As I have now finished the novel, I can honestly say that it opened my eyes in so many ways. My knowledge of eating disorders was satisfactory before reading this incredible story, but now I can say that it is optimal. I consider myself very fortunate that I was able to read Portia de Rossi’s raw life story of everything that she was able to overcome and the battles that she fought in order to do so. I feel unbelievably inspired by her bravery and her willpower.

Before reading the novel, I understood what anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa were and the characteristics that went along with them. What I didn’t know was the raw details of what goes on inside the mind of someone who is living with one or both of these disorders. Portia has made this possible by allowing us into her mind, complete with her personal thoughts and the voices that encouraged her to continue to harm herself from the inside. The entire time I was reading her life story, I was eager to get to the point where she recovered, where she realized that she was enough and she was beautiful no matter what size she was. There even was a time when I thought that she would not get to that point, and I began to feel such sadness for her. Finally when I was nearing the end of the novel, it happened; Portia’s turning point. That moment in time where she came to the realization that she needed to do what was best for her and listen to her family and her friends. Unfortunately for her, this realization did not come until she fainted while getting her make-up off after filming a scene of a movie she had been working on for some time.

After Portia fainted, she received testing to determine the cause of her loss of consciousness. This is when her wake-up call occurred. She had lupus, and not only that, but she had osteoporosis. Learning of all of the health issues she had developed due to not treating her body properly, Portia was finally ready to take control of her health and she did not care what it took to be healthy. She described it as the end of her career at the time, but she did not care. She was going to succeed, she was going to be happy, and more importantly, healthy.

I will end this by saying; Portia fought a battle with herself for years and years; a battle that completely consumed not only herself but the people around her. She struggles with being gay in an industry that did not yet openly accept gay people, and she struggles with her anorexia and bulimia. Her mental and physical health were both deteriorating at a devastating rate, and she was losing control. The way she saw it though, she was her career could only improve if her mental and physical health decreased. This was a significant imbalance in her life for a very long time. It was hard for her to choose one over the other, and she was certain that she did indeed have to make a choice one way or another. Thankfully, she eventually realized that she could have both good mental and physical health while having a thriving career.

Mind over matter.

I am nearing the end of the novel, and I have finally made it to the part I, like another other reader, has been awaiting. The moment that Portia finally begins to take her life back into her control. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, and at times I did not even think that it would happen. After her mother and brother started to realize her weight loss and get worried about her health, I thought that this moment would come. I was disappointed that it didn’t, though I would not say that I was surprised. Portia promised that she would gain weight and that she was going to be okay, that she was in control. This took some time and some bargaining. She did not want to begin to gain weight until she had done the shoot for Angeleno Magazine, and attended the Australia Day Ball. This is when she would make an effort to begin to take her health back into her own hands.

Finally, a few months later, Portia began to gain weight back. She went from her lowest at 86 pounds, to 96 pounds. Although this made her feel self-conscious, she knew that this is what she needed to do to be able to survive and make her friends and family stop worrying.

It was the last day of filming the movie she was working on where her character was grieving the loss of her father, and she was required to cry. She mentions how she felt as though there were two difficult parts of this particular scene; the fact that she herself had lost her father at a young age, and the fact that she believed that in order to be able to cry, she first needed to feel as though she was pretty and put together. Nobody likes an ugly crier. Portia was successfully able to act out the scene perfectly and flawlessly, but it was what occurred afterwards that was challenging. The scene brought forward painful memories of her own father’s death and the resentment and trauma she still carries from this tragic event in her life. She had to be carried from the set into the make-up trailer and could not stop crying. For the first time, she allowed her flaws to be seen by the make-up artist as her make-up was taken off of her face. Before this day, she had never let the make-up artist take off her makeup for fear that everyone would see her bloodshot eyes, broken blood vessels in her face from throwing up, and everyone would know that she was not perfect, that she was ill. That she had an eating disorder.

