The World Was Whole

by Fiona Wright

  Fitness entrepreneur Michelle Bridges has built this language of magic into her very business, explicitly offering her clients a ‘12-Week Body Transformation’. Bridges rose to prominence as a trainer on the TV series The Biggest Loser, a series that was designed to compete with reality home-renovation shows like Renovation Rescue, Changing Rooms, The Block, feeding off the same fairytales, the same transformative desires of the same prime-time audiences. (My family often watched The Biggest Loser in its early series, after our collective family dinner on Sunday evenings; I’d squirm whenever the show’s hosts humiliated the contestants for their difficult relationships with food.)

  I met a woman in my first hospitalisation whose eating disorder had developed while on this very ‘Body Transformation’ diet, who has been readmitted four times now, who still cannot undo its damage.

  But renovation, Allon argues, is also about detail, and it is about distraction – ‘there’s nothing like renovations to keep the world at bay’, she writes, nothing like the never-ending lists of details and fittings, colour swatches, carpet samples, different kinds of benchtops and floor tiles and splashbacks to distract from the everyday worries and distractions of a life. ‘They focus our concentration on the here and now, the little details, and they appear to bring everything under our control.’ So much of our lives we cannot control, especially in an environment of unspecified global threat, imminent ecological disaster, increasing workplace uncertainty, but within the boundaries of a home (four brick walls, a fence) we can fixate on the little things, and we can fix them.

  This is also exactly how anorexia works.

  Malnutrition narrows everything, not just the body; we cannot think, for any length of time at least, of anything besides the food our bodies so desperately crave. We plan and organise every meal, whether it is to be eaten or avoided; we collect recipes and cookbooks; we walk through the aisles of supermarkets, looking, touching, but not buying. I have a friend who has to re-wash his plate and cutlery before each meal, in case he might accidentally eat any crumbs still stuck there, invisible to the eye. Another who reads the nutritional label of every can of Diet Coke she buys, just to ensure its energy value hasn’t changed in the last few hours. Our days are consumed by making choices about food, by worrying over the things that we might eat or have just eaten: these details that a healthy person does not even register. We’re not quite present in our bodies, and we’re certainly not in the world.

  When my body became unsafe, became uncertain, became a thing I did not know, when I was forced to reconsider the small details of what I was eating and how my body was reacting, I think I very soon found reassurance, found some security in those minutiae. Those endless details diverted my attention, seemed to bring one thing at least under my small command. And it’s this that still troubles me now: without these strictures, without this inwardness, my boundaries feel uncertain, my walls porous. I don’t know, as the psychological phrase goes, how to furnish my life in their stead – although I’m learning, slowly and often intangibly, I’m learning. And I still don’t see myself as belonging to this frugal, abstemious and stretched-tight body. I’m still unhomed.

  Until recently, I thought that I was twenty in the year that I first became ill, in my second year of university, the year I picked up extra subjects but spent enough time reading on trains each week to keep up with the workload. But sorting through a filing cabinet at my parents’ house a few years ago, I found some discharge papers from St George Hospital’s emergency department, from what was the first hospitalisation of my life (bookish kids, after all, don’t break bones).

  I’d ended up there late one Saturday, extremely dehydrated and shaky, after throwing up even the water I’d tried to drink throughout the day. Because there were so few beds, I spent the night hooked to a drip in the aged care ward, next to a woman who kept trying to climb from her bed and a man making increasingly explicit propositions to the nurses. The papers I found said I was nineteen, not twenty.

  It’s a small error only, but it rattled me because I also realised that so much of the story I’d been telling myself of and about my illness, over what I now know is its fifteen-year duration (how awful that number seems), was riddled with false assumptions, confusions, and an embarrassing richness of denial. Those papers made my own remembered history feel more and more unstable, at the very time when I was unable to imagine what my future might look like, still struggling every day in the attempt to overcome my illness.

  Because even if disease unhomed me, it also ultimately offered another way of being within my body, a way that was uncomplicated and unselfconscious, even untouchable, because it was insistent. The hungry body constantly makes its demands known, in small twinges and distractions that are always there, like the background buzzing of a refrigerator. It’s as if we have to constantly prove that we’re in our bodies, that we’re present, because we feel so often, somehow, that this might be in doubt. We need to prove that our bodies are not transient, that they’re our own, in order that we might find some definition of, or for, our selves.

