Reinventing the Self in Illness: A Study of the Vlogging of People with Eating Disorders

The disruption of self-identity can be distressful, and it is especially pronounced in people with mental illness. Narratives may allow them to innovate their "selves" in ways that help them adapt to the altered life. Drawing on the Dialogical Self Theory (DST), this study explores how people with eating disorders (EDs) construct and innovate the self by examining their illness vlogging on a popular Chinese video platform. While ED sufferers tend to otherize their ill selves, by producing and posting their vlogs, they gradually learned to reflect on and integrate their experiences into new identities. The study reveals that the ED vloggers view their life as a story from a distance, which enables forming a "bystander me" to reflect on the conflicting "waste me" and "ideal me" positions. They also integrate the "waste me" and "ideal me" into a "sick but recovering me" position, acknowledging their imperfection but also actively seeking treatment and believing that the future will be better. Finally, ED vloggers create a "helper" identity that helps them transform the painful experiences into a resource that can be used to help others, enabling a sense of self-worth, authority, and mission. The visual and performative nature of vlogging enables it to be a dramatic form of self-healing for the narrator, through dialogs with the self and the audience. The study contributes to understanding ED sufferers' identity reconstruction and elucidating the mechanism of the DST.