was allowed to use my camera, so I was taking a lot of pictures. And then I found I saw in the newspaper that the college, there was a college that was teaching professional photography, and there was a deadline for applying. And I was going, I have something concrete to look forward to. Like I have a goal, a concrete goal, and I love photography.

And the nurses came coming around. So it was all this, all this was happening at the same time. And that's what happened. I got discharge, I applied for photography, I got in and I never went back into the hospital. That is so wonderful. Thank you for sharing all of that. I'm I am so touched that you're letting us dive deep into your life. So when you knew you wanted to shift and you had discovered that photography was sort of a great way to express yourself or something that you just truly enjoyed, and you kind of made a conscious effort toward that.

Were you also then feeling different about womanhood, or was that just now kind of secondary because now you were going to eat, now you were going to sort of fulfill this dream that you had, and you would deal with the womanhood separately. Yeah, that's a good question. My God, I just realized basically I was 19 when I got out. How many years were you transitioning in and out of care? It was over five years. Yeah. And during that time, I lost my mother and my sister. Yes. And then finally, there was a place in the psychiatric hospital where they had the eating disorder clinic, which I was on a waiting list for, and I got in.

But to answer your question, I was I felt like I was 12 years old when I something got stunted. I felt I feel like my growth got stunted at 11, 12 after getting my period, something changed. And so when I got out at 20, I was still 12 years old, like I hadn't had an adolescence. So while I'm seeing my friends and and peers getting their first apartments, you know, having relationships, you know, exploring their sexuality, their career here I was just, you know, still 12. I was a late bloomer. I guess that's it was always an issue, you know, kind of figuring out what woman is and who I am.

And, and it's been a part of the exploration of my work. You know, gender is a big theme in my work. You know, I made a feature film called Venus, which is about a woman who's transitioning, you know, she comes out as a woman. And that was another way for me to explore. I mean, what better way to understand what woman means than through the experience of a trans woman? Yes. You know, in your 30s is discovering that she's a woman. So that that was that I did in 2016. It's that's really fascinating to think about someone who has now kind of tiptoeing in the world of femininity and experimenting with this and that, but it's basically every aspect of what femininity means is having to be thought about.

And for those of us who are transitioning just from adolescence to womanhood, there's a lot of that to contend with, too. It's like, wow, what does it mean now that I now that people are going to, you know, look at my breasts or whatever it might be, but to think about the whole world of femininity sort of being on your plate as new things to contend with. This was like a part of my film. Short film. Am I the skinniest person you've ever seen where, you know, you see, it's about my younger sister and I who are very close in age, and how she does transition.

You know, she turns, I talk use the analogy of butter caterpillar turning into a butterfly, how she was able to turn into the butterfly and how I didn't, you know, I still stayed a caterpillar. And it's actually like the part of the film that I'm most that still moves me is, is seeing my, my sister transitioning, you know, and becoming the butterfly. It's really lovely. I agree with you. And and what was that like for you to hold yourself back and watch your sister become something different? Did you embrace her experience the same way you were embracing your own, or was one more quizzical than the other?

I think I was, I think in my film I say she she was not my little sister. My little sister became my big sister, you know, she's the one who turned, turned into a woman. And I think when I started to show symptoms of anorexia, there was like my sister and I were very competitive growing up. I mentioned this in the film. Like we were always trying to beat out each other. We're physically combative and verbally. And then when I started to lose weight, she became protective of me. She became much more concerned about me. And then I think our competitiveness fell away and I understood and she understood that we were different.

People were not the same people. We can't compete because we're not even in the same game, you know, we're different. I see I was able to look at her and appreciate her, to look at the way she's done her hair, and she really loved making clothes. And yeah, she she was much more always was much more comfortable with her body. When she had her period. I was devastated for her. I was devastated for her. And she was like, okay, here we go. Yeah. And and it was she was more curious about it. She was more giddy about it. And she just had a completely different experience than I did.

Completely. 180 and it was fascinating to me. It's like, oh, she's she just moved on like she has it and she's, you know, embraced it and she's moved on with her life so different. Yeah. And I guess it is true, really, that children coming from the same parents don't always have the same experience. But yet the idea of the imprint, let's say, is that whatever our mothers influence unconsciously is or our fathers, it affects us differently. But that is that's a curiosity for me because you were both affected, like like you say, you had opposite experiences coming, coming from the same kind of circumstances.

