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I suffered
from anorexia nervosa between the ages of about 15 and 26; by the end of this
period I weighed 37 kilos and was pretty much debilitated by starvation-induced
depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, physical weakness, cold, hunger, and
mental rigidity. In the autumn of 2008 I embarked on a nine-month course of
cognitive behavioural therapy with Dr Shawnee Basden at the
Centre for Research on Eating Disorders at the University of Oxford
Psychiatry Department, in the Warneford Hospital. During this period I gained
over 30 kilos, and came gradually back to life. I now consider myself fully
recovered.
During my
illness I wrote a long autobiographical account of my anorexia’s origins and effects
(2004) and a novella (2007) which told the story of a fictionalised me who tried
to get better, a year before I did. Excerpts of both can be found below. Since
August 2009 I have written a blog on anorexia and related issues for the US
website Psychology Today; see below for a list of my blog posts. I have
published an article on anorexia in Psychology Today magazine
(March/April 2010: 43 (2), pp. 88-95), and contributed a chapter entitled ‘Dying
by Inches’ to
First-Person Accounts of Mental Illness
and Recovery (2012), edited by LeCroy and Holschuh. I
have given an interview together with my mother for the BBC Radio Scotland
series A Life in Limbo (transcribed in the blog post ‘My mother and I: a radio
interview on anorexia’, below), and for the
Daily Mail (1.10.2010). My mother has written
a post on how she coped with my anorexia on her CommentIsFree blog.
All these
are my attempts to use honest testimony and careful reflection to counter the
many misconceptions about anorexia, and the widespread tendencies to glamourise it, with
the ultimate aim of helping those still trapped by it to escape, and their
friends and families to begin to understand what makes sufferers starve
themselves.
Psychology Today blog posts:
Seeing and (not) believing in anorexia 16 December 2013
Anorexia and the right to die 22 July 2012
Anorexia and The Diet Delusion: healthy eating after recovery 7 June
2012
A partner's perspective on anorexia 6 March 2012
Is anorexia a disease, a series of bad decisions, or both? 31 January 2012
Hospitalisation and recovery from anorexia 31 December 2011
Not leaving recovery 'til it's too late 30 November 2011
The physical effects of weight gain after starvation 31 October 2011
Is 100% recovery from an eating disorder possible? 30 September 2011
Wasting time: symptom and enemy of anorexia 31 August 2011
Making an exercise obsession healthier by eating more 31 July 2011
Where next after anorexia: death, recovery, or another eating disorder? 30
June 2011
Fully recovered, but not quite: the long post-anorexic road 31 May 2011
Seeing
through anorexia’s academic charade 30 April 2011
Escaping
from anorexia II 31 March 2011
How to
reunite work and life after anorexia 1 March 2011
What weight-lifting can do for a former anorexic 24 Jan 2011
Christmas and New Year make the perfect time to challenge anorexic behaviours
24
Dec 2010
Starvation study shows that recovery from anorexia is possible only by regaining
weight 23 Nov 2010
What's the difference between being fussy and having an eating disorder? 25
Oct 2010
Learning how to relax after anorexia 24 Sep 2010
Constructing a character after anorexia 25 Aug 2010
Anorexia and today's world 1 Aug 2010
My mother and I: a radio interview on anorexia 3 Jul 2010
Not only stopping starving, but starting living again 6 Jun 2010
My mission statement for keeping on recovering 8 May 2010
Anorexia and the invisible changes to its immovable rules 24 Apr 2010
A history of anorexia while skiing: part three 3 Apr 2010
A history of anorexia while skiing: part two 2 Apr 2010
An article on my anorexia in today’s Daily Mail 1 Apr 2010
A history of anorexia while skiing: part one 1 Apr 2010
The end of feeling my hunger becoming nausea? 2 Feb 2010
A night with friends, overshadowed by food 3 Jan 2010
My second grown-up Christmas, eating 30 Dec 2009
This autumn and last: from student to tutor 16 Nov 2009
Bumps in the road to recovery 3 Nov 2009
Having the strength to cope with what life throws at you 19 Oct 2009
In my father's house: a weekend of food and memories 5 Oct 2009
Eating, continued 28 Sep 2009
How it feels to eat again 21 Sep 2009
Defying my own conventions: the day I started eating again 13 Sep 2009
Escaping from anorexia 6 Sep 2009
Facts and fictions: stories of a hunger artist, and lettuce 30 Aug 2009
Five anorexia myths exploded 23 Aug 2009
After a decade of starvation… 15 Aug 2009
A
Hunger Artist: excerpt
The
‘autobiography’ of my anorexia, written in the exhausted summer after my Final
examinations at Oxford, separated ‘she’, my past self, from ‘I’, the very ill
self writing. This chapter describes the emergent preoccupations with body
shape and weight of my 15-year-old self.
