sushiwasabi:

asymmetrical-ghost:

Alright, PSA you all better reblog. ED Community, Listen Up. This is my most important text post ever.

(please excuse misspellings, mentally I’m not doing well and my typing skills have become trash super quick.)

So, we’re going to start this off with a little Storytime.

Let’s go back to Summer 2017. I started getting active on “pro-ana” chatzy chatroom. Got close with some people. Weeks go on, and one night I get a PM from another girl in the group saying she needs to talk to me. Being decent friends at this point, talking privately was cool with me, however the chillness of everything was about to take a turn for the worst. In one of those chatrooms dealing with trolls, people thinking EDs are lifestyles, etc are not uncommon, at the time I didn’t realize the events about to happen were common too.

We had a girl in there with us that things didn’t seem to add up with. It was mainly what she said that didn’t add up, especially when talking about her (who we knew as) fiance. It was just strange. Nonetheless, she was our friend, so I would hang out and do journals with her and talk and everything.

So my friend PMs me saying there’s a missing child in our chatroom. We both are panicking at that point, and she goes on to explain to me that the girl who was acting weird, we’ll call her A, had told another user we were close to that she was a missing child. We had no proof at the time, so my friend asks her about it and A in turn gave her her birth name. She told me and I googled it, sure enough there’s missing persons posters and posts plastered all over my laptop now. A then sends us a selfie, and it’s her without a doubt. Yeah, I couldn’t fucking breathe. She was missing for around a year, missing kids have been found dead after a year and there she was. A went on explaining the situation, come to find out she met this guy who was claiming to be an Ana Coach on a very popular ED forum website. He groomed her, got her to trust him, so she ran away with him. She left behind everything, her medication included. There he starved her and did even more unmentionable things to her. I couldn’t think straight, I didn’t know what to do, and with it being an international server we weren’t sure how to post it. And then my friend ended up messaging A’s family on social media, who contacted the police. Within 24 hours, she was home safe. We did everything we could, my friend even stayed on the phone with her while she was waiting for authorities to arrive. She was on the phone with A when the authorities got her out of that house. We didn’t know how bad it was until the charges were posted. Besides obvious abduction charges, one of the charges was sodomy. SODOMY. that man abused her in every way possible. I felt sick for days knowing we were all blind to her until she was brave enough to say something. It became an international case because my friend was in another country when she contacted A’s parents. We shut down the chatroom, hoping it would never be found, and thankfully the type of chatroom was never made public. Unfortunately it was reactivated by another moderator with permissions to do so.

But why am I posting this? Because I’ve seen people posting about ana coaches way too much.

I get it, it’s tempting, having someone else determine what you can and can’t eat, reporting weight, reporting body checks…but it’s a playground for sexual predators. You NEED to be careful. Especially the minors on here. Please.

Every time I see one of you post about it, I go right back to that hell of a 24 hours. I’m sick again, my heart sinks into my stomach, and I can only imagine what the intentions of your “coach” may actually be. I’m fighting tears as I’m typing this. If it was this traumatizing for me, I can’t imagine how A felt. It’s a situation you can get yourself into so easily and it’s hard to escape from.

I hope you take this to heart if you’re wanting to be apart of these Ana Coach deals so you can take extra steps to protect yourselves. Bodychecks may not be sexual to you, me, or a lot of this community, but unfortunately, they are to some people out there who pray on this side of the internet quite frequently.

Stay safe. Be cautious. Do not do something you have a bad feeling about.

Seriously. It’s not a joke, we aren’t kidding. Being thin is not worth having to live through literal hell.