My Secret Life (8 page)

After what feels like an exceptionally long Mass, all my extended family and I make our way to the Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel in Killiney to enjoy a meal. But by the time we’ve gotten there, I feel like crying and want to go home. Mum and Dad are seated on either side of me in one of the big gardens; they want to have some photographs taken to remember the day, but I won’t smile.

‘Leanne, what’s wrong?’ Mum asks me. I refuse to answer and everyone is getting fed up with me.

What I don’t want to tell her is that I’m not pretty enough for today and that I’m not sure Jesus wants to be my friend. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to take off my sister’s dress, tear off my white veil and pretend I’m not here. But I can’t tell her any of that because then I’d have to tell her about what happened after Mass. I’d have to tell her how Gerald stood beside me and told me, ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

‘Why not?’ I asked him

‘Because nobody likes you and Jesus didn’t have any ugly friends like you anyway. All his friends were pretty.’

‘No, they weren’t.’ I told him uncertainly.

‘Yes they were. So you shouldn’t be here.’ When Father Peter walked over, Gerald didn’t say anything and neither did I.

Mum and Dad are getting really angry with me now because I don’t want to be in any of the photographs. Eventually, they give up and we go back to the hotel for the big dinner. I’m not hungry anymore. I feel like I don’t deserve to be Jesus’ friend, but I hope that maybe he won’t mind if I pray to him anyway.

***

There is a naivety among adults when it comes to children that they understand little and therefore, are perhaps limited in their ability to cause harm. I disagree. The capacity that children have to understand – albeit not fully – the things they do and various actions they take, is shockingly potent. Though I was never deterred from my faith by the cruel words of one boy, the dynamics of my relationship with God changed and, in truth, I don’t know if I have ever felt worthy of His love. Moreover, I have been sure for years that He has never cared for, nor required my faith. Subject to my own character, however, I have been nevertheless dedicated and completely addicted to that belief in Him.

More than weekly Mass attendance and conventional bedtime prayers, my faith in Him is an internal flame that simply refuses to burn out. The institution of the Catholic Church, which I have followed my entire life, remains only the facility I utilize in guiding that flame. And if ever my confidence in the institution finds fault or wavers, I am at liberty to turn inwards and seek peace in that most inviolable and faithful niche within. This is the power of belief and once instilled in a person’s definitive make-up, it lives with them in a most private manner.

Much like my devoted belief in God, the faith I had in my own illness was something I seemed addicted to. Understand me well when I say that I make absolutely no comparison between God and bulimia; but for a time in my life, both retained almost equal power over me and sometimes I wonder if I gave up on God in favour of my disease. The very thought upsets me and it’s usually something I try not to think about. If I were to completely admit the unvarnished truth, I would probably say that for that time in my life, I felt like God wasn’t enough and that my faith in Him simply couldn’t make me as happy as my relationship with bulimia. Or else, I just didn’t need Him as much as I thought I needed her. The sacrifices I made for her were, apparently, boundless.

While my reliance on her hit an all-time high and my devotion to God started stumbling, I found that my reclusive behaviour had become impossible. It had begun to draw too much attention among friends and family. Furthermore, from time to time, I would miss the life I used to enjoy. I had convinced myself that I had a greater purpose than others around me. While they luxuriated in social drinking, recreational activities and other simplistic fancies, I had surrendered to the darkness inside me. It had been, I thought, a necessary part of this greater purpose. But my pledge could only last so long. That’s the problem with this stage of bulimia nervosa; it’s usually only temporary because sooner or later, you just have to eat. I never considered that this lifestyle of fasting could last forever and for this reason, I have never believed myself to be anorexic. When you’re anorexic I assume that this is the natural way of living and thinking, much the same way as bingeing and purging is to bulimia. But it was never my natural way, merely a temporary stepping-stone to the next place.

