Small Acts of Disappearance (9 page)

I've been obsessed, lately, with reading about the brain, and the ways in which it hungers. In the first hospital, one of the psychologists was researching ways of mapping and re-mediating the starving brain, using functional MRI scans to chart which areas become active when eating-disordered patients are shown images of food, or asked to read out lists of words, when every now and then these words are interspersed with something non-benign: a word like ice-cream, restaurant, sugar, kilojoule, oil. In America,
psychologists have used the same techniques to try to understand how a hungry brain reacts to the act of eating itself, and have found that while a healthy brain responds to food with activity along a circuit that registers pleasure, then safety and contentment – it tastes good, it is good, I am good – an anorectic brain doesn't register pleasure when eating at all, so the entire circuit is confused. The brain cannot decide if the food is good or dangerous, if the body is safe or at some uncertain kind of risk. There's no release of the reward chemicals, dopamine and serotonin, no cognitive reward for eating at all.

Other researchers have found that anorectic brains have stronger mechanisms for impulse control and for working memory, but poorly-functioning circuits for body awareness, for the recognition of physical pain – including pangs of hunger. I recognise all of this. I can remember making my way, in the first weeks of my second admission, to a lazily-late weekend breakfast with friends, with a strange feeling in my stomach, not quite nauseous, not quite anxious, but somehow close to both, and that it took me several minutes to realise I was hungry. I still lose interest in my meals long before I've eaten an appropriate amount, they still don't give me pleasure, by and large. On the other hand, my working memory for food is acute: I can still account for every single thing I've eaten over the last few days, the number of chips I may have grabbed at a party, the pieces of cheese I've picked from a platter.

But all of this understanding falls down in the face
of the specifics of my disease: it cannot help me when I'm sitting at a restaurant table surrounded by the serving plates of a shared banquet, it cannot help me when I'm desperately trying to breathe through the spasming of my oesophageal sphincter, when I'm reading a café menu and can't trust my own instincts or lack of desire.

I can't write easily about recovering because I vacillate, each day, between knowing that it's possible, and thinking that I'm not up to the task, or that my physical condition will always hold me back. I've lived for so long with my hunger, through my hunger, that my imagination fails sometimes, when I try to think of how things might be different.

When I first started writing this essay, almost six months after my second admission, I found myself driving back home after another extended dinner with my family – which now includes an additional two nieces, and my sister's partner – along the same roads, almost empty and lined with sleepy fibro houses, spilling coloured light from their TVs onto their front lawns. I'd pulled the roast chicken meat off the bones and shredded it, flipped it underneath the leafy vegetables I'd left on my plate; and I had been relieved when my sister-in-law brought along six ramekins of dessert, even though we were seven adults there. I found myself sobbing again at the traffic lights, gulping in air, and I thought, again, that I couldn't go on like this, even as I knew that I had no choice. This happens often, these moments of exhaustion
and despair, and to all of the other patients I have spoken to. There's no room in any narrative of recovery I've ever seen for this terrible sadness, this unreasonable fear, and these unmeasurable movements, backwards and forwards and sideways, towards, away from and around whatever a return to health might mean.

One of the most profound changes in an anorectic brain is a rigidity in thinking, an inability to adapt cognitively to sudden changes, to let go of small details that don't matter; and it's certainly evident in the way that we eat, or think about eating. At my sickest I used to sit at the same place at my dining table for every meal, at the same times every day, using the same single set of cutlery, to know by rote the quantities before me, ten beans, three slices of tomato. I'd plan my meals hours in advance, prepare them carefully and slowly, and I still miss this focus sometimes. I miss its simplicity, how the physical world becomes heavier, almost, and everything else falls away; how the immediacy of that physical hunger, the continual tiny distractions it enforces on the body and the brain, subsumes and consumes everything greater: sadness, disappointment, uncertainty, fear.

