My Secret Life (7 page)

The most powerful weapon against it was, quite simply, prevention. Once in my stomach, there were limited cures and the only degree of safety to be upheld was through enduring resistance. I would not do that to myself; she wouldn’t let me, she cared too much. So I would not eat and that was final.

Through such justifications, it gradually became easier and easier to suppress the hunger pains and even tolerate the stabbing intensity of a truly empty stomach. I soon found myself enjoying the pain. It would spark in the lowest point of my stomach, light like a match and blaze until I thrashed in flames. Then it would tear north, shredding my sides and scorching beneath the skin that enveloped my chest. It was more than hunger. My insides screamed at a deafening pitch, unable to fight the devouring emptiness. Soon it was like my body turned against me in desperation. The hollow sting that I nurtured so affectionately began to eat away at me instead. It fed off my muscles and biological insulation. I thought it a most fair trade. The person who lived in my head was the most important priority now. If she was the predator, I was happy for my body to be the prey. I would permit her to feed until fully cultivated. In doing this, I knew I could finally satisfy that impossible hunger which had gripped me so many months before.

Anything I had to give in return for this seemed insignificant; whatever it was, it would be a small sacrifice by comparison. One forfeit made, for example, was bodily. I’m sure that must sound very strange but constantly being cold was something I had to adjust to rather quickly. With little or no nutrition to thrive on, my body temperature dropped rapidly. It wasn’t the same as getting a draught from an open window; the cold had seeped into my bones and stayed there like an anchor on the seabed. It would not be moved and I would feel almost no warmth whatsoever. My hands and feet felt it the most. While no amount of layering could ease the piercing ice that ate at my toes, my fingers couldn’t feel to grip anymore. It had become too painful for my hands to do most things that others surely take for granted as I did before. From making a cup of tea, to dialling a number on the telephone and even trying to write, my hands felt like they were cramping up and just couldn’t work with quite the same efficiency.

The worst memory I have of being extremely cold was at a friend’s birthday party. It was August and given the fortunate weather of late, said companion resolved to throw a barbecue in her garden to celebrate. It had been only a few hours since the party began when shadows started chasing one another on the ground and the sun was remembered only through the amber and pink remnants imprinted in the sky. Darkness fell and with it, the heat of the sun vanished. Heaters and garden lights dotted the gathering of people and I gravitated toward them, unable to focus on much else. As always, I tried my best to stay perfectly in sync with the chorus of conversation around me. Part of being perfect was to always appear so and with this ideal in mind, I thought it best to simply ignore the distraction of my numb fingers and toes. I laughed and smiled, playing my part faultlessly and still managing to avoid the food passing from plate to plate. But my skin prickled so much that it began to sting. My feet may as well have detached themselves from my body and taken a walk elsewhere, while my nose was about to crumble and turn inwards into my face.

‘Jesus!’ someone choked beside me. ‘Leanne, you’re lips are blue! Are you cold?’ I laughed it off uncertainly before making a swift exit from the situation and to the nearest bathroom. When I looked in the mirror, it took a moment to fully appreciate what exactly was looking back at me. Yes, my lips had gone a faded shade of blue-gray and seemed to jump out from my face, which had turned a deathly white. I looked like a porcelain doll, I thought, except for the flawless finish. I had put my make-up on immaculately that evening, leaving no room for mistakes or blemishes anywhere. And yet, something looked different about my face. Something was wrong with it. Aside from the very obvious bizarreness of my blue lips, my complexion was gaunt and hallowed. It reminded me of a cracked painting, damaged through the years of wear and tear. Though you saw no out-of-place contour from my forehead to my chin, the overall composure was ghostly. It wasn’t my face. I stared at my own reflection, convinced that there was someone else in the room with me.