We have briefly touched upon the issue of bingeing, though not fully appreciated the significance of its place within bulimia. You see, a binge is almost always inevitable when one goes without eating for such a long period of time. It doesn’t just satisfy the physical hunger that becomes you; it nourishes the psychological need to escape from your own controlling mind. In this way, the binge presents itself as the ultimate loss of control. It is the undesired pinnacle of a bulimic cycle and formed the collective moments of failure and shame that plagued me during that period. Bingeing was as common an occurrence as purging, given that if I hadn’t binged I would have nothing to vomit up anyway. But before we address the idiosyncratic measures involved in bingeing, I feel it necessary to explain how I came to define eating from bingeing.

After months without proper food, I would say my body was near ready to give up completely. My muscles had deteriorated, my energy levels were run into the ground and most of the time I was in tremendous discomfort, if not exhausting pain. I had forgotten what it was to eat when it took my fancy and because it was no longer a regular daily routine, it was as if I had fallen out of practise. I didn’t know how to eat anymore, not the way others did. It was too monumental an act now to just ‘eat’. Here is where the distinction between eating and bingeing began to form and also where my aforementioned lack of moderation would prove to be most destructive. I suppose it developed largely due to the concept of proportion. When we’re hungry, we eat in proportion to that hunger and pacify it adequately. But when you haven’t eaten for so long, it’s impossible to know how much food is required to fill that void which had taken up permanent residence in your stomach. And so, I didn’t merely eat, as the very thought seemed outrageous under these circumstances. Instead, I binged. It was an entirely different act, as we will explore at a later stage.

Much the same way that I fasted for months, I underwent a period of time in which I binged in more ways than one. Looking back, I’d say it lasted for only about a handful of weeks. It felt like longer at the time. You would think that one would feel a sense of liberation but that wasn’t the case. I had been so disciplined and perfectly controlled that sometimes I wonder if my subconscious was rebelling against the conscious mentally I lived under. Although that’s probably impossible because my subconscious was usually the problem in these things and that more than anything else, I felt ashamed of how out of control I was for those weeks. It was more than just letting my weight go; I let go of that tight grip which held me for so long. It was like all the straps that fastened themselves round the cusps of my character suddenly buckled. The seams of who I was trying to be burst and I lost all sense of definition. Without that definition, so went moderation. I retained little purpose anymore and therefore allowed my once-rigorous direction to go askew.

I ate whatever I wanted and ignored the alarm bells that chimed over and over in my head. My previously burning mind iced over and I now worked neither for my body nor my mind. I was a loose cannon, exploding amidst the chaos of uncontrollable urges. During this period, my sense of taste burst open. It was reawakened in a most crude fashion and stronger than any drug addiction, once revived, I could not see past the hunger or the cravings any longer. I ate until my stomach throbbed several times on a daily basis. It seemed to please others around me and so I began to associate food with the concept of being watched. It was a show as well as everything else. I performed a daily matinee of meals and snacks in a manner more grotesque than I’m ready to admit to just yet. I would wait out the stomach pains, which often seemed worse than any hunger cramps I had known before. Eventually, I would slip under the overpowering thump of anguish and retire into what I came to call ‘food comas’. Food, in the excessive way I consumed it, was paralysing and usually left me in so much discomfort that I was unable to function properly and would have to simply sleep it off.

Drinking also featured in my life in a way it never had before. Alcohol was apparently more unavoidable than food and I remember many nights when, during my feeble attempts to regain control of myself, I would drink on an empty stomach. I would endure an entire day’s worth without any food, telling myself that I was back on track, but would binge drink later in the night. Aside from the many health risks this lifestyle involved, I was usually conducting myself under one of two states. The first was total oblivion; I was either wiped out from the endless intake of food or else was smothered with the overwhelming inebriation of alcohol. The second was my own exhausted attempts at recovery from one or both of the above; I spent this time either sleeping through the food coma or the crippling hangover from the night before. This was my life for weeks and it seemed to please everyone just fine. As long as my family saw me eating and my friends saw me drinking socially, they were satisfied, unaware that my bingeing was just as dangerous and volatile as my fasting had been before it.