We were different, our personalities. She was very tough. She had a thick she was more, you know, bold and more selfish in a good way. Confidence. She had a thicker skin. She didn't care what people thought. Qualities that I admire in her. And I was hypersensitive to everybody and to my mom. You know, I think I. I experienced her emotions more deeply. I was just a more sensitive kid. So you might come home from school and be thinking, okay, what's mom going to be like this evening? Yes, yes, yes, I'm walking in the door. I'm like, what's mom's mood like?

And your sister maybe was mom's going to be who she is. I'm who I am. I'm just going to take care of myself. It'll be whatever it is. Yeah, she was more rebellious around that. And I was, like, wanting to take care of my mom. But then you sort of went inward with your revolt. Yes. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. When? When your mom and your sister passed away and you were really deep in your struggles with anorexia, was it your thought or maybe this, again, was unconscious to sort of did it prove the point that you should continue on this path of anorexia, like the world is never going to be right.

Everything that I thought I had ahead of me, you know, is now changed because I've lost these two people that mean so much to me. You know what's interesting in my post? Losing my Mother, it was like those were two separate things. It was, you know, my my anorexic part that was like one movie. And the, the loss of my, my family was another one. And sometimes I was like, I'm really sick of worrying about this stuff here. I'm going to focus on that because that feels like a relief that I see. And because that was harder, I found. So I saw those as two separate things, like a line was that my mother and I, I think we needed stuff to resolve because I felt like I needed to separate from her in a, in a healthy way, you know, like, I'm your daughter, but I need to be independent.

You have to let me know myself. I'm not a psychologist, but I felt like there was period where I needed to separate from her in a healthy way, and that never happened. And do you think she had the same agenda for all three of you girls, either consciously or unconsciously? Did she expect you all to enter womanhood and deal with it in a similar way? Or did she have different ideas about what that would mean for each of you? I think she the same way, at least not disappoint her by maybe marrying outside of our culture. For example, my older sister married outside of the culture, and so that was a big disappointment.

And I witnessed how my parents reacted to that. They were devastated. So I was always like, oh my God, I have to really watch myself. And already I was like, I'm not going to have a boyfriend. Period. Maybe a part of why anorexia worked so well is that I don't look attractive. I'm not attractive. There's nothing sexual going on because I don't have a sexuality anymore. I don't have a gender anymore. And so here I am. I'm just existing. And so I won't create any problems for anybody. And another way of making yourself invisible. Yes. Yeah. You mentioned that your your dad was really well received as a professor.

And obviously there were few, if any people that represented the community that you guys came from on campus. And your mom had a different experience. She she wasn't embraced the way your father was. Is that is that right? Yeah. I mean, she wasn't she didn't have the level of education he had. She studied to be a school teacher in India, but she had to redo her education to be a teacher when we came here. And she had to learn French and she was a different personality. She was not an intellectual, you know, she was a very social person. She needed community.

She needed people. My father was more, you know, he was more bookish, and he survived well and still does being alone. I think there's a lot of him and me, and I think there's a certain stigma to someone who's more outgoing and kind of laid back. It's not as seen as with as much prestige as someone like my father, who's restrained and intellectual and. But they both came together, for example, when your older sister married outside of your culture, they were both very disturbed by that. Yeah. That was shocking to me that my father's reaction was very shocking to me because I thought he would be cool with it.

He's like, grew up in Quebec and you French when we were before we immigrated. He's an artist. He's a writer. He teaches Shakespeare and Milton. And do you think it was largely out of a sense of protection for his daughter, in that she would now be in a world that was not always going to be welcoming to her, and he didn't want that for her. I think it was that it was a yeah, that was a part of it. Also, the the man that my sister chose was not very educated. I think there was a lot of few things. And that that would sort of go against your culture to then.

Yeah. Yeah. And we never talked about that stuff anyway. You know, relationships, boyfriends, sexuality. It's a hard check. It is. But the hard subjects are the ones we need to talk about. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And I hope that that's happening more often now. But although I still feel like women are very, very pressed to figure out their path in this world as women, and I think we all need to stand up for each other, not just women, but men need to stand up for women to. And as we've said, you know, if it weren't for women, none of us would be here, of course.

So the best job we can do with our fabulous women, we ought to think about doing to that, though you and I did the same thing, I. I think I unconsciously looked to my father as my source of finding my own strength. My father was very strong, very good at what he did. And my mother was very meek, timid and and, you know, it was always allowing my father to be in charge, sometimes to the detriment of their children. And I was pissed off about that. And I thought, well, I can't maneuver through life like my mom. I'm not going to get anywhere. And while I don't like some of the things my father is doing, there's a strength that he has.

