Thin (14 page)

Sometimes we drive around because my friend gets bored sitting in the same place all day. We pick up another girl and they sit in the front playing their favourite music loud, singing and laughing along, and it hurts my ears. I can hear better since I stopped eating; it is amplified, so the music makes me want to be sick. I am cold in the back of the car and I don’t want to open my mouth in case some heat escapes. I pack myself up by folding my arms under my armpits and pulling my knees up to my chin. I feel like a tight ball of ice as I huddle in the back, waiting until I am taken home. I don’t want to tell anyone that I am feeling like this. They will only shut me away in a room and I will have lost. It is better to be out. I don’t like to lounge around all day as if I am sad.

I go to my friend’s house most days too, just to get some space and to get some air. Her family are grown-up, they sit around chatting and drinking wine. Today they had smoked salmon on brown bread with butter (little triangles arranged beautifully on big, white, solid plates). I ate several little triangles. All my rules were broken; snapped in two. I have never eaten smoked salmon before because mostly, in my family, we have traditional northern food, or we have frozen meals, not things like smoked salmon. I don’t know why I am able to eat the smoked salmon; I can’t explain it. I wouldn’t eat it at home. I won’t feel good tomorrow, I will wake up in a panic and I will keep running to the scales, but I let myself, just this once, without knowing why.

I need to get away like that. Away from my family, who sit on the sofas every Friday night and eat newspaper-wrapped fish and chips and mushy peas and cans of full-fat Pepsi. All I can think about when they do that is about how I want to break out of it, break out of the growing-up house. All I want is to find my own space, go to Cambridge and be a success. I grind my teeth and I pull a face and I think about how I should be somewhere else. This isn’t right any more. I don’t know where that came from; where this longing grew up, but I know I have always felt different from everyone else, eating their fish and chips on the sofas.

I have to go to my best friend’s birthday party at a pizza restaurant. I haven’t been to a party in a while. I haven’t been to a restaurant either. People round the table watch me – staring at my plate, my mouth, my fork and at my reactions. They are shocked that I know how to eat, but of course I do! It’s just that usually I eat on my own so they don’t see me do it. I don’t like being watched. They eat pizza and drink wine and I have salad. I have a huge salad with beans and mayonnaise and pasta. As I take in every mouthful I try to work out the calories in my head. Usually I have all the labels in front of me, but here there is nothing, no information. I am glad I didn’t eat anything else today. I finish my plate and I feel like there is a huge hole. I don’t know if I feel full, empty or hungry. I just can’t believe I have come to the end of the plate. I start to panic. I think I need more. I think I want more. I knew that this would happen. So I go to the salad bar and I get some more. People look at me. They tell me, ‘Your salad looks so appetizing.’

They actually want to try some. All of sudden, there are other people’s forks in my salad and they are commenting on it and eating the best bits. Maybe they are trying to make things normal but I want them to get back to eating their own doughy-smelling pizza.

Eat your pizza, leave me alone.

I sit perfectly still while they eat their desserts. I wish I had the strength and power to throw it all up.

I can barely see my anorexic self in my head now. I look inside my memories for clues as to how I then appeared to the outside world. All I can see are people’s dropped mouths and uncomfortable faces looking back at me, around a pizza restaurant table, in a clothes shop, on the street, trying to conceal their true feelings. I can imagine the shape they saw, hauntingly thin, drawn, hollow – certainly not the same shape I perceived myself. I try to figure out how I saw my body – what it really looked like to me, how it appeared to me then. There are few photos of me at the worst time – at the lowest weight. Like my feelings, which have been whitewashed out of my memory, the brutal photos have been destroyed, as if no one wanted to admit me to any part of history.

Such a different, and yet similar, body lies before me now. I walk along the edge of the sea on a windy summer’s day. I look down and out at my shadow, which is outlined in the sand, blown up, distorted and fuzzy-edged. I pull my hands into my sides and my body becomes an amorphous mass, this black shape lying in front of me. I move my arms up and out to the sides, waving them in the air and my trunk is suddenly smaller, lesser, lighter, freer. My shadow shows up the object of me – I am there on a second substance, which is fickle, and as I turn, it moves. There is no light; there is no enlightenment here. There is only an insubstantial image, which moves with the water of the tide beneath my feet, and the wind, which blows my image into different shapes.

I stand in front of a mirrored bathroom cabinet, where the two doors of the cabinet meet. My body is reflected half in one side and half in the other. I look at the whole and it makes me shrink. I move my eyes from the shrunken image to the reality, shrunken image to reality and wonder just what the reality is. It is all about perception. The power of the mirror is only as strong as the person reflected in it.

When an anorexic looks in the mirror, her own form looks large, rounded and curved. Her eyes sharpen on the other bodies around her while her interpretation of her own image is skewed. Others see her as thin – skeletal – but she struggles to understand their perspective. Two sets of eyes see the size of the body completely differently. She fears her own shape – it becomes, like a monstrous creation, the seat of all discomfort, pain and anxiety, while the idea of an alternative, thinner shape provides comfort, stability and reassurance. We translate our own shape and size through a myriad of other emotions and sensations internally, and end up with something removed from the starting point.

It is hard to understand this, and because it is hard to understand, there is not always sympathy for this plight. Some would say that anorexia is pure self-indulgence, anorexia is caused by vanity; she has been staring at her reflection for too long; surely she should try to pull down all the mirrors and stop being so self-absorbed.

‘Just get on with it, love.’