Chapter Three – Backtracking
The
flat stomach I’ve always wanted. But since when is always? I’ve been reading,
searching for the moment at which always began. I read backwards, find a
hundred beginnings, each one spoiling the one before – or rather, after.
I seem to have found a time before always. A
time when cooking could be a randomly creative pleasure: I made a cake for
dinner, a sort of banana and raisin loaf – not from a recipe, for a change. It’s the first thing I’ve just invented – and it was simple but good, and so
much more enjoyable. It takes about half the time, because you don’t have to
bother weighing everything, and it’s really good fun and creative, almost, just
throwing things in and seeing what happens. That’s what real cooking is –
throwing in a bit of this and a bit of that, and knowing it will turn out all
right. I suppose you could say that of life, too… (18.06.97).
The fifteen-year-old philosopher knew more despite her posturing than I do about
the necessity of spontaneity; I eat up time doing what she learnt to sidestep,
weighing and measuring; I eat little that comes unpackaged, unlabelled with
nutritional reassurance.
She berated herself for lack of that which is
destroying me – I really am not very good at self-discipline; if I don’t
absolutely have to do something, I don’t do it (29.06.97). I feel
quite sick – I’ve eaten far too much today and it serves me right. I won’t do
it again tomorrow (at least, I probably will – I never learn – but tonight I’m
full of good resolutions) (14.10.97). But she still enjoyed the exquisite
privilege, impossible to value until it’s gone, of having an appetite and eating
by it: I woke up at seven this morning feeling really empty so I went
downstairs and made some bread and jam and then went back to bed. I woke again
at ten and had a second breakfast of scrambled eggs and mushrooms and toast
(12.10.97). This, admittedly, after a Saturday night of drinking beer and
throwing it up again – but the italics were hers, that emptiness was notable,
and as something to be filled, not to be hated and treasured, loved and feared,
as now.
Then, in the failing light of an early summer
evening, I stumble across what really seems to be the first time, in writing if
not in thought, that that phrase emerges: I feel better now having had
something to eat – on the train coming here I felt quite sick – still recovering
from last night’s excesses. I’m so fat, it’s really depressing me. I have to
worry about which clothes will show it and which won’t. I’d love just to have a
flat stomach. I suppose most women would (26.10.97). That glorious
ignorant misery, thinking it would end with the flat stomach rather than grow as
the stomach shrank, thinking there was such a thing as a flat stomach, thinking
that worrying about food would be better than worrying about clothes – not that
the former would just make the latter a worry in a different way. And all this
after just having been made to feel better by food – though better after feeling
bad for having eaten too much and drunk too much… Food already and forever
friend and foe.
Funny and sad to think how my ideals of
beauty have made me so much uglier in the eyes of the world – because even when
the world called out its admiration in compliments and cat-calls she couldn’t
believe it, the mirror gave a different testimony from the rest: walking
anywhere in the daytime, all the men whistling, hooting their horns, saying
hello, it gets me down, I’m not flattered, it intimidates me (16.08.97);
I’m always astonished when people say to me ‘Oh, you’re gorgeous’, or ‘You’re
elegant’ or glamorous, or even pretty. I have no confidence in my own
appearance; no matter how many times people say this to me, I don’t believe
them. I look in the mirror and see an ordinary, sometimes unpleasant face, and
a rather badly-formed body. I don’t think people – certainly not Adam [my
mother’s partner] or Kylie
[my best friend]
– are coldly, intentionally flattering, just misguided
(29.07.97). Teenage angst, much of it,
perhaps; and certainly not yet centred on size, more comprehensively critical;
but unwavering rejection of what clashed with her own vision. She was passing
herself off as twenty-one to nightclub bouncers, her well-learned date of birth
’76; she got asked for ID more and more often the older and thinner she became.
