This is going to be a bit of a
diversion from my usual [tiny number of] posts. I’m hoping I don’t sound too
self-absorbed…maybe I’m just a big old narcissist. But then again I’m talking
about my own experiences so you kind of have to be absorbed in self-reflection
when you’re doing that. I’m writing this because it’s cathartic and because I
hope it might help people who have had the same/similar experiences, and maybe
even inform those who haven't.
I’ve wanted to write about struggling
with anorexia nervosa for a long time, but always feel held back by worrying that
it’s self-indulgent, that it won’t add anything new to the conversation, that
my experience has been so much less severe than the hell so many others have
been through. But as usual that’s me holding myself to standards and
restrictions I would never expect of anyone else.
The few times I have tried to
write about this I haven’t really succeeded, whether because it just felt too
raw, or I didn’t know where to start, or once I started I couldn’t stop and it
was just this flood of words that seemed to have no conceivable end in sight. I
started a blog a few years back that I was going to keep anonymous so I could
write as frankly as possible. That fizzled out very quickly, but there’s one post on there that I wrote during a rare moment of clarity that shows a tiny
bit of what it’s like to live with an eating disorder.
I also went into it a little bit for an article on mental health in Concrete, the UEA newspaper.
People have a lot of
misconceptions about eating disorders, ranging from the belief it’s just an
extreme diet or a desperate desire for attention to the conviction that the
sufferer will be alright once they’ve gained some weight, or that all people
with eating disorders are thin, or that complimenting them on their thinness
will cause them to suddenly realise they don’t need to lose weight. Then there’s
the idea that eating disorders are a rich white girl problem, which is utterly false.
I’ve had some bizarre, amusing
and unhelpful responses to telling people about anorexia: “Eat some chips”
(insensitive mood-lightener), “Oh that’s a clever person’s disease you know”
(bizarre compliment), “I wish I had a
doctor giving me an excuse to put on weight” (utterly insensitive perverse
look-on-the-bright-side bullshit).
Eating disorders are horrendous,
life-threatening illnesses. They arise from an intense, grasping desire to
wrest control where you feel you have none, to seek completion where you feel
broken, to punish a body that is the material manifestation of everything you
so deeply loathe about yourself.
That drive to be in control is
central, and it is a futile endeavour because when you develop an eating
disorder you are no longer in control. The disorder is driving you, but you
falsely believe that you are empowered, that every time you abstain from eating
or stay on the exercise bike another half hour or feel your bones pressing more
tightly through your skin you have gained more ground in achieving the
completion you desire. But that ‘completion’ is utterly abstract and
unattainable solely through body modification, because the void you seek to
fill is emotional and psychological and is not of your flesh.
The less you eat, the more it
eats you.
I was depressed and anxious for a
while before anorexia crept in. From about the age of 8 or 9 I would go through
long periods of utter obsessive terror about dying, climate change, nuclear
war, alien invasions and a whole host of hysteria-inducing cataclysmic events.
I would literally break into a sweat and have palpitations any time the
thoughts resurfaced, which was often. But I would escape temporarily through
reading, drawing and writing. This morbidity smoothed out into a background
malaise, a sadness that would clamp onto my body and weigh me down. As I
entered puberty the feeling of general, non-specific worthlessness began to
cluster around a new target: my expanding, sweaty, spotty, monthly bleeding,
glasses-wearing and eternally awkward body.
A few years in I began drinking
with my friends, which properly started to kick off at the age of 16, and my bouts
of depression grew more severe. I felt like I did not belong unless I was
pretending to be someone I was not. I felt disconnected from my family. I
loathed myself for my lack of ability to commit to anything, whether it was my
previous love of artistic pursuits, music lessons, swimming, any kind of
activity that I had chosen outside of the forced, exhausting routine of high
school. I went through a short phase of cutting and making myself vomit but
couldn’t sustain that either - the only time my lack of motivation and
commitment has been a good thing.
So when my clamouring body
anxieties grew to a high enough volume in my head, they combined with all these
feelings of failure and self-loathing and I finally committed myself to
something. I wanted to be perfect. I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to
shake off my worthlessness, which I perceived as being physically manifested in
the flesh I felt was weighing down my body. Its absence would be my armour. The
less of me in the world, the better.
What followed was a very dark
period. Strangely I have a lot of memory gaps from that time. I know I spent a
lot of time on the sofa. I barely slept. I remember feeling constantly cold,
right through to my bones. Mum strictly administering 30g of cereal and making
sure I ate it all. My therapist threatening hospitalisation. My doctor’s
warnings of early menopause and cancer because my periods stopped for so long.
I remember being curled up sobbing
in my mother’s lap because I felt I would never be free of this thing hounding
my every moment. Getting myself into college and interacting with people as
though everything was normal took up what little energy this ravenous black
hole had left over to me.
Calories, calories, calories.
Everything viewed through a haze of obsessive thought cycles.
Some of it I’m able to laugh at
though. I had a panic attack at a prawn sandwich because there was butter and
mayonnaise in it. I almost shouted at my mum once because she didn’t make an
egg the way I thought it was meant to be. It’s certainly true that I was acting
like a bratty monster. But the warped emotional mind-set behind that behaviour
was far more than being some neurotic princess.
You kind of have to laugh at it
because in the grand scheme of things it is absurd. How can so much fear and
value be assigned to something as basic as food? But this is what an eating
disorder does. You flag up certain things in your head as harmful, because you
view a body weighed down by any level of fat as dangerous. Excess flesh seems
full of crenellations open to grapple hooks. It makes you into an assailable
target. If you look alright, maybe you’ll become valuable. If you look alright,
maybe they won’t notice your ugly internal flaws.
It becomes so all-consuming, this
perverse matrix of self-defense, that little and eventually nothing else
matters. I had to postpone university for a year and when I finally did start
attending, I only lasted a semester. It was impossible to study and live and
fight off this thing and keep pretending everything was cool. I struggled to
maintain any academic effort, in large part because a malnourished brain cannot
focus properly. I also could not, and today to a lesser extent still cannot,
sit down to study for long periods of time without guilt about being sedentary.
And then there is the additional guilt that I am concerned by such things in
the first place.
So much time and effort wasted.
All the potential for learning, changing, all the things that could have been
worked towards. I know this is all very negative and my nearest and dearest
would tell me not to feel guilty, it's an illness, I can do all those things now I’m
“better,” but that does not make how I feel any less real or legitimate.
I am so much better now than I
was, but I still struggle with those thoughts every day even though I act
against them and work through them. I am managing university and have just
about got through a year abroad. I let people into my life now. I have even
somehow, out of the blue, found myself in a committed, healthy relationship and
it’s fucking wonderful. I’m determined not to waste any more time.
Anyway, despite this tale of woe my life
has been very privileged. I want to use that position to enact socio-political
change, and am finally getting into a place where I can do this – not just
reading and sharing articles/petitions and ranting to people with pretty much
the same views as me – but actually getting involved in direct activism. And I
never want to stop learning. Specifically I want to read more academia on
eating disorders and mental illness in general, from perspectives which look at
their social construction. We can’t separate individual experiences like mental
illnesses from the fact we live in a consumer-capitalist society.
Anyway I seem to have begun
rambling vaguely. As I said, once I start to talk and write about this stuff I
don’t really know where to stop. So, for now, that’s enough. Maybe I’ll write
about this again, maybe not. But it feels good to have communicated a little
bit of what eating disorders and mental illnesses are like, for those who are
interested. Next step: smashing white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. Easy
as.