Anorexics are disproportionately self-absorbed, there is no way to write about this illness without confronting that; it is where the illness takes them, only further inwards, as they reject the outside. The mirror actually means very little because the object that is seen in it is translated and altered depending on the mood on the inside. And that object – that body – is always hovering below her, as if it is a detached and separate entity, something which the mind must suppress.
Why else would she stare in the mirror a hundred times a day, checking the millimetres of fat on her thighs? Why else would she chastise herself for days on end for the three pieces of popcorn she ate before bed? The body is the enemy, it must be weakened and shrunk and suppressed. It is controllable, it is physical and alterable. Food equals fat and starvation equals thin. How can she live with herself if this less than perfect body actually
is
her self? The equation petrifies.

I continued to not-eat because what I perceived in the mirror image did not shock me like it seemed to shock other people. It didn’t make me scared to see something so thin; it was more intriguing than anything else. I just observed it, almost like I would do with an animal in a zoo. I saw its movements and bony bits, and I didn’t really relate them to any particular part of what I termed ‘me’. I squashed the remaining flesh and I saw it as countering me because I didn’t feel that it represented who I was. The fat didn’t need to be there and I could do without it. I could be this image of myself in my head without any of this surface, surplus body.

I covered things up because people stared at me. I wore layers of clothes because I was so cold and frozen that I needed to wrap up. Layering also played another role; I felt ashamed that everyone thought I had failed. It was better to keep my head down, not be seen, not see anyone else and not be in anyone’s photos of Christmas or New Year. The hair on my arms was getting thicker. My head hair was dropping out in clumps on to my hairbrush. I convinced myself that it was better to wear a hat, because of the cold escaping through my head. I always had ways of rationalizing my behaviour and logically explaining things away, especially what I saw as other people’s flawed perceptions of my own body.

As my weight continued to decrease and I became more and more shocking to look at, I continued to increase the amount of activity I was doing. I followed a semi-normal existence in terms of my day-to-day routine; I was shopping, talking, reading, studying, watching TV and exercising (of course). My breaking-down body was held up only by a tightly focused mind, which continued to try and hold up its own illusion. This ability to focus on achievement and studying is common to people suffering from anorexia.
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It is hard to understand how someone who is not-eating, and is therefore in a starved state, can carry on with such intense activity. In one sense, it is a powerful distraction from thoughts of food and the intensely painful hunger which you crush, and in another, it is part of the bigger issue, that constant need to achieve intellectual aims, while ignoring the issue of emotional maturity.

Achievement had always been something central to my life. I did not want to let anyone down. I believed that I had made my family, teachers and friends happy by being good, strong and achieving things, and I wanted to continue with this (this was not necessarily their view of things, but my self-made one). I wanted to make them proud. Academically, I just wanted to get better. In my bettering, I believed there would be this happiness, which I had not yet found. I placed huge pressure upon myself to achieve everything I set my mind to, and the terror of the thought of failure was paralysing. In the end, my anorexia may well have been some

sort of withdrawal from this conflict between the desperate need for success and the consuming fear of failure. Becoming anorexic was temporarily a break from the whole cycle.

The irony is that although I was focused on achieving academic, external things – I was hugely articulate when describing world affairs – when it came down to my own emotions or expressions of my feelings, it was as if I no longer had access to my own senses. Looking back, my senses seem numbed. My speech was constrained by what I felt I had to say so as not to upset anyone, my sight was in food-focused tunnel vision. I did not taste, I stopped the enjoyment of it and I laced it with guilt. Smell was the one sense that remained strong, and it became stronger as I stopped eating. Smells of bread and cake and fish and chips seemed to possess me. Amazing how the smell of the body spray I used at this time fills me with a sickness and sends a tremor through my body, immediately transporting me back.

Family and friends tried to ask what I felt; they tried to talk to me. They must have wondered why I didn’t talk to them or ask for help and why I was so closed up. They stared at me as I sat on the sofa, playing with my salad. I was in a different place from them, somewhere else where things were ‘absolutely fine’. I refused to respond to what my body was showing outwardly; instead I only listened to my internal drive. They were crying and not sleeping and not eating (most irritating to me), and pulling the hair out of their heads trying to think of ways to reach me, and I was just sitting there making notes on my books, making further plans to achieve.

As an anorexic, it is almost impossible to connect with those feelings everyone is desperate for you to express. The answer nearly always is: ‘I’m not feeling anything. I’m just feeling fat, big, huge, yuk, flab, skin, lines, sick-making fat.’

There is a blockage. Fat is the only thing that is being felt. The aim of everything is always to get back control, to achieve and to be better, and feelings seem irrelevant to this. The cruel reality is, however, that in each self-bettering comes more self-battering. When doctors and friends and family told me to be still, to switch off, to relax and rest, I could not understand what it meant. I was anxious; there surely must be more I could achieve; there must be things I could do to be better – to be thinner – to be better.

Anorexia nervosa (of nervous origin) and anxiety by definition sit side by side. Anorexia fixes and controls (temporarily) anxiety – it provides a single focus for fear to be played out – and anxiety builds and feeds, grows and festers beneath the surface of the anorexia. Indeed, the issue of anxiety and its relation to problems of identity formation is often cited as a key factor for some people who suffer from anorexia.
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Anxiety has prevented these individuals from experiencing and overcoming risk situations. As young children, something has inhibited them from being able to explore enough. They therefore have been unable to learn by experience; they have not faced up to their fears. As a result they fail to find a set of limits or edges, which define their sense of self
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and so they try and forge a sense of identity through losing weight and changing their shape.