Analysis Of Elena Vanishing
948 Words4 Pages
Anorexia can cause many losses in a person 's life, but losing a baby because of the mental illness is one of the extremes. In Elena Vanishing, Elena loses her baby due to her anorexic lifestyle. With the loss of her daugter, Elena starts to understand what this illness is really doing to her life. And with this new sense of being, Elena finds a way to push away the anorexia thoughts and the manipulating voices that haunt her. During Elena’s fight with anorexia she loses her daughter, and because of this, she loses the fear she once had for the voices in her mind.
On Elena’s journey through the recovery of her illness, she loses her baby daughter. Elena refused to eat or consume the nutrients she needed. In this she not only starved herself but also her baby. This causes the miscarriage of Elena’s daughter, that was the only thing Elena had that made her care. An example of this comes from the night of the miscarriage, “Miscarriage. I carried her wrong. I carried my baby wrong. I sit on the bathroom floor and bawled, soundlessly bawled, mouth open, eyes tight shut, rocking myself back and forth” (Dunkle 169). The loss of Elena’s baby was the first time Elena sorted out what she really wanted in life. When not having the child she started to feel incomplete and no longer felt that her life was useless. She started to see a future and a path that she wanted and how she lost the chance because of poor decision making. As Elena spirals into a pit of guilt she starts to think