Thin (27 page)

That is the odd thing about anorexia: it is seen to vanish when the body is mended. It moves from body-side to inside, and perhaps it is more dangerous when it cannot be seen. What may start off as a panic button for a fear about growing up and leaving home, and about having to be perfect in everyone’s eyes, turns into a chemical addiction to food. That addiction continues even after it has been beaten on a physical level, because mending your relationship with food does not equate with mending your own self-esteem.

As I started to return to food, and to my body, I became hypersensitive. I felt things from the outside. I could feel other people around me with a strange intensity: I could sense the surge of the crowd, the breath of a stranger, the whirring noise of the traffic. Normal daily events seemed to be enhanced and magnified. As an anorexic, my senses were numbed, nulled and restrained, and then I jumped straight back into the busiest, noisiest world, which initially overwhelmed me. I took it all in with equal intensity, especially other people’s views of eating disorders. These were things I hadn’t been able to hear before, and it was if they were now magnified, these conflicting voices about what I had suffered, and how it related to the fabric of our society.

Perhaps the most intriguing element of eating disorders and the one thing which it is common to overhear, on a bus or in a shop or in a busy café, is about how impossible they are to understand:

‘I don’t get it. I mean, I would never think like that. I can’t even get my head round how it starts. You eat. You
are born to eat. It’s one of the only things that you need to have as a human to survive. It’s something from birth. It’s not like alcohol or drugs or cigarettes – addictions like that come later – you start them, you start to drink or smoke one day, but this one, it’s like fighting something elemental. Eating, like sleeping or waking or moving, is natural, it’s innate. It starts from in the womb. Why can’t they just eat? They should stop being so vain. All that self-obsession is boring. I don’t even know how that kind of chain of thinking begins.’

Alongside this, there is, paradoxically, the permanence of the other voices, which are constantly dealing with issues on the perimeter of anorexia: the dieter’s voice, the dieting industry’s voice, the Government voice, the food guilt, which the whole of society seems to be consumed with. In the small and insular world of a Cambridge college, driven only by the potential success of my next result, I was mostly able to evade it, or maybe I blocked my ears. Dieting just didn’t seem to be a topic of conversation – it wasn’t mentioned because we were at Cambridge University to be strong and successful women, not diet-obsessed girls. Coming out of the shelter of university, things changed and I was thrown back into the centre of it.

As a society our relationship with food is seen to be out of balance. Obesity rates are rising; we are – apparently – what we eat. When you are in recovery from an eating disorder the magnitude of this voice is often stronger than your own internal one. You have trained that internal voice over time to
Just be quiet and leave me alone
.

But it is all too ready to be convinced otherwise. It is ready to hear all of the food restraints and plans presented by the outside world. It is hard to think that you are an exception to the rule, that you actually shouldn’t be going to the gym every day and reducing your calories, or trying
the latest celebrity plans. This is what everyone else seems to be doing and why shouldn’t you? It is difficult to ignore the verging-on-hysteria of a nation gripped by its size and its shape and everything related to it.

The thing to realize is that a super-controlled relationship with food and body weight will not solve everything. It is a fallacy to believe that happiness comes flooding in on the lighter side of eight stone. I could see that every time I picked up a new diet. It was a symptom of something else. It was a symptom that I wasn’t feeling right – and trying to find what I was about through food, like everybody else seemed to be doing, wasn’t the answer. I had been there before.

The passage of time is a powerful thing. When people ask how you overcome an eating disorder it doesn’t sound like the most convincing of explanations to put it down to just waiting for things to get better, but this was the case in my experience. It was a slow process to wear it down but the more I fought it, the more I wanted to rid myself of its strangling hold, and eventually, with sustained effort, the eating disorder voice gradually faded out. As with anyone growing up, things change and develop and move on. In my case, living constantly with such a throttling addiction was very tiring and over time I decided to move away from it, importantly for my sake and not for anyone else’s.

A big part of my recovery came down to actually embracing change rather than opposing it. Beneath the chop-change of emotion based on body size, I was bored by permanently thinking about eating and not-eating. I was bored by the frustrating obsession with every inch of my body. I had had enough. Going round in circles over a growing-up issue seemed to be distinctly non-adult. In my early twenties, trying to forge a connection with myself as an independent adult and lose the remnants of my teenage self was an important goal and I wanted to reach towards it. If you are able to admit real responsibility for what you can achieve – if you can start to counter that fear – then you realize that anorexia is something you can put a stop to. I didn’t need it to be a part of my life. I needed to find a new shape without it but, importantly, without pretending it never happened.

That is not to demote such a serious addiction to ‘just one of those phases’. I don’t think it is. The strength of anorexia is such that its remnants are clearly felt, or translated into something else long after the ‘phase’ has passed. The memory of it is imprinted upon you; it threads through you. It is not something that you forget you experienced. You cannot do this because the potential long-lasting consequences for your body range from infertility to osteoporosis to the erosion of tooth enamel. And it can come back. Even if the relationship with food recovers, the relationship with your body and with yourself can remain a fragile one. But my experience is that recovery is a possibility if you allow it to be, and work hard at it. It will be different for everyone.

The process of my getting better, as I look back, did come in a series of thoughts, or moments. The arrival of my boyfriend is one of those instances. I was suddenly pulled away from the control I thought I had over my life, my body and the foods that it ate. The presence of my boyfriend filled the absence left by the fading relic of my anorexia. It had left me feeling absent. Everything I had known about myself was bound up in my relationship with food. Now I had a new relationship.

Ultimately, the result of the relationship was that I was determined to lock out the anorexic tendencies; and I had found someone that this was worth doing for. He was more fulfilling and more full of potential than any diet was. Momentarily, I stopped caring. I was really determined that I would end this. I would make my relationship work without it.

