Thin (29 page)

When you decide to allow yourself access to the reality of your eating disorder, past or present, that’s when you empower it with an existence outside the confines it has shrouded itself in. That is when it can start to break down. When it is shared it is broken. The anorexia itself tries to stop such an invasion of its privacy, of course. It tries to stop any sense of an ending to keep its power within, and you have to fight this. You have to break the secrecy. In my
story
came my survival, not because it was cathartic, but because it showed I had an interest in something beyond my relationship with food. I was motivated again, I had a passion for something – writing – and I realized I was able to locate
a sense of myself from this, instead of from the empty hollow I had been living in.

In order to share my story, I realized that I really did have to think about how to start it. I had to go back to the beginning. I didn’t want to do this because I didn’t want my anorexia to have anything to do with where I came from or be a part of any kind of unintentional legacy passed on to me. I wanted it to be a boxed up, separate part of my life. But a beginning, and my beginning, were necessary. I decided to look back, to involve myself in where I had come from (my family and my childhood), rather than running from it. I thought of my gran.

My gran told me that no two persons’ knitting is ever the same, so if you leave your knitting half done, and someone else picks it up and starts their bit, you can see the join. One person knits tightly, the other loosely, so that the knitting becomes uneven; some parts are bound together with an almost concrete force, and others are sagging and holey. My knitting was pretty uptight and there were noticeable mistakes where I dropped a stitch and left a gaping hole. Mostly, I just never got round to finishing anything – it all became too big and too unimaginable. I could never visualize the finished article. I had other places to go and other ideas to start, or maybe it was just that finishing anything might mean that I would be judged and criticized, and I couldn’t cope with the aftermath of that. I was too fragile, too protected. I couldn’t cope with the possible rejection. Unlike my gran. Her sewing was always complete. Her work was finished and whole. It reflected her dedication and her skill. She would sit for hours with the needles between her hands and move the wool gently and thoroughly through them. My memory of her starts with her sturdy hands, which resisted the prick of a needle. Her skin was tough – it would not break. She passed the fabric down the line.

But our family fabric is incomplete – there are holes in people’s memories and in our history. There are shades and colours of supposed memories, fragments of experiences and washed-out traces of lives. But mostly the family history is missing. In big chunks. Big, bulky chunks. Too big to begin with, or to end with. To break through the mystery would be like trying to cough up a whale. History has been veiled with a sheet of silence.

Two people will begin to try to talk through it and two people will begin to shake, their voices vibrating with the fear of uncovering and discovering as they start to pull apart the layers that shroud the memories; memories which are only ever thought, believed or supposed. The fear – of the pain, of the effort, of the unpicking of all of those stitches, which hold it all together – is absolute. And in my own seamed-up memories there has been such thickness that occasional shafts of light threw me into fear of who I am, what I am and what I could have been – so much so that each of my memories became self-sealing. In the silence of memory, and in the avoidance of any conflict or discussion around it, there was a sense that the surface of everything was perfect, closed and quiet. Perhaps it was the perfection which filmed my exterior that caused me to nurture such high ideals. Such way-too-high ideals.

Searching through and talking about my emotions was no more than the psychiatrists wanted to do, of course, but I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, tell them. At that time, they would have started telling me my own story back; they would have made me into this character in their own version of events. I was determined that this was my story, and I wanted to share it. In the sharing of it, perhaps I could also transform the view of it for other people, perhaps it might be seen as something understandable, or at least be seen with a new perspective, framed in a different way. I know that it
is easier to rationalize it now. To sit here, pen in hand, working it through in many different ways, but at the time it made no sense at all. There was no space to make sense of it. All of us caught up in it were held suspended over time, but I also know that many people around me would have given anything for some illumination on what I was going through.

I wonder what my anorexic self would think of me disinheriting her power. She might reject it as not at all relevant; she might be angry that she was exposed, and that people outside of her control would have a better idea of how she was operating; she might even look for tips on how to starve herself better. She might just look at this story and make hers work even more viciously; further planning, further competition, further starving. I would have to hope that she would see more than this, and that in the end she would see the possibility for change and start to do something about it, that something would have caught her eye and helped her to see how to change, even if she initially felt it triggering her. Because beneath the layers of bravado, deep down, I know she is scared. She has no idea where she is going to end up but other people, those around her, they do, and they can begin to give her some direction, if she would only give them the chance. Perhaps this is a hope too far.

My story is not as extreme as others. I did not spend time as an inpatient in hospital; I did not deteriorate again and again; I did not experience all the possible stages of my illness. I do not tick every box. I am just in the middle of things. I had this part of my life, which moved things in a certain way and moved me with them. I was at a very low weight for only a matter of months and yet the residue of it lasted for years. It was a place I was in, a frame of mind, a situation, which changed me.

You see, I imagine that this story – this part of my life – may well not be something that I will want to write about when I am older, when the growing-up part of life might even be seen as insignificant, or childish, or even foolish, and when there may well be so many more important life lessons than the ones between teenager and young adult. Perhaps? Now I think it is important. It is not about me any more, it is about the world I have experienced, it is about the shapes expected of us, and the shapes we have chosen to make.

My gran would be proud of my story. Behind the strength of her hands and her seamless fabrics there were many tears ready to fall. Things that were never said. There was such unbroken silence, that to speak out loud was to create an explosion in the air. Nobody was ready for that. They would, instead, sit with their hands over their ears and hope that by the time they took their hands away the noise would have stopped. Then further silence and cups of tea. Instead, I have been digging in my back garden for broken pieces of pottery, scrambling through the dirt with my fingernails to discover old footpaths hidden beneath the dry soil. Like I did when I was a little girl, before things got too deep to dig for. And I have broken a secret because of this. There can no longer be a perfect silence in my house.