It was a time, too, when food, if not a
source of carefree pleasure in creation or consumption, could be a simple
nonentity, even in excess: Little to report today. Food, food, and more
food. Very good food, but not terribly interesting to write about. There are
two things I’ve been thinking about… (07.09.97) – boys and travelling were
the mental foreground of a day only physically defined by food.
The always seems to insinuate itself
as the ever-headier potency of a mixture of the emotional and the physical
effects of eating, the intimate and the comparison with others: I’m really
knackered and I feel I’ve eaten too much, and I’m jealous of Kylie – her figure
(03.10.97)
The next discovery I make in search of this
ascendancy is perhaps the active beginning worked up to by those wallowings in
self-critique; this is the moment when for the first time her body becomes the
sum of its dimensions, existence and desire become quantified, made abstract and
compared with others. She was writing a few days late: I really can’t
remember much about Thursday at all. Apart from watching too much TV in the
evening – oh yes, at games there were two students doing research; we had to do
the bleep test. I did all right. And then have our height and weight
measured. I was 5’6” I think, and
61kg – the same as Kate! It made me
determined to get fit and get rid of my stomach, if you see what I mean. I’m
sick of being fat, of having to worry about what clothes to wear and all that. I’m going to find out about the swimming times at the pool down the road – I
think there’s a piece of paper somewhere on our chaotic notice board, struggling
for space with taxi numbers and old postcards. I can’t eat much less, I have to
do more exercise. Clubbing’s good, as long as I don’t drink too much – that’s
another point, I can drink less beer
(06.11.97). In her précis of that Friday
night’s clubbing there was no mention, between descriptions of the topless men
and the techno and the adrenalin, of how much beer was or wasn’t drunk. It’s a
second shock for me, though, that 61; like the 50 only six months later. Twenty
kilos, to within a few hundred grams. Twenty kilos less of me. You wouldn’t
have thought I had that much to spare. I suppose I didn’t.
Fascinating, too, that this writing and
thinking towards thinness was resolutely anti-anorexic, the sensible route of
exercise not starvation – though alcohol was the first casualty, it seems, the
first place denial could be practised, the first place social effects started to
take second place to personal ones. I can’t eat much less – did she
really think that? How long for? By Monday she seemed to be contradicting
herself, gorging herself on the flavours of asceticism, even while disapproving
of them in general, for others: of a friend who never served much purpose beyond
ungainly, unfortunate foil to her own qualities, she wrote with moralistic
ridicule (verging on the ridiculous): she’s always complaining that she never
has any money, and that she’s always starving, but today – you should have seen
the inside of her desk. It was bursting with packets of crisps, sweets,
chocolate, fizzy drinks – as well as her lunch sandwiches. She spent almost
three quid today just on food! And then she moans that she’s really fat and her
mum’s trying to make her go on a diet. I don’t approve of diets in general, and
especially not when they’re instigated by someone as fat as her mum, but really
– does she expect to be thin as a rake if she stuffs herself like that? She
says she won’t eat any more sweets till her birthday, which is – guess when? –
Thursday! It makes me feel quite virtuous, watching her stuffing her face. I
always say no when she offers me things. It gives me a sense of power. A false
sense, but there you go (10.11.97). She knew about that falsity – as I know
about it; she was clear-sighted enough to see through it, but not strong enough
to see a way past it, or, later, out of it.
The
Cat and I: excerpt
Chapter One
The cat sat
poised on the gunwale in the evening sun, her spare frame outlined black against
the glinting gold water. She moved and miaowed at her owner’s approach. The
girl tied up her sleek black bicycle, lifted off a pannier full of books and
another of food, passed between sentinel blueberry bushes on to the landing
stage and down on to the boat, which moved gently, fenders squeaking, under her
weight, her hands too full for a cursory stroke, cursing the clumsiness of
digging out keys, finding the right one, unlocking the padlock, unbolting the
bolts, sharing the narrow entrance with the cat, putting panniers on the sofa –
the mess of it all. Her gaze glanced off the clock, her hand to the radio,
eternal haste. A cleverly scripted conversation was already in full flow: she’d
missed the first minute or two; always this daily pleasure she tried to make
more special and ended up spoiling, through the haste of returning just in time,
not quite in time.
