During the years when Elliot Page came to the understanding that he was transgender, those inner struggles manifested in self-destructive behavior. As he wrote in his memoir "Pageboy" (via USA Today), the walls of the metaphorical closet he'd been forced into were closing in. "The closet was grueling, it suffocated me," he wrote, noting that one of the ways in which he expressed himself was by slicing his skin with a razor, a practice known as cutting.
It was during this time that he also developed another self-destructive behavior by restricting food. "I struggled with food," Page wrote in an essay for Esquire. This led him to lose a dangerous amount of weight, his body reflecting the stress he was experiencing mentally. "I dropped to eighty-four pounds," Page wrote in "Pageboy." "My arms were so skinny I could take the outer sleeve of a to-go coffee cup, stick my hand through and slide it up my arm, beyond my elbow and to my shoulder. Wasting away."
While Page wrote that he never contemplated suicide during that period, he could certainly understand the urge. "Yeah, I can relate deeply," he wrote. "And not only to the very conscious, direct act of doing it but also certain times when I lost so much weight or when I was having such severe panic attacks and collapsed multiple times — all these things that very easily could, and statistically do, lead to death."
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