Thin (19 page)

‘You have been so brave – you really have done so well. Do you think you would like to continue to see me? I’m here if you need me. When you come back from university you should make sure you check in every holiday, so we can monitor your progress.’ Nice lady doctor smiles.

‘That would be delightful. Thank you so much,’ I say.

I glide into the weighing room and nod at the rising scales.

‘Well done, you! You have put on two pounds,’ she informs me.

‘Yes, it seems that I have put on two pounds.’ I smile back as I say this because it is supposed to be a very good thing.

Thank you, dear lady doctor, I am thrilled. I am truly delirious to have made you happy, and what a great job you have done! Although, surely, you know that I will never be coming back here. I will not be speaking to your busy receptionists any more, ever. I am fine now. There is no need for you, and your scales, and your thirty-minute chats, and my
superficial smile as I wait for hours on end to see you. Actually, I need to go. I have bought a new dress, which is a size ten. It hangs off my shoulders, it slips off my arms and you can see my new padded bra underneath. I am going out drinking with my friends. My favourite cocktail is one full of cream. I bet you are very pleased with that. Goodbye, nice lady doctor. You should go, as I am sure there is another emergency right round the corner. You really are so much nicer than Dr Whitecoat. He said that I didn’t have a chance of getting away, and look, I have.

Please don’t blame yourself. I am an excellent actress. Sometimes, you know, I sit in bed and I can’t believe I actually managed to get up and force myself through the day with such confidence. I can spend the whole day lying. I don’t actually tell any lies, I just act out one big one. I feel guilty for that. I don’t want to let you down. I would really like to fold up within myself. Things might be better like that. I should be able to get properly depressed, but I can’t. Sometimes I can’t even make myself cry. Even if I think of the saddest part of me there is just a blankness. I don’t have much to say, so I stare in the mirror until I lose myself. I have lost myself. I have lost what I was. I try and force myself to feel and when I manage to prick up the tears, I watch my reflection in the mirror, tears rolling down my face. I try and see if I can work out what they are doing. I step outside myself.

What am I? What am I, now?

The order of my story now appears to be: child, teenager, anorexic, then not-an-anorexic. As quickly as I was labelled an anorexic, I was no longer one, not an official one, anyway. One day I made a decision to turn things round; it was New Year and so I thought I should make a resolution. My resolution was to end my eating disorder. Just like that. At five and a half stone I simply changed my mind.

I would have expected the story (had it not been my own) to have a more forceful twist. I would have expected somebody to get a proper grip on me and shake things out of my control. Surely, anorexics are put into special centres where a diet is constructed for them, where it is ensured they gain weight week on week and where they are watched and monitored with close scrutiny? This is the case for some, but not for others. Anorexics are often difficult and stubborn to treat; it is not an easy task. Because of this, there is a range of very different treatments suited to the individuals involved, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Often there is a multi-disciplinary approach, with a whole team of professionals dealing with various aspects of the anorexic’s behaviour, both the causes and the symptoms. This level of intervention may be more the case at the life-threatening end of the scale, but as my weight was not evaluated to be that, this experience was not the reality for me, or for many others. There simply don’t seem to be the resources for those on the cliff edge of severity. I just wasn’t a priority unless I made myself into one. Ironically, I needed to carry on self-destructing in order for me to
get more treatment, and for some reason I decided not to do that.

My initial sit-up-and-do-something change was actually filled with the needs of others. I could no longer deal with everyone else’s depression and anger. I could no longer take the transparent stares and the sharp look-aways of the shoppers in Sainsbury’s. In reality, I had no desire to be anything in particular, not well, ill or anorexic; I retained only a reflex response to make other people happy. I needed (wrongly or rightly) to resurrect some part of the good girl for other people. I was embarrassed that I had created a version of myself which was the opposite of the achieving and successful me. I made up stories about how I was feeling to reassure other people, rather than actually experiencing that set of emotions for myself. There were stories about how ‘great’ it felt to be an acceptable weight and how ‘great’ it was to be able to fit into clothes from the shops. There were stories about how ‘fun!’ it was to get so drunk that I couldn’t stand up. Then there were stories about how I was ‘feeling so much better’. These were the things that other people wanted to hear. Everyone around me was cautiously willing to accept my change, because it was the relief that was so longed for and so needed. It was much easier to think that I was fixed. That is, after all, what everyone had been hoping for, for months. As I ate more, and refigured myself ten months after diagnosis, I removed my anorexic label, I dispatched the psychiatrists, I rationalized and objectified my problems and there was a sigh of relief all round.

Anorexics often do depersonalize their actions in this way, as if what is happening to them is an entirely passive experience. They manage to sustain a sense of distance from their body; they tiptoe round the edge of feeling. They can’t be a part of what they are doing because to admit it would mean collapse. So they just look on.

I remember thinking to myself, ‘I must now be on the verge of fainting.’

But I didn’t feel weak or light-headed. I watched myself fall over on the carpet, and then I got up and went to watch TV, and I didn’t tell anybody and nobody saw me, so it didn’t happen. It was simple like that. I just framed myself in different states.

During my decline, I liked to read about all of the theories on the causes of anorexia, and say to myself, ‘Hmmmm, perhaps these things are happening to me. How interesting.’ Then I would get out my pen and underline the relevant bits in the book, and I would write quotes down in my notebook and think, ‘This is really important.’ But I would not know why, and I would not think of it as me, or me as it. The objectification of myself was a survival instinct – it was the only way to survive the self-destruction.

