Yesterday, something happened to me that I never thought would happen.
My mother and I visited MS Wissenschaft, an exhibition about the medicine of the future. The ship travels from Berlin to Vienna over the course of several weeks. The exhibition itself was really interesting.
After we left the ship, we sat down in the shade a few meters away. Nearby, there was a mother sitting with her daughter. Suddenly, one of the crew members threw a cigarette into the river. The woman completely lost her temper. She started shouting at him, insulting him, and didn’t stop for several minutes.
My mother and I decided to leave because no one wants to listen to that. As we walked past her, my mother calmly said that she understood why the woman was upset, because throwing a cigarette into the river was careless, but that there was no need to scream like that.
Apparently, that struck a nerve.
The woman became even angrier. She started loudly complaining about my mother, but after only a few seconds, she found a new target: me.
I struggle with binge eating disorder, which has caused me to become severely overweight. I also have a lot of anxiety around other people.
She insulted me relentlessly. She told my mother that she should “clean up her own doorstep first” and asked how she could let her daughter “end up like that.” Those words hurt more than I can describe.
She also claimed that the government wastes taxpayers’ money on people like me. At that point, I started crying.
We tried to walk away. As we did, I turned around and shouted back, “I have an eating disorder. How is that my fault?”
She didn’t care. Instead, she became even louder, saying that I was even worse because I was using mental illness as an excuse.
We kept walking. I was crying, and my mother kept telling me that none of this was my fault.
But how are you supposed to believe that? How are you supposed to ignore words like those? How are you not supposed to wonder whether there might be some truth in what someone is saying about you?
I asked my mother to call the police. She told me she would if the woman approached us again.
We continued toward the parking lot. By coincidence, the woman and her daughter were walking in the same direction. When we took the escalator down, she immediately started shouting again. At the bottom, she made one last comment before finally walking away.
Looking back, I wish we had called the police.
People like her will probably keep doing this. They will continue insulting, judging, and spreading hate. Just because some eating disorders cause people to gain weight instead of lose it, many people assume they aren’t real illnesses, but simply the result of laziness or a lack of self-control.
Not only because of the insults, but because moments like these make you feel as though your illness isn’t real and that you somehow don’t deserve the same respect as everyone else.