She swapped
black ankle boots for pink slippers, and wrapped a kimono-like dressing gown
round herself. She got out her two favourite knives – the bread knife with the
soft worn wooden handle, the steel knife with the most elegant lines. The
chopping board in line with the edge of the hob. All the while her mind fixed
half on the radio, the unfolding of the evening’s fifteen-minute serialised
farming dramas; half on all this, here. She fetched margarine and vegetables
from the fridge, bread from the chaotically ordered cupboard, tightly wrapped in
its own wrapper and an extra plastic bag that protected it from air and somehow
negated its existence, neutralising it for the 23½ hours of the day it sat in
the cupboard not being eaten.
She began
to make her food. She began always by weighing out the bread: 150g. How long
had it taken for the amount to settle upon that figure – how many years since
she had made that first crucial shift from just judging by eye – or by stomach,
even: by appetite? – to curiously checking sometimes with the scales to see how
much she tended to have? She remembered how she had looked up, once, in a
little book of calorie-contents, how many bread was meant to contain; she had
idly calculated how many she was getting. She no longer had slices of bread,
either, but a varied array of slivers and fragments and one huge chunk, in a
pattern on the blue-spiralled plate congealed now into necessity. Much the same
thing had happened with the margarine: moving from spreading butter as one does,
coating the bread in an unctuous, nonspecific layer, to finding lower-fat
spreads instead, and measuring the amount, to needing this very-lowest-fat
variety, and not spreading it any more, but scraping it with minimal effect over
all but one corner of the thick piece of bread, where she’d heap a huge lump of
it, so as to make her last mouthful a dense fleetingly totally satisfying
mouth-quite-full of starch and fat. And perfected with salt. Now she ground
salt and pepper over the ‘buttered’ bread, never able to try very hard to
restrict the time she turned and turned the glass handle of the salt mill,
covering the plate in whitish crystals; the pepper more a vestige of
convention. She rushed outside, straining not to miss too much of the radio, to
the herb pots on the landing stage, to pick half a dozen tall strands of chive
to place on top as a final adornment. Then she boiled water in a pan for celery
and cabbage, opening the door to let the scented steam out; hoping her neighbour
wouldn’t be there, either to disturb or to be disturbed. And as they cooked,
the lettuce. Precise here-and-now lettuce-weighing; with mental images of
farmyards permeating it, completing not intruding. She paid concerted but ever
more automatic attention to the leaves she cut from the dense half
iceberg-globe, part of the whole orchestration of other smooth movements:
turning, turning the tap, filling a saucepan, cutting cabbage, lighting gas,
spreading margarine, sprinkling dried herbs, rinsing hands, draining out water,
positioning on plate, grinding pepper and salt, wiping the surface, standing
back a minute, judging, checking, looking up: a gradually choreographed –
– Oh,
Ebony, Ebony, for God’s sake, what is it with you today? Will you please shut
up, get out the way – you really can’t be so desperately hungry you can’t wait
another few fucking minutes till I’m finished with this, can you? You know
you’ll only be hungry too early in the morning if I feed you now – just ’cos I’m
making my food now doesn’t mean you need magically to start needing yours, does
it? I don’t start bawling as soon as I start getting hungry, do I? Haven’t you
ever heard of self-restraint?
There would
be no peace now till the cat was fed. Sometimes the miaowing was soft and
pitifully plaintive; sometimes – this evening – it was tinged with shrill
mania. It came again and again until she too wanted to scream; did scream,
swear:
– Oh, just
shut the fuck up, Ebony. Can’t you see I’m feeding you now – can’t you just
wait? Can’t you just see you’ll get it quicker if you just let me…
She
suspended just above cat-head-height the remaining 1/6 of a tin of fishy
jelly-encased meat, chopped up in the little white ceramic dish, sprinkled with
brown fish-shaped biscuits, just for a moment till the cat stood up and begged
for it, though ever more feebly these days; then she set the dish down on its
plastic mat on the floor at the end of the work surface, by the matching white
dish of water. The cat lowered her head and ate, ate, chewed too quickly,
didn’t look up. The girl hovered a minute watching her, marvelling at her. She
wondered: wasn’t Ebony really much much thinner these days, quite suddenly;
angular where she had been lissome? But she was eating so much more –
clamouring so much that she gave her often almost half a tin every day now
instead of a third; why was she always hungry, why then ever thinner? She
did throw up sometimes, but not often.