I was so suddenly stricken with panic. My hands had been shaky and uneasy for as long as I could remember, but now they trembled violently along with the rest of my body. My knees clattered against one another and my pores began to release cold perspiration. Finally, my throat started to close up and I couldn’t breathe. Something terrible was about to happen, I was sure of it. With that one fleeting thought, I was mentally committed to the notion that there was no escaping this horrible event that was about to unfold. It could have been anything; the bathroom door was jammed and I was about to faint with claustrophobia or the roof was about to fall in on me. Someone in the garden was about to fall and hit their head because I left my bag thrown on the ground or someone was about to burst in and accuse me of not eating. It didn’t matter what it was. For some reason, in that moment, I was doomed and the reality of this brought me to the floor. I was nauseous, my head was spinning and I wanted to get as close to the ground as possible. I curled up in a foetal position on the tiles; cold, shaking and dizzy. It was as if I was watching myself from the eyes of a third person. I witnessed everything a split-second after I did it. I saw myself get up, pace momentarily and eventually wrap my arms around my knees on the bathroom tiles. I would have cried but the anxiety had paralysed my body. I couldn’t catch my breath long enough to even do so. Without a doubt, I was definitely going to vomit. I closed my eyes for what felt like the longest time until finally, the ominous cloud lifted and I was back in my body and lying on a bathroom floor. The same song that had been playing outside when I first came into the bathroom was still playing now, thumping through the walls. Only minutes had passed.

I eventually stood up – albeit too quickly – and endured the last momentary blinding of my own light-headedness before I was at long last, looking at myself in the mirror again. It still wasn’t me and if anything, the reflection looked worse now than it had a few moments ago. I splashed water on the back of my neck, which made my already freezing fingers throb. After fumbling for some tissue, I dabbed my face gently and took off the glossy shine that now ruined my previously spotless make-up. It was no use and I was too cold anyway. That panicked feeling in the pit of my stomach had not fully retreated and for fear of it surfacing again, I was quick to grab my things, give my apologies to the hostess and leave as soon as I could. In bed that night, I could finally breathe properly once more.

More than anything else, I was physically exhausted and may as well have just run a marathon. I didn’t even care about how cold I was. My body had never felt so small or so fragile. In one sense, it was a moment of ecstasy and I was comforted with soft, almost compassionate, encouragement.

Delicate
, she said. The word imprinted on me like the cold before it. I was weak and going numb, but I was delicate. This is what I had wanted. I wanted to lose weight and retain some ounce of delicacy to resemble that of the spider-figured women I had seen in all those flashing images. Suddenly, the lack of strength displayed by my body was counterbalanced with a surging lease of mental satisfaction and might. As I lay in bed, buried under all my layers of clothes and bed sheets, the warmth still could not reach me. It was too late for that now and I didn’t care. I just wanted to sleep, basking in my success and enduring the cold until I could finally slip into a forgetful slumber.

Naturally, I tried to combat the freezing temperatures of my body with excessive clothing and found myself wrapped in layer upon layer, looking rather strange most of the time at home. It also served a dual purpose. Beneath the heavy folds, my body was free to waste away without too much attention. I have always been big-boned – the old cliché – my mother used it to reassure me as a child that this was why I looked bigger than the other kids. She was right to a certain extent. I did have a rather broad frame. It was being shaped liked this that allowed me to get away with the weight loss I experienced. Beneath my baggy clothes, my frame didn’t appear all that different to what it was before. The body that was hidden under these clothes was mine. Eventually, that body would go numb and devoid of all feeling. Soon after, all I began to feel was my brain pulsing between my eyes. With less and less of my body to be seen as time passed, my head became everything I was and all I lived. While I owned my body, my head owned me and somewhere in my consciousness, I accepted it most apathetically.

Though psychologically I felt liberated and powerful while fasting, my mind was of course split in two ways on the matter. On the one hand, I was merely doing what had started to feel natural to me – or at least what I had convinced myself was natural to me. On the other, it is impossible to fully ignore basic urges, no matter how well you have trained your brain. Consequently, I was haunted by food. While my body continued on its degenerative path, my senses seemed to explode from time to time. Particularly my sense of smell. Of course I would not eat whatever food was before me, but smelling it was something entirely different. I started smelling everything. Cooked meals always smelled the most potent and would travel from a hot pan straight to my nose, filling me and testing me. Salty foods would tickle my nostrils; nuts, crisps and popcorn were the main culprits. Such processed foods were packed to full capacity with salty gusto and aromas.

