My first meeting yesterday in Haifa was with Noa, a 24-year-old who has been suffering from bulimia and underweight for six years. She still lives with her parents. Noa’s parents surround her with love and concern, sometimes a bit too much. There is nothing in Noa’s refrigerator at home. The food is kept in a locked pantry.

We sit in her room, the same room she grew up in, the room she wants to leave to live the normal life of a 24-year-old woman. At the beginning of our meeting, I give her my story to read, two pages I wrote a few months ago that briefly describe 16 years of daily suffering alongside the illness and my way out. “It feels like I wrote this,” she says, the same sentence Tamar Brauner, the first participant in the project, said to me after reading them.

I pull out some pictures from my bag. “This is my family,” I say, showing her my loved ones and children, showing her what my life looks like today, eight years later. She starts talking, describing how and what brought her to this state, describing the uncontrollable addiction to the frightening ritual of bulimia that was a part of my life for so many years. “The key to your prison is with you,” I say, “You just need to find it. To release the obsession, to silence the voices…” “I know,” says Noa, and I feel that she truly understands this.

Noa has many plans for her life. I give her the project questionnaire, which she will return soon, where I ask her to describe how and where she will be in eight years from now, at age 31. We part with a hug, not before she gives me a colorful and crazy manga sticker she made by hand.

Noa is very excited and wants to see her painting already. So do I. On the way back to Ramat Gan, I turn on the radio—50 years of the Beatles.
The song playing in the background suddenly seems very fitting.”