I recently stumbled across the word "narritization." I love it. It puts into a simple word the process of giving your experiences context and meaning. I've written about narritization, though I called it "Narrating anorexia" at the time.

I came across the word in a post from Mind Hacks, on a post about choice blindness. In it, the author brings up philosopher Daniel Dennett's concept of narritization, which is

"the ability of the mind to make a coherent story out what's happening, with you as the main character, even when it's clear that the outcome was determined externally. In a well-known article, Dennett cites this process as the key to our understanding of the 'self'."

It is, in short, how you write your own story.

How I understand my eating disorder now, right at this moment, is different from when I was first diagnosed (eating disorder? I don't have no stinkin' eating disorder!) or when I first began to accept the idea. Much of this understanding is predicated on my background as a scientist, my gravitation towards research and evidence.

And how I might have understood anorexia ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, five hundred years ago is certainly going to be different yet. The actual neurochemistry was certainly almost identical no matter when a sufferer might have lived. Some researchers have been examining the importance of narritization in the actual disease process by asking if EDs are "culture-bound" syndromes.

I wonder, often, how much our culture's understanding (or lack thereof) of eating disorders influences what we attribute the illness to. In other words, how do we understand why we got sick? If you've read this blog before, you'll know I believe that eating disorders are biologically-based mental illnesses that are often triggered by mild malnutrition in the form of a diet or healthy eating or even just weight loss during the stomach flu. I also know that many other people disagree with this view and so understand their illness quite differently from me.

In non-Western cultures, people with anorexia are less likely to express a fear of fatness. So is this fear a Western concept, the result of steeping our brains in the Language of Fat? Or is it, like food restriction and hyperactivity, a more basic part of the illness? Fasting medieval saints couldn't blame supermodels and didn't express a desire to lose weight- yet they almost certainly suffered from anorexia. So how do we separate this? Can we?

I don't have any firm answers on this, no witty zinger to end the post. Not all that long ago, I would have attributed my epilepsy to demon possession. Not all that long ago, I wouldn't have been able to look at neurochemistry as a possible cause to my anorexia. This, I think, is progress. This is the core of my narratization.