Oh Ana is a poem that personifies the struggle of anorexia in order to communicate, personally, the sheer confusion and helplessness one experiences in this situation. It is intimate, confronting, honest, and yet cryptic in its meaning.
The idea for this poem came to me at 2AM on a Thursday. I woke up randomly with the feeling that someone had just been choking me. No one had of course, and it was probably just a remnant of whatever dream I had been having, but the feeling disturbed me. It was a sticky horrible feeling- intrusive, almost violating. I decided that I needed to write it out of my system. And so oh Ana was born. I connected the feeling I had awoken with to my previous struggles with body image and eating disorders, drawing on the sort of intimacy that eating disorders have. The way I’ve always visualized mental illnesses is in an almost human form. Ana is the personification of anorexia, in my mind,- intimate, clingy, controlling, obsessive, sort of hanging off its victims body. I wanted to capture the struggle between reality and paranoia that seems to be a constant battle for those living with an ED. I wanted to communicate the helplessness felt, as if there is no alternative.
After writing this I gave it to my friends and teachers to read and asked them to tell me what it was about. The poem is so cryptic and almost vague that the interpretations were endless and interesting. I loved hearing the way others understood it and the meanings they drew from it. After they told me their take on it I would reveal the intended meaning- the personification of an eating disorder- and they would immediately respond with “ohhhhh, that makes so much sense!” Although I believe every interpretation of this poem is in its own way correct because reading poetry is such an individual experience and interpretation is utterly personal.
