My Secret Life (20 page)

I want to kill myself. I held a scissors to my arm and pressed down. But I couldn’t go through with it – I was too afraid of the pain. I can’t stand this any longer. I can’t live with an eating disorder anymore but at the same time, I can’t bring myself to live as everyone else does. Everyone is going to think I’m a big, fat failure. I want to die. I want to go into a hole and never come out. I hate myself. I am a monster. I’m a failure and I am unlovable. He is becoming more and more distant. He doesn’t want me – nobody does. I am problematic, ugly and unlovable. I want to die. I want someone to kill me. I hate myself. I hate what I am. I just want to give up. I’m nothing more than a problem to the people I love most. I don’t want to be their problem anymore. Please God, save me. And if you can’t, please just kill me.

Yours, Leanne.

***

You would probably assume that looking back on all these vicious words hurts me very badly. During recovery, they didn’t. I was never in denial about how I’d once felt on so many things. Besides, by that point, I was no longer reading them merely to dwell on the horrible feelings they came with; I was reading them so I could see myself fully, all the good and all the bad rolled into one. Both were required to attain any level of understanding about myself and my disease.

I embraced therapy to the best of my ability. If not for the sake of getting better, but also because it just made me feel better at that time. I still had doubts about whether or not it was what I truly wanted and for a while, was convinced that all it would result in was being physically larger in weight. Others around me – my family included, as they now knew about my weekly attendance – passed comments often on how I appeared brighter, more like the person they’d known before. I was happy to please them, as it was something I hadn’t been able to do in so very long. At the same time, however, some days it felt like I had been reverted back to my childhood and like I had to stay in line with all the ‘grown-ups’ around me, as they watched me play in the sand. It’s ironic how one seeks out a sense of control in such a horrific way and while you think you’re gaining more and more, the reality is that you are stamping a guarantee that you may lose that control forever.

Recovery in general was an up and down battle. Some days I wanted it so badly, while on other days I neither cared for it nor wanted it. And on occasion, I went as far as to believe that everyone around me was utterly against me. I convinced myself that they had no interest or care for what I wanted anymore; that the only interest they took in me was always related to what they believed I ‘needed.’ Throughout my therapy I seemed to be entirely dependent on others; my family, my friends and Michelle herself. It felt to a large extent like I had surrendered something of great proportions, like I had handed myself over to a more powerful force. I wondered sometimes if these people would still be around once they had ‘fixed’ me. This was a dangerous thought and threatened the development of my recovery because it fuelled the idea that once finished and once ‘fixed’, I would have nothing left. I would have nothing left of myself or of the people around me. This was the risk I thought I’d taken and it wounded me deeply.

Changing my eating habits became a little easier, although stopping them was still a struggle in itself. It’s just not that simple. You don’t flip a switch and undo all that you’ve been taught for so long. As I grew to understand my actions more and how my subconscious ways of thinking dictated to those actions, I found myself thinking on the surface level when it came to food.

In this way, I certainly saw improvements in my eating. I avoided fasts as much as I could, attempting to replace them with healthy eating. But the purging was very difficult to break. The phrase, ‘it’s a daily battle’ is an understatement in this case. It’s an hourly battle, every minute was a challenge for me. For other people, eating is just a natural part of their day. It fuels their day. But for a bulimic, eating and the consequences of eating are what your day revolves around. Every meal is agonized over, trying to consume it and hold it down thereafter. Equally, the time spent not eating is usually spent obsessing or worrying about the next time you have to eat and what will happen to your body when you do. Each meal is more weight and getting past this notion was incredibly problematic for me. Time and endurance were the only healers as it turned out and to this day, I still struggle.

Getting help for an eating disorder is naturally one of the hardest things a person must do. For the most part, this is because before you may go down this route, you must first accept that there is in fact something wrong with you. I never wanted anything to be wrong with me. I never wanted to be sick. On the contrary, I had built an entire fabrication around myself that I was a hard-working, would-be successful girl who generally maintained a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed demeanour. To admit the truth was to contradict this facade, which I wasn’t ready to do for a very long time. Even harder than admitting the lie to yourself, is doing so with the people around you. It would be at least a year and a half into my illness before I ever made the admission to friends and family that I was sick and that I had been suffering bulimia nervosa.

