on living with an eating disorder

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.