I do think that things can change, if you are able to sustain a real and lasting relationship outside the one you have with food. Some psychiatrists might say that the ability to have a long-term relationship marks the beginning of the end of
an eating disorder. It can open up a new way of living, which begins with ‘we’ and not ‘I’. ‘I’ is slim and controlled and sharp, from the form of the letter, to its sound, to all that it means. And if this can become ‘we’, then ‘I’ gets thrown out of control. In my case, this meant I had to face my fears and confront things that I didn’t want to. I think this is important; instead of continually striving for further self-analysis and self-obsession I directed my energies to someone else. It also meant that I could no longer structure and shape every minute of my day just the way I wanted it. I had to battle with my anxiety.

The presence of a relationship meant that my eating disorder voice was disturbed; it became very disturbed when someone else was constantly there with me. And with its demise came hope, and the slow realization that one day the voice might altogether forget to wake up with me, especially when there was someone else who loved me and supported me, and who I loved, waking up with me instead.

‘It’s gonna hurt, now,’ said Amy. ‘Anything dead coming back to life hurts.’

A truth for all times, thought Denver.

Beloved
, Toni Morrison

As you recover from very low weight and self-starvation – as you put on more weight, and return to the target you are told to achieve – lots of things do improve (perception can shift and rational decisions can begin to be made), but at the same time it can be a terrifying experience. The biggest change for me was the emergence of real feeling. I felt, like many others who regain weight and grow, that I was thrust back into my hypersensitive body. Emotions returned with full force after a long period of nullification. I went from emotional paralysis to a sense of being flooded with fear and feeling. It was as if all of the experience of the last few years had been unlocked and released, and I was initially totally knocked down with it. The first thing that an anorexic looks to do with that intense emotion is to relate it to her size and weight. She believes this is what shapes all of her feelings and moods, and fuels her happiness or unhappiness. It was the same for me.

At twenty-three, five years after my diagnosis, I still related my happiness to my weight. If I stepped on the scales and realized that I had lost weight, or if I peered into the mirror and noticed that my face was more drawn, and that my size ten jeans were slightly too baggy, I was still strangely filled
with that same sense of delirium that triggered my descent into anorexia in the first place. Losing weight and gaining control were still capable of making me happy. As weight went up and down, moods followed suit. Feelings were in quick-shift mode.

I was, however, strong enough by this point to realize that one way out of my dependency on weighing scales was not to own any. I also decided it best to ignore them completely, not to even step on them, unless, on a very rare occasion, I needed to for some medical purpose (or maybe once in a while in a fit of desperation to check things were still in balance). This was a highly successful mechanism. Once I rejected them outright, they just gradually faded in importance. If I didn’t have access to the anorexia-propelling information, I simply couldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t even have to consciously stop myself thinking about the scales because in the end something in my unconscious took over. Every time I remembered I wanted to weigh myself, I just as soon forgot. Perhaps it was because I had learned that the answers to my questions were never going to be resolved there.

Recovery, I think, is about growth in different ways, and for me it was about accepting womanhood, responsibility and change. The hardest thing here is to remove yourself from the pressure of normal expectation. Around us, the shape of the body seems to be the most important thing a woman can control. If the women that you are looking up to look like girls – in body, in shape and in essence – then it is hard to think that something different is right for you.

As an anorexic, you don’t have a sense of what your ‘self’ equals, and so you think that if you can emulate others, something will form around you. If the images you are presented with are long and thin and glossy, it is easier to think you should be like that; it is easier to think that that
is how and why those people have got there. You look up to them (models, celebrities, other thinner and seemingly happier people) and think that you will be made by your thinness. You can begin to believe that your success will be built from it, and that your self-esteem will somehow emerge from a thinner body.

I wonder how we have ended up here. How we ended up using the control and choice we now have as women to fight this battle. There are just too many expectations, conflicting ones, which can’t be forged on one body; it cannot split so many ways and achieve them all perfectly. These expectations have been internalized and they have split us apart.

For so long, I didn’t know who I was, and which of these expectations to follow. All I could think was that if I presented myself as thin and attractive then that’s what people would take out of meeting me. That’s what they would say: ‘Grace – yes, that slim, thin girl.’

I liked that. That was a good way to describe me, and it was a good way to think of myself. Then it made it so much easier to take the bad bits (possible failure and criticism). But looking ahead and behind me for the first time, I realized that I had to be more.

It is hard to accept that you have to find your own level, which is inevitably a different level from everyone else’s. It’s hard to stop staring, to pull away, to stop wishing for a transformation to someone else’s idea of ‘the right shape’. Your inside strength finds it hard to come through, but when it does, you stop the self-rejection. You start to think of yourself as your own unique shape, your own outline.

Almost simultaneously, once I started to think of myself in my own shape, away from the expectations of others, a grown-up, out-grown anorexia me, I found myself stuck with the question in my head at all moments when I was
alone:
‘How do you feel?’
(That dreaded question!)
‘Are you OK?’

I could at first hear this voice, and then it was my voice, and I owned it. I didn’t preempt it, I didn’t forcibly ask myself. It seemed to come from within me, like a sense check, to make me take a step back, to make me assess myself in the moment. To make me sit with myself in the present and feel things. Feel my body; help me listen to my state of mind. It was a hard thing to do. Perhaps it was my body protecting itself against pain. Like the reflex action of the hand against a burning stove, it protected me from any self-destructive intentions, it got in there first. It irritated me into talking back, and I could tell by the sound of my breath, by the clench of my teeth or by the tightness of my shoulders, how I was feeling, and I could start to answer, slowly.