Thin (9 page)

‘I feel a bit spaced out when I do it. I can’t concentrate on problem-solving, that type of thing, but I totally escape myself. It’s a freeing feeling.’

I can recall the beginning of my addiction to not-eating. The feeling of lightness – of happiness – and a fuzzy, airy kind of an energy, which seemed to be irreplaceable. This is the high – every addiction has one – something that makes you feel good, something that is worth the low, or so it seems. Initially, my addiction brought me power and pleasure. With each new shape I made for myself, I was more optimistic, more alert, more euphoric and more in charge. I ended up feeding only from my addiction. I was surging off the highs that my super-control gave to me.

Those suffering from eating disorders often feel that they have walked into a relationship with food they did not choose. They feel that it took them over and that they are suddenly powerless to its effects. They didn’t mean to get addicted, they didn’t mean to lose so much weight; they didn’t mean to interrupt everyone’s lives, not on purpose, anyway. At the same time, however, they also feel a sense of immense control over their relationship with food. Whereas other issues and decisions might seem overwhelming and unconquerable, food is manageable and can be manipulated by the sufferer. Anorexia moves life into a restricted pattern of behaviour based solely around food and exercise. It means a regression into a simple, straight, black or white way of living.

In my experience, my food patterns gave me comfort – there were answers to problems. There were merely shapes – shapes of me – that told me how good or bad I was feeling and this reassured me. Not-eating seemed to work like a magic trick – the more I restricted myself, the more I sensed my own power. I also developed a feeling of righteousness about what I was doing. Controlling and restricting my body empowered me with a code, a way of fixing and structuring anything that was thrown at me.

In fact, many anorexics, when forcibly taken to the doctor for a diagnosis (as often happens), can only see the positive in what they are doing. They feel that other people simply misunderstand them, because there really is ‘nothing wrong’. They are acting to expectation, they are being ‘healthy’ and
‘fit’ and ‘thin’. They are not shovelling fast food into their bodies and eating all the ‘wrong things’. They are in control, right?

However, whereas their friends who count their WeightWatchers’ points or watch their GI levels are conforming to other people’s patterns, and obeying the most current world order, an anorexic is actually defying it, and making up a set of her own rules. A diet is acting to a set of prescribed rules laid down by a book, a magazine or a slimming club. It is about participation and regulation. An anorexic does not want this direction from the outside. She wants control of her own game, thank you very much.

I certainly did not want any help with my anorexia. I knew that what was happening to me wasn’t right but I couldn’t get past the feeling that I had everything in place just as I wanted it. Any discussion of interference into my way of handling it was terrifying and inconceivable. I was petrified that if I didn’t keep my hunger under control everything would collapse.

My memory of this time is dominated by impressions of figures from the outside of my anorexia trying to do exactly that: aiming to disrupt my self-control. There was a constant intrusive presence of psychiatrists and nutritionists, family and friends, intent on taking away my internal power, which I found and owned for myself, focusing on spoiling the lines of the character of Grace I had so neatly sculpted. And because none of us had the same shape in mind for the outcome of things, I used whatever power I had to fight them, not the eating disorder. I drew an invisible circle around myself. If I didn’t share anything of myself – no words, no thoughts – then I was convinced that I could continue on my own.

The amazing thing about the initial stages of anorexia is that it does seem to imbue you with a surge of physical
power. In eating less and less, it appears that you have more energy. The restlessness and the anxiety, which come from the hunger, translate themselves into a jittery, edgy, get-up-and-move impulse, which only drives you further. Then, all of a sudden, the illness begins to consume you, and while the body consumes very little, it consumes you even more, and so you become encircled by it, by a fear of losing control, a fear of letting go of this hold over your weight, over food and over everything. Then it becomes all quiet and blank, and you feel like you are floating out of your body, above people’s voices, detached from the world. To engage you need to be able to feel, and when feeling is too difficult, there is shutdown and closure, and days which pass by without any thought external to that of the body and how to suppress it; how to keep it under further pressing control. So instead of empowering you with total control of your every move, the reverse happens. You look like a child, you appear small and childlike and so that is how you are treated.

Within a matter of months, my invisible circle got so big that I would barely let anyone touch me or talk to me. If I did talk, it was all on a top layer, on a level which didn’t get near my skin, a level which was not a part of me, but was external to me. The more that I continued to starve – in fear, in addiction, out of control – the more I became alienated from myself. I wasn’t even able to remember what I used to talk about, think about or how I even started to think or talk from the inside. No, suddenly it was all from the outside. I was talking for the poorly me because she wouldn’t talk, in the way that someone might try and voice the feelings of an elderly person who they falsely assume has no right or ability to speak for themselves.

‘No, she doesn’t want any food, thank you very much.’ Perhaps the self-alienation was the only way of coping. I
was removed out of my own pain. It wasn’t happening to me but to a version of me and so it was almost bearable.

In my interpretation of this time, I see what the doctors and psychiatrists tried to do; how they were trying everything they knew to change me or to move me. But I have the power of the whole in my hands now. I have the power of hindsight, retrospect and reason. The memory must remain as it was, framed in anger and pain and with a critical edge, where the hospital and the waiting rooms and the cottage cheese talks are seen out of focus and in one dimension. This is the only way to truly see inside the anorexic mind and to break through the invisible circle which deflects away those who try to travel inside it.

An anorexic uses her body as a vehicle for expression of emotion, fear or anger, and in this she implicates those looking on. History provides us with many examples of people using food and appetite as a voice in different ways. The suffragettes used hunger-striking as a political instrument; in religious contexts, food abstinence has been an articulation of repentance or atonement. It is a powerful weapon, a weapon of demonstration, an act of implication, used in a variety of cultural situations.