I recall a friend’s birthday spent in our local pub. Ami was turning 19 and we celebrated first with a surprise birthday party, to which I played host, and later with drinks. It was a most horrific night, in which a major turning point came for me in my illness. The day had been another ‘get back on the horse’ kind and I had avoided food all day, promising myself that I wouldn’t allow temptation to defeat me. One day at a time, I told myself, and I wouldn’t permit my silly cravings or peer-pressure to interrupt the mighty pursuit at hand. Yet when the moment finally arrived, I disintegrated. All my discipline and all my promises came to nothing that night.

It started with a glass of white wine, which couldn’t be avoided during a toast. ‘It’s just one glass,’ I whispered to myself. But in truth, it’s never just one glass or just one anything for that matter. That’s the problem with myself and others of my age; we sacrifice well thought-out moderation for the extremities of experience, hoping that we may reap the fruits of our endeavours in one way or another. I’ve seen it with alcohol more than anything else. What we of my generation do to our bodies on a weekly basis through the consumption of alcohol is nothing short of mass destruction. Yet it is met with an air of acceptance, which enables our actions, if not condones them entirely. And so we are often limitless in how far we will push those boundaries. Natural of our age I suppose but still little justification. I made this mentality applicable to most facets of my life during what I now call my ‘big binge’ (big because it was the first and it incorporated so much over such a long period of time). Everything I did was carried out under that rather haphazardly extreme fashion and any potential consequences bore little relevance in making my decisions.

So when a second drink was passed into my hand the night of Ami’s 19th birthday, I accepted effortlessly, having already failed my day and possessing little concern for any repercussions. Once I had failed, even moderately, then I would abandon redemption, simply committing to the bad deed I had already started. That is exactly what I did on this particular occasion. Binge drinking seems perfectly acceptable in contemporary culture. So when I declared, ‘You know what? I think I’m just going to get wasted tonight,’ it was met with a warm reception. I think I drank a bottle of white and devoured an unnerving amount of party food, including Brie and crackers, birthday cake, sandwiches and nuts. All mixed in my stomach not long before we were due to leave for the nightclub, I felt like I was on the verge of passing out with all the chemicals now hibernating in my system.

I felt extraordinarily exposed in that state, like my body wasn’t my own. It didn’t belong to me or my illness and instead tossed itself amidst the air of no man’s land, a purgatory in which there lived no purpose or even hope. The safety I had found in fasting had all but disappeared and I was falling fast, nothing to grab on to, nobody to save me and no place to retreat to and call home. With it came those nerves that had haunted me since early childhood. It was as if I was unprotected, like eating and drinking ensured something horrific would transpire in this now strange place. I had no harbour in which I could find asylum and rode on a current too powerful to control. Getting into the taxi that night, I tried to shake those forgotten feelings but to little avail. They resurrected inside me at an alarming pace.

***

I am 11 years old. The trouble with the girls in school started a while ago but Mum doesn’t know and now I can’t sleep anymore. I remember having problems sleeping when I was very little. Just before bedtime, I would become so anxious that I would feel sick to my stomach and I often cried for fear of being away from my parents, even though they were just down the hallway. I have no idea why it started but being away from Mum became a matter of urgency and it’s still an issue now. Since the girls at my school started being nasty to me, it’s gotten a lot worse and when I lie in bed upstairs, I feel like I can’t breathe because it’s too warm. My mouth dries up with the growing temperature and sometimes I have to gasp for air. I know most kids don’t like going to bed but this is different because I shake with terror when I have to go. I get so nervous when I’m alone up there. Mum tried leaving my bedroom door open and the landing light switched on, but it hasn’t made a difference. I still feel that panic setting in, as I watch the sitting-room clock tick it’s way to 9.00 pm, waiting for the drama to start unfolding.

Please stop, please stop, please stop
, I pray in my head, wishing I could just stay up a little longer. I have become a nuisance to everyone in the house because bedtime is now a really horrible part of the day. I know everybody wants me to just go to bed and fall asleep like a normal kid but I just can’t and now I get scared that I won’t sleep, which keeps me awake even longer.