Thin (23 page)

I didn’t realize at the time that I wasn’t alone with my problems. I was like many other people
²⁷
who experienced problems with food at university or college, even if those problems were not classified or diagnosed as full-blown eating disorders. We did not share our stories, and it is only now, years after leaving university, that I am aware that there were others like me who battled alone with anorexia, or bulimia, or both, but we were all too secretive and too locked in our own self-absorbed worlds to notice.

Bulimia nervosa (recurrent binge-eating and self-induced vomiting or evacuation of food eaten) has a slightly later average age of onset than anorexia (according to different reports, around seventeen to twenty-one years
²⁸
). It was only recognized as a clinical condition in its own right in 1979.
²⁹
It is common for people who have suffered from an eating
disorder to swing between both anorexia and bulimia
³⁰
and many anorexics do end up using this method of weight control, even if it is only a temporary measure. My experience of the purging element of this condition was infrequent and it did not last long (to be diagnosed a bulimic, the compensatory behaviour – that is how it is termed – has to be happening ‘at least twice a week for 3 months’
³¹
). But the fact that I was not an official bulimic is irrelevant to the fact that the behaviour was a relapse. It meant that the recovery of my weight – perceived from the unknowing outside to be solved – did not necessarily equate with a full recovery from anorexia. It is likely that at this time I had an Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (EDNOS). This means that I met with some of the criteria for bulimia and anorexia, but did not display all the symptoms. Again, this is something that is common. Anorexics very often do relapse several times, and an average recovery (being free from behaviours) length is around five years.
³²
Among those who do recover, a large proportion recover to the extent that they manage the illness in a way that allows them to maintain it to some extent, rather than overcoming and moving on. Getting better involves not only addressing the symptoms of the illness – the eating restrictions – but it also involves exploring the causes of it. This, for me, was to be a separate exercise and one that I could not do in its immediate aftermath in the intensity of university.

It is still hard, looking back on my time at university, to see what I was truly feeling. My Cambridge experience is hazy, almost like the memory got distorted, spun out of shape. I cannot see myself clearly; I cannot hold the memory. Perhaps I filtered it out. I chose to use other pieces of me to make up my identity, rather than the half-felt, half-experienced time in this part of my recovery. There was just a sequence of things, which I needed to achieve. Externally,
I was ambitious, charged, energetic and intellectual. I did not let the fading insides come into show. This was the way it happened and then ended, without reflection or understanding. There was simply achievement and a series of successes and, sometimes, failures.

I did not know how to define myself or what I stood for, and so I looked for things to define me. When people asked me what I wanted to be, I would try and find words and expressions which I felt represented me, but at the same time words which fled from any real commitment to any one thing. I had been running for a long time. I had been unable to make decisions for myself.

‘It must be in my genes!’ Or, ‘It’s my star-sign,’ I would say.

For too long I let myself believe that this indecisiveness and lack of self-determination was an immovable part of me. I cried at the thought of any real responsibility, or any real allegiance to anything or to anyone. I evaded things I did not want to confront or did not want to do, like I did when I was a little (littler) girl. I let friends down, and I lost contact with people (and they with me) because I did not like to give myself to anything, because I couldn’t face the commitment of it. Then, paradoxically, I would suddenly take on something so great, so huge, that it threatened to overwhelm me, almost as if I was making up for all the other things I had failed to stick at or commit to or decide on.

This behaviour seems to be a common theme in those who have suffered from anorexia. Whether it is an associated personality trait, or a reflex of the anorexia itself, to those people with anorexia life often seems to be a set of polarizing choices. There is success or there is failure, there is black or there is white. There is fat or there is thin. Things around them, and the choices they make, are always in opposition. It appears to tie back to that obsessive, perfectionist
behaviour that is often a key characteristic. The obsessive behaviour extends beyond the food relationship into other areas of life. As the food relationship begins to normalize it seems to be common for other obsessive tendencies to take over: a need for symmetry, a need for things to be straight, ordered, tidy, neat and controlled.