It seems that many adolescents who develop an eating disorder like anorexia are unconsciously using it to express their feelings, often towards their families. Some theorists believe that there are personality traits that many people who develop anorexia nervosa have in common. One of these is a wish to please their parents and to be universally liked.
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A result of this is that they have not allowed themselves, or been allowed, to express feelings of anger or upset, nor have they felt that they have the voice to do so. Many parents of anorexic children will say that those daughters and sons were obedient, quiet, loving, good children when they were younger.

That goodness, which the anorexic feels is so much a part of everyone loving her, means that she will do anything to keep up a polished exterior. This is the way she has learned that things work, and the whole family learns the same pattern. Because of this, the anorexic chooses a silent and secretive way of demonstrating her feelings; she keeps her secret starving to herself so as not to cause harm, not to
displease. She makes a statement, she thinks, in the nicest and quietest way possible. In retaining that goodness, and in not talking about issues of frustration and anger, a sense of pride is retained. Pride (such an important and precious feeling to an anorexic) is still intact in not-eating, but more talking is actually done through this act than has ever been done before. She slowly tips the balance of power; she asks to be recognized and she asks to speak.

‘Confront me and my power on show,’ she challenges.

‘Witness me,’ she says.

I did this. I asked my family and my friends to watch me self-destructing – I made them, forced them. I sat them down in front of me and I carried on. We watched each other over the dinner table. I tried to pretend that I wasn’t interested in my plate at all, and that I couldn’t stand the idea of food, but instead it was really the opposite. I was counting the seconds until each meal, I was blisteringly aware of the size and shape of every crumb on my plate and on theirs. I suppose – without knowing – I wanted my family to witness this thing that was happening to me. I wanted to tell them that I couldn’t cope, but that I was not sure why I couldn’t cope or what the problem was. I needed somebody’s shoulder to cry on, but I did not want to cry out loud. I was so proud of my status, my achievements and my successes that I did not want to admit any fallibility. I wanted to be strong, and in my not-eating I was stronger and more resilient than they had ever seen me, but I was also forcing a confrontation. I was forcing a conflict. I was refusing to eat their food.

The hardest thing must have been that they were not able to give me a plaster, a bandage, some Calpol or a cool flannel; instead, they had to watch me be ill, and not do anything immediate about it. Inside their heads, and in the meetings with the psychiatrists, nutritionists and family therapists, and in endless conversations with friends, with experts – with
anyone who might have any idea about what was happening to me – they just wanted to know what they had done wrong and how they could help.

Harder still for my parents was that the treatment I was initially offered was limited and they were left powerlessly watching from the sidelines (anorexia is particularly good at alienating those around it). As with many eating-disorder patients, the first stop was my doctor’s surgery. I was lucky that the GP I saw that day was sympathetic and that she immediately saw the signs. Perhaps this was because I was not as advanced in my illness as others, whose levels of secrecy and closure prevent GPs being able to diagnose correctly.
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I was more open; I was falling and ready for someone to catch me. The next stop (and the only free one available to me) was to be an outpatient at the local psychiatric hospital. This immediately threw me. I didn’t see anyone else like me, and I didn’t know why I was sent there. It made me feel worse. Unfortunately, this is the norm for many patients, because provision in specialist centres is so sporadic, and because even where there is provision, waiting lists are long, leaving the sufferer to shrink, the problem to grow and the parents to simply, wearily and desperately hang on.
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It must have been impossible to watch this, to witness this. The consequences of the illness are potentially enormous: anorexia has one of the highest rates of mortality for any psychiatric disorder.
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If unresolved, the end result of anorexia is death. This is not a shock statement, it is a reality: up to 20 per cent of those seriously affected die, and rates of suicide are cited as up to 200 per cent higher than in the general population.
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Like nineteenth-century hunger artists who starved themselves and then displayed themselves as living skeletons, gawped at by people who paid to see these miraculous figures on show, I made my body into a performance.

‘Here I am.’ I didn’t say, ‘starving myself’.

‘Here I am.’ I didn’t add, ‘not eating my dinner’.

‘Now watch me.’ I didn’t exclaim, ‘throwing my pasta down the toilet!’.

‘And for my final trick of the evening – 200 sit-ups on a totally empty stomach. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, mums and dads, boys and girls, and goodnight.’

‘Ta da.’ (Circus round of applause.)

As my body began to close down all functions that weren’t critical to its survival, I think it also stopped me remembering my experiences. It was like there was not enough weight to support them. My focus was so single-minded and so food-driven that the events and the people who surrounded me barely existed in that same time. Because a lot of my actions were not conscious, breathing ones, they were not admitted. I can find them only through thinking of a face, name, room or date, or by flicking through old letters and photos.

In the telling of my memories, it is not always possible to write them as if they were lived and breathed in fine detail. The detail could be made up, of course. The memoir would then become full and lifelike; like a beautifully crafted novel. You would see subtle angles of light, floating through windows; I would present you with puffs of cigarettes dissipating into the thick air. The text would be cluttered with the landscape of description. This is not the memoir of a full brain, but the memories of a fog-filled one. My narrative is fragmented because my sense of self was fractured. It is this that I am trying to reflect. Lucidity and clarity aren’t available when, as an anorexic, you are totally self-absorbed, unable to contemplate living without your addiction.

In the memories that I do manage to capture – those days, hours or minutes that I did hold on to – I have to look through a further layer; that of myself looking in on myself, far-removed from the space in which I lived. I did not feel the moment, but I acted as if I was ahead of it, almost as
if I was trying to control time. The only way to deal with the pain of the starving and suffocated body was to step out of it and make every thought a rational one. I was a protagonist in a rather difficult situation, dealing out my lines with composure and authority.