I've got to figure out how to wrangle some of that if I'm going to survive and not live a life like my mom, that already pisses me off at the age of seven. Yeah, I think they become role models, you know? Yeah, yeah. Even though, you know, there's for me, there wasn't really enough ground to stand on there. But you sort of fish for what you can catch and apply it to what you think you need to be in the future. So in addition to these two films, you also have some really great photo projects that you are still working on. Yes I am. This is something that is on my to do list.

I'm mostly writing at the moment. So you've sorted, sifted through the artistic you to find the place that most satisfies you. Yeah, and I do gravitate towards ideas when I'm really I feel like my heart starts pounding and I'm getting excited about something. I move towards it, and I don't always intellectually know why I'm attracted to a subject, but I just gravitate in the news that comes out and then I just go. I move naturally towards it. And that's how my feature film Venus came about, you know. In your film calorie. And I think perhaps in the other film, too, when the two sisters are in India, the one sister that I think is representative of you keeps asking her other sister about the calories, how many calories in this, how many calories, and that was that something that actually happened in your household where you were constantly marking that.

There wasn't any autobiographical part of it? Oddly, it seems. I mean, it seems like it would be because it's called calories and she's counting calories, and I was counting calories. But of course, I mean, there are certain similarities. The younger one isn't anorexic, but she's sort of like borderline. Yes, yes. She, she's really fixated with she's into fitness and it's a means of, I think, the way she's coping with the dysfunctions that are happening in her family at the time, especially the absence of her mother, you know, her mother's attention.

She uses that to to cope and to deal with emotions that she doesn't understand. And I think that that is an aspect, I think of me that I can relate to, that, you know, finding control. And it doesn't have to be, you know, a disorder. It could be like tidying up the house. You know, your emotional life might be a mess, but it really feels good to tidy up your house or do some filing or. Yes, yes, but you're you're starving to find some relief. However you're you're doing that. Well, the name of the film and the fact that calories come up so often to me almost puts like a stamp on the process that that child is going through, that she's so in tune with that, that that's where she is attempting to get some sort of inner relief, whether it's positive or negative.

She's going there. And it is, I think, as you just said, that she's she's trying to clear a path. There's so many distressing things going on in her life. The absence of her mother even now being in India, and a whole new cultural setting, that her aunt and uncle are surprised that, you know, she feels like an alien in what they would say is her own culture. And she keeps going back to this one thing the the exercise, the not eating the calories, all of it, to do what she can to control her existence. Yeah. You know, what just came up to me was the idea of identity.

My experience with anorexia. There was no differentiation between who I was and this behavior or this identity of anorexia. It was too similar things. When I think I found photography, there was kind of like anorexia was up here, and then photography came up and then my I started leaning more towards photography and art and, and the identification with the anorexia started to loosen up and have less of a hold on me. And I think there's something similar happening with Alia in India when she's, you know, counting calories. And she develops this very deep relationship with her great uncle, who's a poet and an artist, and he's opening her up to these other ideas that's making her look at calories.

And this fixation on numbers differently. Through him. And and it is in that character. It was lovely to see that he was letting her be who she was, as you say. You know, he never said, why are you doing this? And you look how awful you look. He just let her come to terms with herself on her own. Really. I mean, obviously he influenced her, but he influenced her with so much love and tenderness and it, you know, it came across that her mom really didn't have time for those kinds of things. Or maybe, I don't know, maybe not even the wherewithal, like, I we're not going down that path.

I don't have time for this. You know? I don't know why you're destroying yourself and look at you and just eat already. Yeah. And it never works. You know, I think it never works. And I think that was the difference in my experience of my hospitalization in the regular hospitals versus psychiatric ward. The eating disorder unit is in the hospital. It was all about punishing. If you lose weight, you're going to lose all of these privileges. You won't be able to read, you won't be able to watch TV. And and in the other unit, it was about, okay, you didn't make it this time.

We'll try next time. And if you eat a little more, we're going to reward you. You're going to give you, you know, congratulations. You did really well. We're really proud of you. It was a completely different way of of so this fixation on and there was a lot of fixation on numbers in my weight and my calories that I was eating. There was less so at the unit. Yeah. So I think this, this punishing way is not or chastising reduces them to like a childlike state and makes them shame feel shame. I don't think that always works. No, I don't either. And I feel like there are more agencies who are taking this approach that you just described, where they are coming from, a true place of compassion and tenderness and not looking at you as being the anorexia that you're experiencing, but looking at you.