In the same way as I could be rigidly controlled, I could also veer to the other extreme. I would suddenly offer up myself to something on the spur of the moment. I would make a decision without any thought, I would buy something expensive, I would agree to something I didn’t want, in a half-shaded thought. This behaviour was the way of coping with my guilt for having avoided so much. That was the way to tell people that I was in charge and that I seemed to be making rational choices, but actually when my restrictive self was thwarted, my extreme veering self was revealed. I was moving from one polarity to the other with no breath in between.

By the end of university, I was four years away from the start of my illness, and I believed it to be behind me. I wanted so much to be something else, something other than an ex-anorexic. I looked at myself and I thought about how it would be impossible, after university, to go back to the house I grew up in, in the town which had far too much knowledge about me. Instead, I needed something separate, something far away, something new to continue my story. The end of university, like the end of school, was something I couldn’t avoid and I simply had to face it, but this time I needed to do it in an adult way. I took it upon myself to invent the next chapter of my story on my own.

In the end, the only real way out of eating disordered behaviour was to turn it round for myself and this is what I did. The desire to get better has to come from the inside, it just has to, and I realize that is a frustrating piece of advice,
because in the midst of it, that just seems impossible. But somehow I managed to do it, so I do not think that impossibility is an excuse. It is an excuse you make to yourself because you know it is really hard to break the cycle of anorexia, and you don’t want to have to try something so painful and so very difficult. In my spillover period, the reality of this self-healing became clearer to me every day. I realized again that I alone had to fight my impulses to fall back to the easy option of cutting out food or being sick because I felt unable to cope with something.

What became evident was that somewhere along the way I had made the decisions for myself. I was the girl who had decided to restrict her food intake on certain days and not on others. I was the one who had stood in front of the mirror and had chosen to make myself sick when I felt I needed to. I was also the one who had initially decided to go to university and to get out of the anorexia in the first place. Once I knew how self-determining I could be and what a powerful tool that was, I also knew that I had the ability to reject the voice of anorexia outright and all that went with it. This was a hugely important learning.

One day, Grace sits at her desk in her bedroom in her Cambridge house. There is a hot summer stillness which hangs in the air. Results are in, another thing is completed and achieved. Grace can’t seem to sit and relax. Things have been so up-tempo and intense for months that to let go would be to collapse. She pulls out a pen and paper from her desk drawer and starts to make a list.

Jobs/things I would like to do next:
Actress
Can’t just ‘be’ an actress. No money. Can’t go to drama school. Can’t even get myself to auditions for university play. So no chance.
Journalist
Made one application and failed. Obviously no good.
Go back home and save some money
No no no. I can’t go back home now. What would happen if I did that? What a stupid idea. No way. I would be going backwards. I would get stuck. I can only go forwards. I wouldn’t be able to do my exercises or go for a run without feeling like I was doing something wrong.

Reminder: need to do my exercises! Must go to the gym.
They might start buying me low-fat microwave meals and I would feel like they still thought, after all this time, that I had some kind of issue. It’s been three years since I came here. Four years since the label got stuck on me. So no. Anything but. I still can’t. Rather get away.

Grace picks up a graduate careers handbook with ideas on different types of jobs and a directory of companies, and she starts to flick through it.

A
is for Accountancy

A
is for Actuary

A
is for Advertising

She stops, and scribbles on her piece of paper, Advertising!

She quickly tears off another piece of paper and starts to write a practice letter:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am very interested in your company. I am just about to graduate from Cambridge at the end of the month and would very much like the opportunity to meet with you to discuss the possibility of joining your advertising agency. I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours faithfully …

She works through the handbook, crossing off names of companies as she goes. She is frenetic, charged, impulsive. Anything to stop her going backwards, anything to take her away.

She sends letter after letter, each one housing one of her stories:

‘This is what I have always wanted to do …’

Or, ‘I really see myself fitting into your company.’

