In serious forms of anorexia, when the victim looks at themselves, they see what they believe. They see inches of fat, chubby cheeks, and instantly feel the urge to throw up. Our mind only means to help us, but in the process it's slowly destroying us.
It was like that in the first months. Whenever I looked in the mirror, instead of seeing sunken cheeks and sad eyes, I saw green skin and bulging muscles. Everywhere I looked, he was waiting. My reflection in a shop window; the rattle of plates as I growled at a waiter for the third time; droplets of water flying as my feet collided with the puddles on the pavement. Bruce Banner was slowly dying while the Hulk lived on.
People say depression is a hawk; it flies down and catches you, unsuspecting, in it's sharpened claws. It was more than that for me. No pills or psychology could rid the claws from my flesh. Every relapse ended with a broken man and an angry monster, waiting to smash his way out from under my disguise. That's all I was now, in my blank brown eyes; a disguise. A mask of a human face worn on the beaten body of a mistake. A genetical mutation that can't be uncreated.
It was there, in the lonely shack on the outskirts of India, that I realised the lies I'd been spilling to myself. It was my body and my mind, and the monster can't take away all of my options. Cuts healed too fast. Blows barely make a bruise. Words didn't register in his mind.
I loaded the gun that sat in a kitchen draw, and stared at it for a few hours. When the village was quiet and the sun sleeping, the monster unsuspecting, I swooped down and shoved it in my mouth, pulling the trigger with eyes shut. He might have had control of my emotions and my life, but I wasn't going to let him have control over my death.
Eventually SHIELD turned up. They asked me to join their team, and I agreed. The monster hadn't been sighted for a while anyway, not since the quiet night when he woke up and spat a bloody bullet out on to my kitchen floor, crumpling the gun with one fist. There was no rampaging or resistance that night, just the shattered dining table to tell me not to try and kill him again.
In a way, it was the best decision I ever let him make for me.