By responding only to the illusion of myself, I was as equally capable of removing myself from the self-starving as I was able to fall into it. I looked over the object of me, and made the decision that things needed to change. Could it have been the willpower that so neatly edged me into my anorexia that was the answer to me getting out of it? It is difficult to explain why this decision couldn’t have been made before. It is frustrating to think that this could have potentially come from within me all along, but I don’t think that is the case. The issue needed to be brought out by other people for me to recognize the seriousness of it. I had to get to a stage where I felt so helpless and weakened to realize that the control that I thought I had was not actually there at all.

But the story does not end because I decided to put my finger over my lip and said ‘shhhhhhhh’ or because I moved the setting of the scene. If anorexia is really defined only by weight – a few pounds here or there – then this would
be the beginning of the end of my story and I could stop my secret here. In fact, what can occur is that emotions, feelings and secrets go further in, and become even more closed-up. In the first part of anorexia things are body-side – it is hard to stop the outside world knowing because they can see for themselves. After weight is put on, things go inside, well away from public view.

‘Hi, I’m Grace. It’s nice to meet you.’

Grace smiles at the girl who is showing her to her university room. Mum and Dad stand at her side. The girl smiles back. She seems friendly, Grace thinks. She is also very small and slim. She looks Grace up and down, registering the new arrival, checking out the competition. Grace weighs seven stone and six pounds. The doctors have said that this is still below the ideal Body Mass Index for her height, but Grace disagrees. Grace has decided that she does not want to lose any weight, but neither does she want to put any on. Gaining weight would not be an easy thing to deal with, and therefore it is best to just keep an equilibrium, which will keep everyone around her happy(ish). This is all she can allow them to be.

The thin, pretty girl smiles at Grace as she leaves. ‘We have a girls’ football team. I’m the captain, if you want to try out?’

‘Thank you, yes, that sounds great,’ Grace responds politely.

Grace does not know if she likes football, or if she likes other girls, or if she likes team sports, or if she would be brave enough to try something that she might not be very good at, but she wants the thin, pretty girl to like her and so she says yes.

Mum and Dad decide to leave. Grace watches them out of her bedroom window, which overlooks the river. They stand on the pathway and wave at her. Tears well up.

Mummy, Daddy, don’t go. Don’t leave me. I can’t do it. Maybe I can’t, after all.

Grace waves back and watches them, hand-holding, gripping each other – tightly. Grace thinks of the cigarettes that she can smoke and the exercises she can do in the privacy of her own room, with no one watching her or making judgements and passing comment.

Grace decides that the best thing to do is to try and find someone to talk to and make friends with. She walks up and down the corridors banging the big, heavy doors behind her. She walks round in circles. Everything is silent. She is probably early. She is always early, always over-prepared, always ahead of time. She goes back to the room. She stands in the echoing silence and decides to unpack some cases. There is a big box of food. Grace went to Sainsbury’s with Dad to pick out all of her favourite things – her usual foods so that she doesn’t have to eat the college food if it is not on her accepted list.

Grace unpacks most of her cases. She makes the room nice and tidy, all the boxes are put away. The room is much bigger than her bedroom at home and so it feels empty, with most of her things packed into the huge cupboards. Everything is so much bigger than she had imagined it would be.

Grace sits in another student’s room. There are special introductory meetings with people from the year above to make the new students feel comfortable. The two boys in charge hand around mugs of tea and chocolate digestives. Grace’s eyes widen as the plate makes its way around. Grace doesn’t eat biscuits. Everybody takes one (even the girls!). Grace quickly grabs a biscuit from the plate, just so that she doesn’t stand out. This is not what she had intended, her sort-of-a-plan to keep things in balance is not going to be easy. Some of the boys and girls drink bottles of beer. Grace sips her tea and thinks of a way to excuse herself.

First-year Freshers also get a first-night welcome dinner, a formal occasion where everyone has to wear special black gowns. On the menu is a three-course meal including chocolate pudding, port, coffee and further chocolates. Grace swallows it all down to make sure that no one thinks that the thin girl has a problem. It is the strangest day, everything is out of place, off centre. It gives her a thumping head that night thinking about all the thousands of calories she has eaten just to fit in. She can’t sleep because she is busy trying to calculate the numbers, but it is impossible because she has never eaten some of those foods before, and she does not know their value.

200 for bread and approximately 600 for the pudding and the chocolates and then there was some orange juice I drank earlier, plus breakfast and lunch … and the wine.

The numbers end up so big that she loses count.

First morning in college and things are out of focus. Grace is up early before the alarm, pacing the room and wondering when to go to the breakfast hall. A girl from along the corridor knocks on the door.

‘Hi, Gracie, you coming to breakfast?’

‘Yeh, sure, great.’

Please like me. I’ll do whatever you want to do.

In the breakfast hall there are people nervously chatting. Grace hopes that they won’t notice that she is having a different breakfast from the rest of them. She manages some cereal.

Stop looking at me. I don’t eat fry-ups. They are disgusting. What is so strange about me? I ate the whole dinner last night, isn’t that good enough for you? I proved it, OK? There are just some things that I don’t eat, even though I am all better now. I don’t eat: chips, crisps, pizza, cheese, ice cream, any fast food, any fried food, pastries, butter, chocolate, sweets, puddings, red meat,
Coke (unless Diet). I will never touch them, not unless I am out of control. I am just eating healthily. OK?