Above anything else, however, fruit would tempt me endlessly. I can sense your bewilderment now. Of all foods, why would someone be most tempted by fruit? I asked myself the same question. My house is and always has been one of full cupboards. My mother’s sweet tooth meant that our kitchen was bursting at the seams with treats and chocolate. Despite this, I showed little interest in these things while fasting. I considered once that maybe I didn’t crave these foods because of their availability. We each want what we can’t have, after all. The problem with this theory is that technically nothing was available to me anymore and there was no reason why my mouth should water at the sight of a fruit bowl and not an open box of chocolates. What made me so desperate for my mother’s fruit bowl, which was always full, was the natural goodness I knew it had. It was as if my body, after so long without proper nutrition, craved natural excellence only.

The smell of fruit was more tantalizing because my body knew it would service it better than anything else. The smell of that fruit bowl screamed of hydration and physical restitution. It also teased my very eyes. I had never noticed before how vibrant the colours were in a fruit bowl. The combination of sight and smell left me ravenous for that fruit. I thought so often of Eve in the Garden of Eden and even fancied myself a modern equivalent. Eve must have been bulimic, I once joked. Nothing could have tempted her more than the sight and smell of that apple and I thought that had I been in her position, I would have tossed eternal life and happiness out the window for just one bite.

Poor woman
, I thought.
Of course the will against temptation had to fall on her. She never had a chance
.

Being surrounded by food became a strange and almost sadistic pleasure for me. While it tortured that part of me that still wanted to live as I had for so many years, I couldn’t stay away from those smells. It made me strong too. Every moment spent around food tested my ability to resist it. When I did so, she fired up inside me like a revved engine. Her vigour and unheralded zeal in those moments was a compelling sensation and I soaked it all in. Of course, there was only a very fine line that wavered between smelling the food and actually eating it; one slip-up and I knew I could lose complete control of myself. I stayed focused and headstrong on the matter.

Smoking helped. It would curb the hunger pains and provided the entertainment that was now missing due to the absence of food in my life. More than just something to do with my hands, I found myself tricked into believing one could survive on cigarettes, water and black coffee if they needed to. And I did.

Over time, fasting became my natural way of living from day to day. I struggled to remember how I could have ever lived any other way but this. The mind can condition the body to do anything. Our bodies are at the mercy of our own mentality. It’s when the problem is in the mind in the first place that the real trouble starts. Although extreme and dangerous, my illness was never about my actions. They were mere manifestations of something bigger. It was about the mind that guided them and the technical faults in its ability to do so. Under this theory an eating disorder is a mentality, albeit an unhealthy one. It is a way of thinking that dictates our life and how we choose to live it. Through the mentality of bulimia or any other illness, the world and our place in it are seen completely differently, as if a new shade has been cast over their original appearance. Through my mentality of the time, everything in the world was seen through a bulimic light.

Bulimia nervosa is a cyclic lifestyle and consists of three main stages, which are repeated over and over. Unaware of the trap I had by now fallen into very deeply, I was in the first stage of bulimia. The behaviours of a bulimic may be documented in their reoccurring fasting, bingeing and purging. For me, this cycle was daily and sometimes even hourly. But looking back, the trend dominated those two years in a much broader way too. I had been fasting on and off for months before I ever considered purging. But after so long without eating – or even just eating properly – I found myself in an uncontrollable state, which had to be remedied. Purging would become an intricate part of my life but I would reach rock bottom before finally getting to that point.

The Binge

I’m unsure of my age. I look relatively older, maybe 18, but feel as small as a six-year-old. I can’t be certain. I’m alone and surrounded by tables of food, displayed beautifully and just begging to be eaten. I know I shouldn’t eat anything; if I do, I will ruin all my hard work thus far and then I will balloon in size. Instead, I just smell the food for a while. As I breathe in, I move my mouth in a chewing motion, pretending that I’m eating that delicious odour; this way, I can persuade myself into believing that I’m inhaling the food itself.

