Introduction

This paper is an experiment to meditate on mediation. Please let us start with a brief story we will use as an empirical anchor throughout the whole essay:

My name is Violeta and I’m 19. I’m 1,52m tall and I weight 53Kg. Since I’m 12, anorexia has been a nightmare of which I can’t wake up. Everything started when I was at school. One day someone said to me ‘hey, how come you look like that?’. I felt shattered; the hidden meaning was “you’re getting fat”. I started to avoid food and to try to vomit, but as I couldn’t, I bought laxatives, which only provoked stomach–aches. I also started to do some exercise. After a long time trying I managed to vomit and started to do it on a daily basis. So much that it became a routine. I eventually got to the edge of 30kg. People told me that I seemed to be sick, but I thought that they told me so because they envied me. I started to go to a psychologist and it was there where they detected my anorexia. I was interned several times in mental asylums, where I was given tranquillisers, anti-depressives, serum... But I still didn’t eat. I recovered little by little, but whenever I exited the clinic and went back to normal life I started to loose weight. This illness has made me change a lot, because it has turned me into a liar and a bastard. I’d like someone helped me and if you are interested e-mail me. This story is the only result of a very simple study recalled from an Internet community of ‘people suffering from anorexia’ done in our research group (Maestro, 2003). In fact this story has been literally made out of other stories pieces. Our results showed that stories were virtually interchangeable, their structure and content being almost identical: each of the fragments, with different numbers in TABLE 1 corresponds to different functions of a narrative structure ceaselessly repeated in every account.

 

 

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