Books breathe. They sigh as we fold their covers back like bed sheets and inhale with each turned page. The words on those pages attach to us like IV tubes, inject us with their story and drug our bodies and minds. With each plot twist, we find our backs stiffening, fingertips whitening, and hearts stuttering with the staccato syntax. Surely no connection can rival the one a reader makes with a book.'

For the first twelve years of my life, I believed that. Though at eleven I’d penned my first novel (and at thirteen self-published it and landed it on shelves), I still believed writing couldn’t rival reading’s catharsis.

That was until a new friend captured me. Introduced by a rival’s pernicious jibes, this new friend promised me both outer and inner peace, beauty, and security. What it delivered was a blindered perception of importance and a reflection that made me writhe as though burned. Anorexia abducted me. Its travesty of a smile coaxed me into living a travesty of a life, one where my confidence fluctuated with my weight and where my skin became as dry and pale as the book pages I could scarcely read, my concentration having withered with my limbs.

Depressed, dejected, and believing myself alone but for the “frenemy” chained to me, I searched for an escape. With my favorite sport, running, wrested from me—eighty pounds an unsafe weight for a 5’6” teenage girl to compete at—and with the threat of hospitalization looming like a storm cloud, I sought a way to reconnect with life, hope, and what remained of myself.

As if by chance, my hand found a pen. Not a pencil, not a symbol of math, school, and Petri dish cliques, but a pen. With an experimental stroke, I felt the ink flow like silk, watched it apply mascara to the paper without clumping. My bony fingertips turned whiter than they had for any read climax, and my spine didn’t stiffen but arched like a feline’s as I spilled my story onto the page like it was my new “friend’s” blood. It was more breathtaking than any cliffhanger and more revitalizing than any IV fluid.

Atrophy is what I named the resulting book—partially because of the content and partially because of what it helped me stop in myself. It is the same title printed in the national List of Winners of the 2010 Soul Making Literary Contest in the third place slot, and it is the same piece of work considered for publication by five literary agents and one small press. Without Atrophy, I would not have been able to shake anorexia’s grip. Without Atrophy, I would not have been able to regain thirty pounds and go on to earn five Varsity letters—three in cross-country and two in track. It is thanks to this book, my book, one of the seven I have written thus far, that I continue to breathe like the books I adore and like the ones I will continue to write.