She
shivered. She had closed the door again now; but she was always cold these
days. And especially now that the nights were getting so swiftly so much
shorter she dreaded the winter: the engulfing blackness that was the prospect of
never being really warm again till spring. She pulled her dressing gown tighter
over her jumper, retied the belt; she knew she herself had been getting thinner
too; though not by eating more… She wondered: Ebony wasn’t somehow – copying
her, was she? Or somehow affected by her own actions so that she might – waste
away in sympathy? No, that was stupid; that simple hungry unheeding eating –
what did that have to do with any weird human habits. She might be warmer in
her night things. Cosier, anyway, less constricted. White silk nightie and
purple fur-collared cardigan replaced skinny jeans and jacket, and with thick
socks and dressing gown back on she felt the deep relief of the soft looseness
of these wrappings: the feel of them meant another part of the day truly over.
The food
sat at the end of the kitchen counter, neat on the clean surface, put aside for
later. In the kitchen, her eye was caught by a pinkish gleam from the two
vertical windows in the front door; she opened it again, and stood looking out
over the very last of the sunset. She felt a deep calm sense of reverence; an
immense gratitude for being allowed to be here, in this city, on this boat, in
the midst of all this beauty and privacy and freedom to think.
Then the
beam of pink was gone; and there was only guilt at feeling all that so rarely,
so fleetingly. It was time to make her first drink. Mug, teabag, kettle, milk;
another act of orchestrated nonchalance, nonchalance in elegance. Filling the
water to just the right level; the well-known pressure of teaspoon squeezing
teabag against the mug’s thin creamy bone china wall; the fluid fling of used
teabag into green metal dish for later; milk then, to turn the liquid just the
right amount paler and creamier; a few drops more water, to top it up to the
very brim; all to be carried to her chair always with the straight back and
pretence of ease that let her cling to the self-respect of perspective. And in
this flowered kimono thing her steps were shortened by the tight-wrapped fabric;
she liked the hobbled grace of it. She admired in full flow the fluidity of
self-observed self-observing movement – cut short by that cat, under her feet
again, finished eating already, hungry again already? Or seeing through the
act, maybe; wanting to mess it up?
The cat had
a mat on the bed, close to where the mouse-mat lay on the silken quilt, next to
where she sat at the end of the bed in rocking chair with rug wrapped around
knees, laptop balanced on lap, tea at hand, books at hand, notes at hand, the
light fading. The cat washed itself, starting with the legs. Sentences
beckoned and came and went and were captured, the essay grew. ‘The world
Rousseau creates for himself in the writing of the Confessions is
populated not only by a fictional self but also by fictional others; his
solitary reality gives birth to an imaginative society.’ They came easier when
there was still tea in the mug; when it was finished – all but the last
millimetres that would be the basis for the next mug with reused teabag – it was
more laborious, without the urgency and promise of imminent reward that the mug
there, waiting to be sipped from, gave her. With it empty there, she thought
still about the sentences, but she thought more and more about the clock in
between and within them, calculating the time she ought to have, or would have
earned, the next cup; liking it all to be as late as possible, even while
knowing that would only mean she would wake later in the morning – liking when
things somehow conspired to mean things had to be later; such a very powerful
feeling, the feeling of power in keeping working later – even if it was at its
guiltless best when the lateness could be labelled unavoidable…
The hours
passed. She drank all her five drinks, wrote as much as she could. ‘…Similarly, in the Rêveries, the danger of the social exchange which is
so emphatically denied is replaced by the pleasurable security of internal
reciprocity, of conversation through the text with himself, as with “un moins
vieux ami”.’ The cat was there, sometimes, hovering round her mind and
mouse-mat.
Eventually,
a little later than the night before, it was time to have her food.
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