Now I think that it's the little things, the details, that will bring me through and cut me clear. The way I haven't felt the burn of chilblains on my toes this winter. The way the saltiness of butter can bite through the thick, sharp sweetness of a piece of good fruit toast. The ability to read a
book over one full day and not be made to lose focus by my anxious body. To be able to feel time just slip away, rather than congeal into long minutes of waiting for the next meal. The single days, the single meals, the tiny victories that are all the increments of change.

In recent months, I've met, for the first time, three women who are able to talk about their hunger in the past tense. I've been stunned, each time, by how normal, how unmarked they each seemed. They are all vivacious and delightfully quirky women, a writer, a designer and a lawyer, respectively. One has a healthy adolescent daughter of her own; she ordered toast when we met in a café, so that I wouldn't have to eat my morning tea alone, but this was the only hint I had, a hint only visible to the initiated, that she had ever been unwell. One of my friends from hospital refers to these people, fully recovered, as ‘unicorns', because they seem like mythical beasts, so often talked about, even if few – if any – of us have ever seen them. Directly or indirectly, I've asked each of them how they were able to pull themselves clear. None of them knew; years later, the processes are unfathomable even to them. They still can't name exactly what it was that changed. Perhaps it is this that might give me hope. That something might be happening, in increments, that is outside my knowledge, outside narrative or explanation, even outside any language I might use to try and pin it down.

IN BOOKS I

 

 

 

 

 

T
he year that I first became ill, when my physical condition first developed, was the first year that I studied Australian Literature. I was in my second year of university, and was actually studying a lot of literature, as a kind of salve to the media subjects that I'd enrolled in, thinking at the time that I might like to be a journalist. (I now think of this as a bullet dodged.) One of my literature subjects was a course on nineteenth-century German prose, riddled with novels about hysterical women, sanatoria and destructive unconsciousnesses. Yet it wasn't here but in my Australian Literature lectures that I learnt about the shock of recognition; the German lecturers were more concerned with accusative declension and pluperfect tense.

The year that I first became ill, when I started vomiting without volition, no one could figure out what was happening to my body. I had gastroscopies, barium swallows, I kept food
diaries. I threw up a pH monitor that had been inserted into my stomach through my nose with my first post-procedural meal and then spent several hours in Emergency, waiting for a nurse to remove it, coiled up in the back of my mouth. I lost count of the number of times doctors asked if I might be pregnant, or how I felt about my body. A specialist asked my mother, while I was present in the room, if she knew ‘why I was doing this'. But the ground hadn't shifted then, at least as far as I can tell.

In the year that I first became ill I remember climbing the concrete stairs at Mortdale station and concentrating on each protesting muscle, feeling as though my legs were moving by telekinesis alone; and the almost physical longing I felt on the way through Redfern when I saw a sign on the gate of a sharehouse:
If you lived here, you'd be home by now,
and then in smaller letters
Housemate wanted.

That year I read, for the first time, Christina Stead's
For Love Alone.
I was nineteen, and it was a set text. I remember that I disliked the male protagonist Jonathan Crowe for his selfobsession and coldness, a coldness that I thought extended to the book as a whole. I found the novel old-fashioned and too rigidly structured, the dialogue too ornate and stagey to feel poignant, to feel real. But even then, there was one section that stopped me dead, and that remained for years as my overriding memory of the book. Teresa, the intelligent and passionate heroine – she who suffers for love alone – is
working in a factory in Redfern and relentlessly saving all of her money in order to buy a passage to London. Rather than pay for trams between the ferry terminal and the factory, Teresa walks. From Circular Quay to Redfern, and back, every day. She saves money; she goes hungry rather than pay for lunch, and she walks, both ways, each day. Stead's description of Teresa's physical exhaustion, of the ravages of hunger on her body, cut me to my ever-more prominent bones.

Early on, when Teresa begins to feel ‘the resistance of the body' that she's pushing to its limits, just as I was mine, she divides her route into defined stretches. From the ferry to the Law School to the courts to a primary school to Hyde Park, to Tooth's Brewery, Mark Foy's, a barber, a park, a station, a street in Surry Hills, a war museum, another park, a chapel, a bridge. This is something I too had been doing, on those late and suddenly biting-cold autumn afternoons, when the walk from the lecture hall in the university's Woolley Building to the steep concrete steps at Redfern station, where an upswept draught was always and inexplicably howling, seemed unimaginably long, the idea of it alone exhausting. I found I could will myself through small stages, landmark to landmark, until I reached the dirty peach tiles of the station and sat down, propped against a pillar.

