What is the Matter with Mary Jane? Read Online Free PDF Page A

area—people who seemed to know me, or at least my disease, better than I knew myself—people I wish I wish I’d have seen when I was sixteen.
    â€˜Oh my God Sancia… you are so thin… you must be like size zero. You are like skinnier than even the scariest skinnies in the Gone Too Far bit in the magazines—you need to see a professional mate—do you want me to get you some phone numbers? Or come with you to visit the counsellor?’
    SANCIA smiles knowingly.
    Yeah—this is the bit where the message comes through, but seriously, if ONLY someone had known to say that to me… Anyway—so finally I stopped talking about food and my weight and started to talk about my mind and my soul. I came out of my dark tower, took off my tiara and began to deal with life on life’s terms as a common garden variety human that was going to have to learn that being perfect wasn’t why she was alive.
    So why Anorexia, why Bulimia Nervosa? Why didn’t I choose drugs or alcohol? I would still have hated myself but at least I could have danced. An addiction with a great soundtrack. Or why didn’t I become an obsessive compulsive, kleptomaniac, pyromaniac, necrophiliac self-mutilator? I was good at spelling.
    I wish I could say it was because of my mother’s unreasonable hopes that I would become a beautiful, accomplished woman.
I wish I could say it was because my father called me ‘Butch’.
Or that my brother called me ‘Moon Face’.
I wish I could say it was because of this or because Josh Mason called me ‘whale arse’ on Facebook. Or Nicole Trewicke… a model in Dolly magazine whose thighs never met in the middle.
And of course I’d love to say it was all my fault.
    But you might as well ask my why my voice sounds the way it does. Why I walk the way I do. Or why I dream what I dream. Because Anorexia Nervosa is a psychiatric illness… a small, quiet, submissive madness… and what is it in this life which sends us quietly mad?
    Right now, for me it feels so hard to imagine a life without Anorexia… the only thing I’m certain of is that I have no life with Anorexia.
    And so my life continues… one meal at a time.
    IN THE MIRROR
    SANCIA looks in the mirror and finds some acceptance there.
    She walks off stage.

Links to the Australian Curriculum
    The Australian Curriculum: English Year 9
    Understand that authors innovate with text structures and language for specific purposes and effects (ACELA1553)
    Compare and contrast the use of cohesive devices in texts, focusing on how they serve to signpost ideas, to make connections and to build semantic associations between ideas (ACELA1770)
    Identify how vocabulary choices contribute to specificity, abstraction and stylistic effectiveness (ACELA1561)
    Present an argument about a literary text based on initial impressions and subsequent analysis of the whole text (ACELT1771)
    Explore and reflect on personal understanding of the world and significant human experience gained from interpreting various representations of life matters in texts (ACELT1635)
    Analyse text structures and language features of literary texts, and make relevant comparisons with other texts (ACELT1772)
    Listen to spoken texts constructed for different purposes, for example to entertain and to persuade, and analyse how language features of these texts position listeners to respond in particular ways (ACELY1740)
    Interpret, analyse and evaluate how different perspectives of issue, event, situation, individuals or groups are constructed to serve specific purposes in texts (ACELY1742)
    Create imaginative, informative and persuasive texts that present a point of view and advance or illustrate arguments, including texts that integrate visual, print and/or audio features (ACELY1746)
    Review and edit students’ own and others’ texts to improve clarity and control over content, organisation, paragraphing, sentence