Or, ‘I would welcome the opportunity to show you who I am.’

And, ‘I am a hard-working, disciplined and yet creative person.’

She dresses herself in a suit, and she constructs another form around her body. And they ask her, ‘Why do you want to work in advertising?’

She answers with the fluidity that never evades her in such
situations. She has the perfect response for all such questions. All worked out. Line-perfect like a perfect actress should. Then there are handshakes and contracts and working hours, and she is going to lead a real life, and put a stop to those ridiculous head-dreams.

Grace sits in her Cambridge living room on the edge of the sofa. She is holding a cigarette in one hand and the phone in another:

‘Mum, Dad, guess what? I had an interview! It was in Knightsbridge, in London. I tripped along Sloane Street in my Topshop heels. Usually I am over-prepared for interviews, you know me, but for this one I didn’t get a chance. I just sent off a few letters, and then I am there, in this bigger-than-you-can-imagine office block, talking about TV ads. It all happened so quickly. The lady called me back the next day, and she told me that I had got a job! Can you believe it? I got a job, in advertising! It’s only a placement to start off with, but I’m going to be working for one of the biggest companies there is. So I’m not coming home. I’m not coming back, not now. I don’t know when I will be back, I’m afraid. But you are pleased for me, aren’t you? I have made you proud, haven’t I? I need to make you pleased and proud, especially after all I put you through. You know, that thing. But that’s over now. Look what I’ve done. I’ve moved on, we don’t have to talk about it any more. Thanks. Bye.’

So Grace packs up her case, locks the door of her Cambridge house and says goodbye to her friend, to university and to the stories that she made there. Just like that.

The first days at work are high-pitched and hot. Grace puts on her new work clothes and eats chocolate biscuits in presentations. She is very careful that no one gets the wrong
idea this time, so she is sure not to be fussy or funny when it comes to food. It is difficult because there are sandwiches and crisps on every table. Fat, gloopy sandwiches with globules of mayonnaise seeping out of the sides. And so she keeps hearing the words,
chicken, fat, mayonnaise
over and over in her head on replay.

Grace has got to keep up with her story of advertising ambitions. She falls deeper and deeper into her story and begins to convince herself of its reality more and more each day.

Dear Best Friend,

How are you? Sorry I haven’t been in touch but things have been so busy, trying to sort out my new job and make new friends. I can’t let myself think about where I was before this. I just have to get on with my new life and put the old one behind me. I’m still trying to find my way around, not like at home where everything is small and clear and controlled. London doesn’t seem to work like that.

At work there are a few of us graduates and we are all in competition for a real job. It’s a two-month trial and sometimes it all gets very intense. We have to work late and go to the agency bar and be happy and sociable and friendly. There is lots of drinking, but I don’t mind because it calms my nerves. Things are blurry, but fun. There is so much noise and busyness that things are quieter inside. I think that I might be enjoying myself – maybe?

Sometimes, though, I feel lost. I am on my own. I don’t have any real friends here. I’ve lost touch with most people – like you. I go home and sit in my room at the top of a house, somewhere on a street that I don’t know, in an area that I don’t know, in a London that I don’t know, and I look out of the window.

I have tried really hard to get here, so I’m not going to
let things turn around. I keep eating and drinking, and making people happy. I haven’t let out my secret either because I don’t want anybody to know. I let it out too much at university, and it made some people uncomfortable, they always held their distance.

Anyway, everyone has things from their past, and they don’t share them out, not when they’re over. You don’t go on and on about bad things that you experienced because it’s totally self-indulgent to do so. You have to get on with life, don’t you? You can’t be burdened with this kind of thing and you shouldn’t burden other people with it. You should be positive, not absorbed in your little eating problems, even if they do still seem like huge, monstrous things.

‘Smile, it might never happen.’ That’s what people say, isn’t it, even if it already has?

And it is over. It’s a new start. A brand-new me. See you soon maybe.

Love,

Grace