So too did the progression of Teresa's disintegration resonate with me. Teresa spends more than three years walking, being spare with her energy and money, hungering for the start of
her new life. These three years are all but elided in the book, as if no real living, no real memory-making occurs within in them. All there is, is Teresa's walking, Teresa's hunger:

When she had less than a year to go, she became very weak…She became indifferent to everyone…She was beginning to notice the noise in the streets, which increased her fatigue; the smell of brewing was getting stronger and sickened her. She avoided food shops and lemonade stands. She had found the kind of step that cost her the least fatigue, a firm lope, though it might not have looked as easy as a drag and slouch…and even when she was half-fainting, she never forgot to walk with this peculiar, life-saving step which cost the least energy…She dreamed; she saw fewer people on the crowded streets but she bumped into no one…She recognised no faces and never in all these years, though she had been bred and brought up in the city, saw a person she knew on the street. She recognised noises and smells, however, things that guided her when her eyes became milky or dark as they did occasionally…She developed the acuity of a savage, in sound and in smell.

These things I remember from that period: constantly arguing with my sister in our shared car about the volume of her music, which made my brain feel foggy but which she insisted she could barely hear. Introducing myself to people who I'd already met, often several times, at picnics or parties, but was unable to recognise because I'd been almost half-conscious,
ghosted by hunger when we'd conversed; on the other hand, even now, being able to recall in detail exactly which foods were served at particular gatherings: the three different cheeses and cherry tomatoes at last year's Christmas picnic, the chicken wings, potato bake and four varieties of salad at my niece's christening, the veal and pumpkin stir-fry my mother made on my twenty-first birthday. How awful I found the smell of bacon, how I'd phase in and out of conversations held around me, unable to concentrate on anything more than the bare bones of a story. I feel, sometimes, that my higher functioning has been milky and dark for years; that hunger has made me savage, as it savaged me, instead.

Teresa begins to look compulsively in shop windows selling jams, cakes, juices, fruits. This I did too. I shopped every day, I stole food. I watched other people eat almost mesmerically. I would hang around in the kitchen whenever my housemates cooked. Teresa's hunger, Stead writes, constantly ‘blow[s] through her like a draught.' Mine did too.

In the year that I first became ill, I recognised the physicality of Teresa's hunger, but only this aspect of her story, and I carried it with me for years, although the rest
of For Love Alone
didn't stir me – I was nineteen, and probably too callow, too cold and self-obsessed to understand it fully. But in recent years, I started hearing so many writers talk again about Christina Stead. Several of her books, and her biography, were reissued with new introductions by writers as unlikely as Jonathan
Franzen, or as important to me as Drusilla Modjeska. Stead died in the year that I was born. I discovered that we went to the same high school.

I re-read
For Love Alone
a few years ago, just weeks after I'd started negotiating with the hospital to permit me a second admission, and days after the National Young Writers' Festival, a four-day weekend during which I'd eaten just two meals, tearing around Newcastle full of coffee, vodka and sugar-free gum. I was still ill, very much so, but at least I knew by then the shape and face of my disease. And this time, as I read the novel, I was stunned.

Teresa, I realised this time, has all of the character traits, from the very beginning of the book, that are said to make a person vulnerable to disordered eating. She is passionate, but stymied by her domineering family; intelligent, but always striving for something more: for honour, for meaning, for love. She is austere because she holds herself accountable, she demands standards and sacrifices of herself, she thinks and feels too deeply, and far too much. She sees herself as separate somehow from, and frustrated by, the life and the society that she must move through: ‘She smelled, heard, saw, guessed faster, longer more than others, it seemed to her. She listened…with a galling politeness, because what she had to say was not to tell them.'