Thank you very much for the feedback. I guess when I was saying that I don’t ever mean to trivialize, I am saying that I don’t want the humor added to the piece to take away from the seriousness of the situation. I feel that 500 is more relateable when she adds some humor and sass to a situation: it makes the subject matter easier to deal with.

One person that I shared this with said that the story is incredibly sad, and it’s made even sadder by the fact that the author is using humor to deflect her pain. In many ways, I think I personally relate to my character. Most of my life, I have used self-depreciation and humor to deal with depression (it’s really the only thing that has made it bearable).

I am a male, but I know all too well the feeling of wasting away. I purposely made a stylistic decision to exclude any other main characters except for 500 and Margie from the text because I wanted to illustrate how the ultimate antagonist in our own story is ourselves, but we can also be the protagonist as well.

As for the questions to the reader, this is mainly to establish a bridge between 500 and the reader. They say that one of the best ways to establish a relationship with someone is to ask them questions about themselves. In this way, I feel that the questions help establish a relationship between the reader and 500, but I will take your suggestions into account and see if I cannot tweak some things to make them flow better.

On a side note, it is interesting to note that humor actually developed as an evolutionary coping mechanism to stress (laughter was a way to tell those around us that everything was okay).

I guess I wasn’t intending on necessarily creating a simple story, but more of a genuine one: I wanted the reader to really feel like they could imagine what it would be like to be 500, to be someone with a severe eating disorder, as like many mental illnesses, it isn’t understood very well by many people.