Once I had accepted and more importantly, admitted, that I had a problem, the changes I saw in myself were of monumental proportions. Be that as it may, opening those doors is like opening a can of worms. This is true in particular cases, such as my own, when you choose to share your story with others so earnestly. There remains now, as there was even at that time, a paralysing fear. It is part of the reason I kept my secret life with bulimia hidden for so long and a fear that embodies everything that is wrong with the common mentality surrounding eating disorders. I was afraid then – as I have been from time to time since beginning this story – that people would not believe me.

It was the one factor that ensured I would keep my hidden ‘friend’ shut away from the rest of the world both during my illness. Why this fear remains so powerful relates back to the matter of denial, which I believe many if not all bulimics and anorexics alike, experience at some point while sick; usually at the beginning I would imagine, but that’s not to say it can’t last years and maybe until it’s too late. To explain it better, I may begin by saying that I spent so long in denial about my mental illness that acknowledging the problem was arguably the biggest hurdle towards recovery. Not fully trusting the notion, it took months of tears and heartache on both my part and that of my loved ones, to finally solidify this to be fact. Consequently, the possibility of others not believing me was what kept me caged for so long. Disbelief would surely threaten everything I had worked towards as it would compromise my own fight against denial and my own faith in that what my friends and family were telling me was true. I was bulimic. But if others could not accept this, I wasn’t sure if I had any chance of fully committing to the idea myself.

I broached this issue once with Michelle. I had been struggling at university since I first began in September of 2009. Mid-way though my second semester of that first academic year, I thought I would drop out. With high fees to pay and my families low finances, I knew that my bulimia had cost me my education. Financially speaking, I could never remedy the damage that had been done.

As fortune and apparently sympathetic souls would have it, the college offered an extenuating circumstances route that students could avail of in the case of bereavement, illness and so on. All that was needed was a letter of clarification from both my doctor and my psychologist. This was not a problem, as Michelle had been treating me for several months by then and my doctor had given the referral, as well as a prescription for Xanax to help curb my out-of-control anxiety. So, I was granted extenuating circumstances due to illness. It didn’t remedy all finances but certainly made my continuation in university possible at least.

Alas, I met the entire ordeal with a level of dissatisfaction. When Michelle and I addressed the matter she asked very directly, ‘What’s the problem, Leanne?’

‘What if I’m not really that sick?’ I asked in reply.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, I have you and all these people in college now thinking I’m really sick with anxiety, an eating disorder and God knows what else. But what if you’re all wrong? Maybe I’ve just convinced you all of something that isn’t really there.’

At these words, she smiled broadly and seemed to almost fight a laugh while saying, ‘Is that what you really think?’

I nodded certainly.

‘Leanne,’ she started. ‘I hate to break it to you but you’re not that smart.’

‘What?’

‘Do you really think you’re so smart that you can fool me and all those administrators in your university? I hate to break it to you but you’re not. I didn’t go through years of studying psychology to get the qualifications I have – and neither did those people – to be easily tricked by any girl who walks in and claims to have an eating disorder. You wouldn’t do that anyway, I know you wouldn’t. But what concerns me more, Leanne, do you really think you’re that deceptive? I mean, do you really think you’re so manipulative that you could lie all this time about being unwell when you’re really not?’

It was a lot to take in. As she spoke about herself and the other professionals, whom I’d convinced myself that I had ‘fooled’, I laughed along, feeling rather foolish. But it was the latter part of her statement that stopped me dead in my tracks. In all honesty, yes, I did think I was manipulative enough to do it. If only she knew how monstrous I thought I was. Perhaps she did but just hadn’t brought it up yet.

‘Sometimes,’ I replied in answer to her question. She looked a little stunned and perhaps a bit disappointed.