It took me time to realize that my problems were not marginal, it took me time to realize that what I went through was not as obscure as people had made out. I stood back and started watching other people. I realized that my symptoms were just reflecting what a lot of people were doing at different levels, but somehow I had taken it too far, I had stepped over the boundary line. In a sense it was a good thing that I went too far, because what I was feeling was acknowledged and recognized and I got some help. I was watched, which I hated, but needed. At least I was stopped at a relatively early stage. I did not go as far as could have been possible. I was made aware that my problem needed attention, unlike the voices I hear of people who make themselves sick ‘once in a while’, or don’t eat for a couple of weeks ‘here and there’, or those who binge and then starve, but who ‘get on with life’. These are the people who don’t make it to the categorization stage, who don’t get the ‘anorexic’ or ‘bulimic’ or ‘overeater’ label, but who slide between controlled and uncontrolled and feel it is acceptable to do so. And they feel this because it is condoned, not only by outside forces, but from within us, from within our female communities. We take pride in our dieting achievement; we admire and are jealous of our friends’ self-control. We binge-drink and eat fast food and then force ourselves into the gym for gruelling workouts – punishing ourselves for the wrongs of the night before. It seems that we have lost sight of why we are doing this; we seem to have stopped questioning it. And that is how, I think, anorexia and bingeing
have slid into society’s vocabulary as if they are just an adjunct to our regular, everyday, self-imposed body and food restrictions. It is a dangerous path we are taking.

People ask me what they could have done to make things better, or what they can do now to stop it happening to someone else, to stop it taking hold even further than it has. I tell them that there is no simple formula. I tell them my story, because it is all I know how to tell. I tell them that as I was drowning in my own desperate bid for control, people sent me many a life-jacket and multiple rescue boats. People sat, swam, sunk in the water with me, even when I told them to go away. They even tried standing on the shore, keeping their distance (because they had given up on the other routes), while they watched me try and drown myself, even though it was the most painful thing for them to do. I wish I had the ‘right’ answer. In the end I had to help myself. I had to learn to grow out of it. I had to step outside it. I had to leave it, leaving me to feel absent, really horribly so. I had to be brave and face my fears and grow up in my own time, in my own shape. I had to help myself, but always with the continual and unending help, support and love of others. As much as I liked to think it, I did not get better on my own.

I have revealed my secret, beginning to end. I will not change my name, or run from it, or disguise it in an act of shame. It is ten years now since I was eighteen; since I felt like going on a diet, since I first discovered my fear of growing up; since my life was taken over by anorexia nervosa. I needed some time away from the force of the emotions and decisions that hit me in adolescence. I needed some space within myself and I found it through this illness. I found a place to hide away. An act of defence turned into one of attack, upon myself. I wasn’t used to emotions, I was more of a
thinker than a feeling person; I didn’t know what to do. That is just the type of girl I was, and is still some of the woman that I am. It is not all down to personality, of course, but it is hard when you are like that, when you are on the inside most of the time, in your own imagination, full of fear, full of infinite possibility. It is hard to become more outside, a little more open, a little less enclosed.

Ten years on, and I made it through university, through first, second, third job, the twists and turns of the early twenties. Happiness and contentment within myself have come with hard work over a long time. They have come with the love of my fiancé, with growing self-belief and with others’ belief in me.

I don’t want to be everything any more. I don’t want to be the successful power woman, the gym-obsessed, super-controlled machine, who suddenly has to transform into a lover, and then mother, and at the same time look like the svelte shadow of a girl. I would rather have balance; I would rather be less of these things, and feel a little more of my life.

The first thing people do when I tell them I once had anorexia is that they look me up and down. (I am a small person. If I had never been anorexic, I wonder if I would have ended up in this shape anyway. Without all of those attempts at self-moulding, I think I would.) Of course, I understand why; I cannot stop their interest. For my part, I have stopped thinking about my body so much, and I have accepted that it will change as I change, and as I grow older. So what I weigh today, or yesterday, or tomorrow will not tell you anything about me. It will not tell you who I am, what kind of person I am, what I believe or what I will be tomorrow.

I try and keep a balance, and that is my way. Sometimes this means taking a step back and away from the noise and
the pressure around me. And sometimes it means relinquishing my control and letting other people run my day for me. This is important. To give up some control you need to give yourself and your time to someone else’s plans, to someone else’s needs; to do things for other people. This helps to break through the fear of what will happen if your life isn’t planned just the way you want it to be. You can’t control everything, and never will, and once you have accepted this you begin to steady.

I used to feel an absence from myself. I discarded my body, I threatened it, I tried to shrink it. Now I feel it, I sit in the presence of myself and I nurture it. It has helped to try and link my body and my mind, rather than separating them out and letting them fight each other. I feel like I am not fighting myself any more.

I actually feel protective of my body now. This is my shape, my body. This is my shape, my life.

I feel like I am on the edge of your story but I don’t feel like I am ready to admit it, so please don’t tell anyone. I don’t think that things are that bad. I’m not drowning, no, not at all. In fact, I have never been a better swimmer, but I know that if I stop swimming, even for a second, then I am not sure what will happen. It is the only way I know how to cope with things, so I just keep moving on, and I do look around sometimes at what I was before, and I think it would be a good idea to go back, but I don’t know how. Not now I have started. I have tried to sort it out and I have sort of got it back under control again but every time I do, something else reminds me why I started in the first place. And this cannot be a public thing, so please don’t tell anyone. I shouldn’t have mentioned it, should I?

Anon.