Everyone wants me to eat. My friends, my family, sometimes even those vague faces I drink with are all nitpicking at me below the surface, willing me to feed myself. I know that they can see I haven’t been eating anything and they’re all just itching to say something. My family would just love if I kept eating; I would stay they’re fat little girl for ever, exactly how they want me. And why would my friends want me to stop eating? We’re each in one big competition after all, contending with one another to look the best and to be the most attractive. They would never admit to it but I know this to be the case. I won’t lose. I’ve lost too many times before. I’m going to win, I think to myself.

Yet for all my reasoning and determination, I can’t stop looking at this beautiful food in front of me with my mouth watering up. The very air that surrounds me has been polluted with the allurement of this food, wrapping itself around my flaccid body, beguiling all my unsophisticated senses. If only there was some way of eating it and then making it disappear. Maybe I could invent a time machine that would allow me eat the food, fondly remember the sensation of doing so and later return to the moment before I put anything in my mouth and stop. Sometimes I do miss eating the way other people do. But I’m convinced now that all is not what it seems.

When I see a very thin girl mindlessly scoffing her meal at a restaurant, I think to myself,
That must be the first meal she has eaten in months
; because it’s just not possible for anybody to eat in this supposedly ‘normal’ fashion and still remain that skinny. If this is the case, then my contention that I am a freak is correct. Not only do I function under an evidently eccentric mentality by comparison, but even my body cannot operate as others do because unlike these bodies, mine simply can’t absorb food without erupting at the seams of my waistline.

Despite this knowledge, I start to give in to all those pressing temptations. I dive into the spread before me, hoping that if I chew loudly it will drown out the screaming voice in my head. It’s too late for her to stop me now anyway; a few bites and I’ve already ruined myself so I may as well commit fully to my sin. I’m eating only a very short while before I start to get pains in my stomach. I knew this was a bad idea and suddenly I can no longer drown out that screaming in my head; it’s all I can hear or feel now. I finally stop and realise that I’m lighted-headed, as if I’ve been pumped with hot air and the only thing holding me to the ground is this gall at the base of my torso.

I fall back into bed, where I’m almost certain I came from in the first place. Everything has gotten a bit blurry now. I’ve lost track of time and it’s dark outside so I can’t see anything properly. I wipe my mouth where a bit of drool had been trickling down and am suddenly aware that something isn’t right. Grabbing a nearby hand-mirror, I can just about make out my face in a ray of light, the source of which I do not know. As if an apocalypse has decided to take place in my head, all horrors of the world seem to crash down on top of me, igniting trepidation and hysteria. All my teeth have fallen out. I open my mouth just wide enough to see big pink gums and my tongue falling around in my mouth, no teeth to keep it fenced in.

‘Mum!’ I start screaming, but to little avail because it sounds too muffled for anyone to hear. ‘Mum! Come in here, Mum! My teeth, I need help!’

***

When I finally woke up, I was temporarily still convinced that there wasn’t a tooth left in my head. After a few moments of lingering distress, I slumped back on my pillow, reassured that it had just been a dream. But my uneasiness was always difficult to shake off and these nightmares usually left a moody and irritable residue to each new day’s premiere. They were quite common by that point in my life. Perhaps they had even become nightly occurrence but thankfully I didn’t always remember them. They were more or less the same from night to night; I would start bingeing on food in whatever the given circumstance and would somehow finish the dream with no teeth and an alarmingly realistic foreboding that would persist long after waking.

They were only dreams and given I had never read too deeply into them in the past I wasn’t about to start doing so now, regardless of the context. Besides, I had little interest in dwelling upon the subconscious when my conscious reality had begun to reach such a point of turmoil. An eating disorder comes about as a consequence of a great number of varying factors, as we have seen and continue to explore. What enables it to persevere and adopt new manifestations is often subject to the ongoing lifestyle of the given individual. As well as feeding on the person whose body it inhabits, an eating disorder feeds on the environment in which it lives. It is mutable in this way. Its ability to bend and contort as a means of fitting the necessary mould is both skilful and an absolute requirement to guarantee its further existence.