Portia described this day as the end of her career. She was overly embarrassed and could not believe that she had allowed herself to become so vulnerable in front of all of her co-workers. How could she? Everyone now knew that she was a fake…or at least that is how she felt. All of this took such a great toll on Portia that she felt herself fading, fading into the air, as she realized that she was going to pass out. This was her turning point, her realization.

Perspective is something Portia doesn’t seem to understand in her life right now. Whether it be regarding her image, her calorie intake, or her career. Portia is in her own world 24/7, and does not seem to understand or be able to comprehend what “normal” is. She is constantly concerned with how she looks, but more specifically how other people see her. In her world all that matters to her is landing the next job, and making sure that she looks absolutely “perfect” in every shot. She is always worried about getting fired or losing a contract because of her weight and appearance.

In Chapter 17, Portia is having drinks with her friend Ann. She considered cancelling, but decided to go through with the plans because she had not seen any of her friends recently. This is when for the first time, Portia was told that she was “too thin”. This is something Portia needed to hear, but her defence mechanisms kicked in and she was in denial. When her friend saw that she was not taking the comment seriously, her friend proceeded to tell her that she was serious and needed to think about what she was doing to herself. Portia found this funny and even purposely stuck out her collar bone and arm in order to continue to make her friend feel uncomfortable. To her this was nothing but a joke, and she felt as though her friend just simply did not understand her or her journey.

This is when it became evermore clear that Portia was deeply lost in her own world and lacked that perspective that would show her that how she was living and what she was trying to achieve was unrealistic, and wrong. I say this because until now, nobody had ever told her that she was too thin. On the contrary, people had accused her of gaining weight and being too big. Of course, this is what continued to encourage her weight loss journey. The professionals in her career and life continuously making her feel like if she wasn’t a certain size or certain measurement, she was not fit to have the position or job. This constant push is what caused the spiral from the start when she started modelling at age 12.

If Portia’s own friend cannot get through to her regarding her dangerous addiction to weight loss and her life spiralling out of control, then what will it take for her to finally realize that she is headed down a very dangerous path? What will it take for her to be able to gain back control of her life and be able to be happy?

Since my last post, I have been getting more in depth into the novel and life of Portia de Rossi. When first starting to read the novel, I was trying to understand the mind of Portia and her mindset around obtaining that perfect model image. She would go days without eating, her mother was helping her and supporting her in her dieting habits, and Portia was succeeding in life. All fo these things seem positive… well in the mind of Portia it did anyways. However, to an outside person only the last thing would seem positive… her succeeding in life. Her going days without eating, and the fact that her mother was supporting her in her dieting habits would ring alarm to any person who is not bound by an eating disorder.

To somebody who is living with an eating disorder, these behaviours may seem ordinary and “normal”. Eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa are psychological disorders that take over a person’s body both mentally and physically. The mental effects can sometimes be worse than the physical effects in the fact that there are constantly voices in the person’s head calling them fat or disgusting, and that they are not worthy of anything or anyone. After all, success only comes to the pretty skinny women right? These voices are always there, in the morning, at night, and throughout the day… everyday.

I think the first surprising thing I learned so far in the novel is that Portia’s mother was helping her with her dieting and encouraging her to eat as little as three-hundred calories in three days, instead of two-thousand a day. This started at the tender age of twelve years old. Although I believe that Portia would have done anything in her power (and maybe even out of her power) to achieve that perfect model image, I am still disgusted by the encouragement her mother gave her so freely. This fact made me wonder if eating disorders may be highly influenced by parental influences. I say this because it was stated that when prepping for the runway show at age twelve, where Portia only ate three-hundred calories in three days, that her mother was the one who gave her dieting tricks such as keeping everything bland and keeping out anything and everything that gives flavour to food. Her mother willingly gave her dieting ideas from back in the day when her mother used to need to lose weight quick. This is what raised the question in my head “can eating disorders be highly influenced by parental influences?”