‘Well,’ she gasped, ‘maybe that is something we need to look a bit closer at then.’

I underwent about six months of cognitive behavioural therapy with Michelle. During that time, we had explored the bullying I suffered as a child and how I had carried those painful messages on into my teenage years, digesting them and thus coming out with a warped view of myself and my place in the world. We talked about my relationships with the members of my family and on one occasion, even brought my mother in to discuss these relationships and all their flaws. We talked about my body image and how I had placed so much value on something that was distorted anyway; it was never going to be a winning situation this way. We talked about men and the issue of self-worth, how I qualified myself as worthy both to them and everyone else. We talked about my eating habits, why I carried out the behaviours I did and how I interpreted them as the only means of empowerment and the gaining of control. The list was endless and it took me to places within myself I never knew existed. Or if I did, I had long forgotten about them.

Therapy had not been what I expected it to be; in truth, it was more positive than I could have ever hoped for. What it did for me was to provide the tools that would strengthen me as I went on to rebuild a lost life. When Michelle and I were in agreement that I was ready to retake the reigns of control over my life, my emotions and my mental health, it was an oddly sad goodbye. Armed with the power of knowledge, enlightenment, understanding and a new sense of resolution, I left that office in a state of transformation. Recovery does not finish with therapy; quite the contrary in fact. Recovery begins with professional help – or at least it did for me – and is continued through the determination and unyielding hope of the individual.

Things were not perfect the day I finished my sessions with Michelle and I would continue to struggle with the temptations of fasting and purging for a long time thereafter. But if nothing else, I left that day with a renewed hope; not in people, or the world, or God, or success, or even her. I left with a strange faith in myself. And it was all I needed for the time being.

27th June 2010

How I feel about myself: 7/10

How I feel about my life: 8/10

My apologies for not writing recently; I’ve been swamped making last-minute preparations for my trip to India. I think it’s going to do me the world of good spending a month in a place like Delhi. I need to get away from this life that has so often been a cage to me.

I finished therapy with Michelle recently and though I have mixed feelings about having to cope without her, I’ve discovered one thing to be absolutely certain: the kindness of others will never fail to astound me. Despite what we may think, people love other people. It’s in our nature to help and hope that, in turn, we’ll receive help when needed. Moreover, people have the capacity to be more understanding than I think I’ve given them credit for. Having reached some of the worst conditions I have ever emotionally and physically experienced over this last year or two, I think I can safely say that ... well, everything’s going to be okay. I was on fire. And now, I just have to sift through the ashes and wait for a change of wind to eventually blow them away. Where that’s going to come from I can’t be entirely sure. But for now, I reckon it will eventually come from me. All I have to do is take that responsibility.

Life is a funny thing. We claim it to be our own; but the truth is, it’s not. It belongs to something much bigger. We, like everything else, are transient. This life is temporary and everything about us is temporary. What we call our life is nothing more than borrowed energy from something much bigger – nature, the universe, God – whatever floats your boat. And one day, when we pass, we will give that energy back to the world we borrowed it from in the first place.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I am in fact something very small – but that’s okay; because I’m just a very small part of something much bigger. It’s bigger than any of us can imagine. We’re not running on our own time, nor our own energy – it’s not ours to run on. And, I suppose, seeing as we’re running on someone else’s time, it’s what we decide to do with this borrowed energy that really makes all the difference.

Ultimately, what people don’t want to face is the reality of how utterly powerless we are. We can’t stop this process – or control it. So we try to find other ways of claiming power; money, status, control over others or in my case, what I’ve put myself through for so long now and what I’m now sick to death of writing about. But that’s not what makes us powerful beings. The human mind, though temporary, is so complex; so boggling that even science can’t fully grasp it. Why? Because we’re not scientifically advanced enough yet? Sometimes I don’t think so. Maybe it’s something much bigger than even science. And, in a sense, that’s what makes us powerful. And the best – though I’m sure for some people the worst – thing about this kind of power is that it’s something that can’t be flaunted or even hindered. Well, not if you protect it.