I suppose, it is this faculty that determined my eating disorder as bulimia as opposed to anything else. It took a measure of time though; I suffered an eating disorder long before I acted out any bulimic behaviours. The problem is that these words, phrases and concepts to which we attribute such mental illnesses are too ambiguous in their meaning. They are umbrella terms that have been generalised to a point of mild obscurity, if not total equivocation. Moreover, our understanding of them is usually very primitive, perhaps even completely ignorant, in comparison to the complexity of the particular disease. An acquaintance of mine, with whom intellect had not graced and who was aware that I’d struggled in this way, once highlighted my point perfectly.

‘Aren’t you, like, anorexic or something?’ he said to me. Yes, he executed his question exactly like that. Needless to say, I was unimpressed. But there seemed little point in lying; I had only recently written an article for my university newspaper in which I detailed my story, hoping to God some good may come out of it. Instead, I got this guy.

‘No. I’m bulimic’ I told him.

‘Oh right, yeah. That’s the one where you make yourself sick, isn’t it?’

‘That’s the one.’ If monotone sarcasm ever had a moment of prodigious notoriety, that would have been it.
Well this is just brilliant
, I thought to myself. Two years of emotional and psychological depravity and in one sentence, this guy had defined what it is to be a bulimic, convinced himself of whatever meaning he gave it and I imagine that in his own head, the matter was now completely resolved and closed for ever.

If I worked under the terms that this person set down for bulimia, for example, then what was I before I began purging? I don’t think it is so simple that I could say I was anorexic for some months and then later turned bulimic. Perhaps it would make all this much easier for us to comprehend if we opted to believe the above. But in doing so, we would disregard the accuracy with which we are attempting to analyse an eating disorder. Sometimes I wonder if it’s possible to be bulimic without displaying bulimic behaviours such as purging. But then I realise that nobody would understand this, not without understanding her and how she conducts herself. The fasting process I underwent prior to my bulimia was, you see, part of it. It was key in the cyclical behaviours that are governed by a repetitive mentality. One doesn’t merely resolve to never again let a meal rest in their body. Something has to provoke the thought and more than this, something has to make you really believe it.

In this way, my months of fasting didn’t merely provide me with the determination to just lose weight; they instilled that raw and pure belief in what I was doing. Though others may argue that the overall purpose was to lose weight, in reality, purpose had very little to do with it. Belief is a staggeringly powerful weapon and once it existed in its truest form, I abandoned logic because I knew that it could be championed by blind faith anyway. This was how I ought to live and I believed that, for the sake of believing something.

I’ve been told I have an addictive personality. It’s a fair assertion and not something I would deny with too much haste. I’m susceptible to becoming addicted to most things; lifestyles, people, moods, activities, you name it. It’s this aspect to my character that often sanctions and fuels my perfectionism in life. But through all my time spent thinking over those two years, I have wondered so much whether I simply allowed myself to become addicted to that bulimic mentality. Or better still, perhaps I just became addicted to the concept of belief, no matter where it fell. It’s natural for everyone to want to believe in something. I’ve never been an exception; my belief in God, for example, has been unyielding and pure in substance. I’ve had blind faith in Him since an extremely young age, probably since I was old enough to even grasp the notion. I never remember a time in my life when God was not in it.

***

I am seven years old. I attend family Mass every Sunday with Mum and Natalie. Dad and Peter don’t go to mass anymore so I pray extra hard for them. I always link Mum’s arm and Natalie does the same on the other side of her; we get uncomfortable on the wooden benches and fight with one another so Mum separates us by putting herself between us. But today Natalie and I can’t fight because it’s my First Holy Communion and everyone has to be on their best behaviour. Father Peter hasn’t even started speaking yet but I’m already tired.