And what led you to, you know, these drastic measures and embracing the you that is struggling so much that you you took yourself to this place. And just from the podcast we've had, we see this across many different disciplines where we're trying to help other human beings who have a set of circumstances that are dire, and so many people are coming to it. More from love. And you know that you're sharing that that's sort of how you helped save yourself is really precious. So going forward in our crazy world, what do you see as hopeful for teenagers like yourself, boys or girls in in trying to live a life where these struggles are not so common?

Or are we just still so far away from being able to help these children that we love and take care of and are responsible for? We live in such a different world today. I mean, maybe yes, maybe no. You know, I wrote this book called fairy, which is also inspired by my experiences in the hospital, but it's fictional. And, you know, I, I'm until this day getting feedback on, on on that novel from, you know, 20 year old women, you know, teenagers was a 15 year old girl who interviewed me for her newspaper, school newspaper, and she wrote a paper which is a cover of her magazine, and she sent it to me.

It's still relevant. You know, the subject that I talk about, even though for me it happened in the 80s, it's still now. It's still the same stuff. Yeah. I mean, there's something fundamental in that process of turning from child to adult that is still it's still a difficult journey and it will probably always be. There are some good things. People can talk about it more easily. The internet, there's YouTube. People could find out more information more easily. I think that is a big part of what's making it different. Being able to express what's happening as it's happening is important.

And, you know, we just earlier we just spoke about how things that are most important to never get talked about. I think that might be the bigger problem than the problem itself in my film is about silences in the family. There's a trauma that happened in the family. The mother doesn't talk about it. She has nightmares. She she's a workaholic, so she doesn't have to. She void that pain. But her kids are experiencing it. And they they haven't been told what that trauma is. They have no idea what their moms been experiencing all these years. Yes, yes.

But I mean, no, no tangible idea, but certainly being affected by what their moms experience is with, you know, so much trauma for her to carry, she can't help but have it leak out into her kids. Yeah, kids pick up, you know, body language and energy and not necessarily words. And then and then you don't know how to or you can't possibly have empathy or compassion because you have no clue what's going on. Yes, yes. So to answer your question, I think the silence is really destructive, not communicating what is going on internally, not being able to express it and acknowledging it and acknowledging it.

So this is what you're feeling and this is why I think that is enormously healing. I think so too. And I think, too, if parents can become brave enough to ask questions of their children. You know, can start in a sort of mild mannered way, and then you can open the door and go a little deeper and a little deeper. You're so you're having this feeling, okay, we could stop there. So, you know, let's talk about why you're having this feeling. Let's share, share some ideas with me. And and to really listen and leave the door open and let those little individuals be the little individuals that they are, you know, not not molded by our experiences or what our expectations are for them.

That's such a hard thing to walk away from, though, as a parent. Yeah, I think I think there's a hunger for that from kids to connect and but not with amongst themselves, but with the emotions that they're experiencing to talk about it. And thank goodness you found this sort of artistic path with your photography where, you know, it sort of came about because you found a way to release some of what you were holding on to inside. And I that's such a valuable commodity to be able to do something like that. And as you mentioned, it seems like a lot of artists start by getting a lot of stuff that's been stacked up inside out.

And then once they sort of see call it selflessly or not, what that's doing for them, and then they expand outward. And as you said, you you can then start to see other things in the community that need that kind of expression. Well, you've shared so much, and we really want our audience to learn more about your work. I think that whether you're trying to or not, you're really a great advocate for people to sort of see that it's important to understand what is going on beyond whatever trauma it is that we're carrying and beyond whatever we've been labeled as being, to really figure out a way to look at each of us as a person, a good person who's struggling with something.

We're all struggling with something. So if we want to learn more about you, you have a website and we can find out about your book and your films and follow what you're up to. Yes. Yes, it's eishamajara.com. I'm also on Instagram at Eisha Majara, and my film is called am I the Skinny Person You've ever Seen? It's on YouTube on the on the New York Times OP docs site and calorie. You can find the trailer. It's available online in Canada only. For now, you can follow the film at Calorie the Film on Instagram. So we could find out when it may be released here in the United States.

Yes, but we do have viewers all over the world and many in Canada. So yeah. So thank you so much. Thank you very much. It was a delight to have you. Each journey is a beautiful reminder that we do not have to remain prisoners to our earliest conditioning. We don't have to shrink ourselves, erase ourselves, or turn our bodies into endless projects just to be worthy of existing. When we look back at our youngest, most wounded selves, not with judgment, but with tenderness. That is where the true rewriting of our story begins. Please follow, rate and share this podcast and pass this episode along to all those who might need it.

This is and now love, listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Thank you.