This was a question Portia de Rossi asked her friend, and love interest Kali when they went shopping for the first time since her moving to the United States… Life was different for her in Australia where she was born and lived until the death of her father. Life was quite different then… She was happy and never felt as though she needed anything else. Since moving to the United States when she was a child, Portia has struggled with her image and more deeply, her purpose. It was this particular day that Portia decided that she was going to go clothes shopping for the first time in forever in order to get “normal” clothes for a gig she landed on the famous show Ally McBeal. Portia did not know what size she was and the very thought of the answer killed her inside to know.

It all started when she was twelve years old. On her first day of school she noticed that she was not like the other kids… kids and their helicopters, their yachts, and their fancy cars… They were rich, they had everything they could ever want and more. She did not have this… she was poor. From this day, she developed a frustration and felt the need to do more. This is when she decided that she was going to become a model and she was going to make sure that the world knew her name… well not her real birth name of course. Amanda Rogers was not a name the world would remember… it was the name of someone plain, someone ordinary, and she wanted to be anything but ordinary.

The name Portia came from a night at a local night-club when she was just fifteen. She craved attention and fame and so she lied about her age and name in order to conceal her true identity… her true self. And this is when the name Portia de Rossi was born. A name that the world would indeed soon know.

Going back to the question “what size are models?”; Portia became a model when she was twelve years old and this is when she started to become conscious of her image, her size, and her food intake. This is when her unrealistic notion of how a woman should look came into play. This was the beginning of her eating disorder, a disorder that would start to control her every move, as well as her every thought.

It’s hard to believe that it is already the year 2020… Every year I find myself making resolutions and being optimistic, and every year I end up disappointed. The reason that I end up disappointed is because I have been setting unrealistic expectations for myself. Expectations that are not necessarily impossible to achieve, but are not realistic to achieve in the course of the year. I have finally come to the conclusion that I only need to make one resolution for myself, and it needs to be the same resolution every year; to make goals for myself that are attainable, that are possible, that are not going to strain me in any way. Everyone wants to be happy, everyone wants to do things that make them feel alive, but a goal should never be something that causes you stress or unhappiness over the the fact that you have set this goal without immense thought and consideration.

This year I made one resolution; one. My resolution was to make goals for myself as I go. Because how could I possibly make several goals for myself to complete/achieve over the course of 12 months? How do I know now who I’m going to be a year from now? I am the type of person that sees opportunities and leaps at them if when I see fit.

This year, I have made it a goal to become more active in volunteering with children in the community and providing guidance to these children. I have began to achieve this goal by applying to coach my son’s soccer team this year, and quite possibly for more years to come. I am unbelievably excited to be involved with the league and have attained my coaching certification through various courses online.

Lastly, my obvious and most important goal is to make the most of the next few months that I am a college student. I am very excited to be nearing the end of my college career, and to be venturing out into the real world to help real people. I guess you could say that my biggest 2020 resolution is to make a difference in the world I live in and to help those around me.

I have set up this blog to reflect and speak about the novel Unbelievable Lightness by; Portia De Rossi. I chose this novel because it is based on a very pressing and interesting topic; eating disorders. I feel as though eating disorders are not spoken about enough and need to be addressed and understood. A lot of people are misinformed and/or undereducated in regards to the nature of eating disorders and how they affect the people living with with them.

My name is Amy Ashton and I am 24 years old. I am a Fanshawe College Graduate, as well as a Fanshawe College Student. When I was completing my Early Childhood Education Diploma, I studied children’s mental health as part of my studies, and it was during this time that I founded my interest in psychology and understanding the way people think and act. This as when I decided to take the next step in my career and continue my schooling by returning to college to complete my Social Services Diploma. I am now in the process of completing my Social Services Diploma, and have been studying the mental health of adults. I am very passionate about people as well as their well-being, whether it be physical or mental. I appreciate the saying “you cant be physically well unless you are mentally well”. I really resonate with this saying and believe it to be very true.