Last night, Mum put the rags in my hair to prepare me for today. While I was practising singing This Little Light of Mine, she shredded a towel into strips, curled each around a chunk of my hair and knotted it on my head. I hate the rags and usually cry because they hurt my head. My hair is full with ringlets of hair now and my scalp is still sizzling from when they were taken out this morning. I don’t know why we spent so much time on my hair because it’s covered with a veil now anyway. I’m wearing Natalie’s Communion dress, which has been altered to fit me and also to look slightly different so nobody will know it’s the same dress. It resembles a white wedding cake, with frills falling like snow atop its silk threading and a pink bow at every turn. But it still feels too tight because Natalie is smaller than me and I’m too fat for it. I move around awkwardly, my dress making a noise similar to paper scraping on the floor with every gesture.

I’ve been looking forward to today for a really long time. My teacher had everyone in the class make their own poster with a stained-glass candle. They’re made out of coloured crepe paper, all stuck together on one sheet. Looking around, the church walls are dotted with those paper candles. Blues, reds, yellows and greens illuminate the building when hit by the rays of sunlight beating in. I’ve heard of the Northern Lights and how you can only see them in certain parts of the world. Spinning my head around all the colours of the church, I think this is like the crepe paper version of the Northern Lights. All the preparation we did was worth it because amidst the rainbow-spotted walls, I can see my stained-glass candle. It looks just as important as everyone else’s and I feel part of something really big. My candle belongs on that wall the way I belong to Jesus and to God.

After the first hymn, Father Peter starts speaking up on the altar. He’s my favourite priest in St. Fergal’s Parish because he hasn’t got grey hair yet, sings along with the choir and always talks to everyone after Mass. I’ve also never taken confession with him; I don’t like seeing the priests after I’ve taken confession because then they know all the lies I’ve told, how often I fight with my sister and how sometimes I don’t say my prayers. For now, Father Peter knows none of these things and I’m glad. When everyone is listening to the readings, I’m looking at the wooden crucifix that hangs at the top of the church. It’s huge and always looks like it’s about to fall down but after so long of seeing it, I never notice it anymore. It should scare me but it doesn’t because there is at least one crucifix in every house I’ve been inside; I’m used to them. But for now, I’m lost in that crucifix at the top of the church, thinking about Jesus and whether he made a lot of money on his Communion day. Everyone says that relatives, like all your aunts and uncles, have to give you money when you make your Communion; some kids make hundreds.

But I don’t want to make loads of money because it means that I have to spend the day visiting neighbours and relatives to collect it. I hate doing that because everyone will ask me stupid questions that they don’t want to ask and that I don’t want to answer. I’d prefer not to go visiting and just forget about the money. Besides, Ms Dilleen says that we’re not supposed to hope for money or presents and that today is special because it is the first time we will receive the Holy Eucharist. If we wish for anything else, we shouldn’t receive the Body of Christ because nothing is more important than that. I don’t want to accept the Body for the wrong reasons because I want Jesus to trust me.

‘You’re lying.’ Gerald said to me in class last week. ‘Everybody wants money on their Communion. Stop lying.’

‘I’m not lying.’ I told him.

‘Yes you are. You don’t actually think God is real, do you?’

‘He is real.’

‘I bet you believe in Santa too.’ Gerald laughed at me all day after that and told everybody that I believed in Santa Claus. I wanted to tell everyone that Gerald didn’t believe in God because I know everybody does and that they would think he was really bold for not believing in Him. But I was afraid of getting in trouble with the teacher, so did nothing instead.

It doesn’t matter what Gerald said anyway because it’s a sin to not believe in God. I’ve been looking forward to my Communion for weeks and even though I know Gerald is probably really bored somewhere in the church, I’m too happy today to care. But when I finally receive the Holy Communion, the moment passes before I know it has happened. I thought when I first took the Body that it would be a moment of pure magic and that I would feel God’s touch, like a spell had been cast on me. I barely realise it has even occurred until the wafer-thin bread gets stuck to the roof of my mouth as I walk back to my seat. I don’t mind any of this because I know that God doesn’t have to prove anything to me and that this is the whole point of belief and why they call it ‘blind faith’. We were told this in school and so I believe it.