  Last year, when the first bushfires of the season leapt up around Sydney, I walked through the afternoons in air almost thick enough to touch, the weird orange sun struggling to cast its light through the haze. This light puts me on edge, still, every time: the suburb I grew up in is a part of the bushfire belt; my family home almost burned down in the year I turned fifteen, the garage windows shattered, the garden shed exploded into a twisted pile of metal on a concrete slab. My family had evacuated to my grandparents’ house in Picnic Point, that one-road-out slowed to such a crawl that some people parked their cars on the median strip and walked instead to the evacuation centres at the local shopping centre, the scout hall, the primary school. We were convinced we’d seen news footage of firemen kicking down our burning gate. But the house survived; the Hills hoist too, standing alone and stringless in a blackened backyard without fences; our fox terrier, who’d run away in terror as my father packed up the car, was waiting patiently for our return at the top of the driveway. My mother scrubbed each venetian blind slat individually in an attempt to wash the scent of smoke from the house.

  My brother’s best friend’s house, three streets from ours, was razed to the ground, and we bought them a hamper of small necessities – salt and pepper, washing powder, tomato sauce – because such things had been forgotten in the official donations (soft toys, bulk packs of underpants) that they received.

  Each time I move through this cloying, vermilion light, what I remember most is the waiting. The waiting that felt like being held in glowing amber, especially before a second fire, a few years later, one which burnt more slowly, and which we watched, over three long days, move down the ridgeline of bushland behind our house. We trimmed trees and packed boxes, filled the gutters with water, gathered up our non-synthetic clothes, but mostly, we just watched and waited, uncertain of when and how the weather conditions would change, knowing full well the terrible unpredictability of fire. Each time I move through this light, it always lets me know that the body remembers; no matter how it changes or estranges itself, how long it remains compromised, the body has a memory of its own. This light seems to reassert something I thought I’d moved away from, and I’m always surprised to find my body so viscerally remembering my home.

  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about one of my first dietitians, a treacly-voiced woman who ran the first hospital program I attended. The program helped me, I know it did, but the more distance I get from it, the more I recognise how punitive it was, how much based on stripping us of any kind of power or assertion. One of my strongest memories of the place comes from my second admission, when I was being grilled by three therapists simultaneously over one small infraction or another, and I decided not to make my case that what I’d done was actually quite reasonable. This dietitian said, it’s good to see that you’re not arguing with us, and I responded, I know there’s just no point. That’s great, she said, that’s progress, well
done.

  This dietitian used to say to me, whenever I questioned the size of the meals on my plan, the frequency with which I had to eat, her insistence that I structure my life around my eating, with the complaint that none of this seemed normal, normal isn’t what you’re aiming for, or, this is your new normal.

  At the time I rolled my eyes at the cliché, but eight years on I’m finally accepting that my illness is my normal, that I have to find a way to dwell within and alongside it.

  I’ve also been living now for ten years in a different kind of landscape, a different kind of suburb, older, denser, more unplanned; and in a different kind of household, shared with friends instead of family. It’s different – but it’s not better or bolder or more exciting or progressive. And even here, I often feel precarious. I’m unable to predict how long my landlord will allow me to keep living in my home, or for how much longer I’ll have income from my string of casual and temporary freelance jobs. This is the case, too, for so many of my friends and peers – our new normal is a less settled one, less homed, but I don’t think we have, yet, the new narratives and metaphors we need to understand this.

  ‘The house we were born in is physically inscribed in us all,’ writes Gaston Bachelard, describing what he calls the ‘passionate liaison’ of our bodies and the spaces we inhabit, our homes (although French, the language that he writes in, makes no distinction between the physical house and the idea of home). By this formulation, we cannot move away, because the unconscious habits of our bodies will always take us back. We can neither escape, nor be exiled from our first suburban homes, and we shouldn’t even try. But what I like about this formulation is that it’s hopeful, it suggests that even with great distance from and discomfort with any idea of home, the memory of wholeness, of homeliness is always alive somewhere within us, always animating our bodies, even and especially where we’re not aware of it at all.

  But this inscription, I think, is more complicated for those of us whose bodies are unsimple, for those of us who have been ill, especially chronically so – for those of us who go hungry. We’re overwritten with different stories, inscribed with different physical experiences, some that contradict, some that complement, and some that simply cannot comprehend the diagrams we carry of that first home, and this process never stops. For those of us who write, for whom inscription is something we do with our bodies, rather than something that is simply done to them, the formulation can never be this clear. I don’t want to go home. And yet I do. I can’t go home, and yet I never left.

  THE EVERYDAY INJURIES

  My friend has just separated from his partner, for reasons that horrify him because they are so seemingly mundane. He’s holding together admirably, they both are, but yesterday, he says, he almost broke down at a medical centre, filling in a form that asked for an emergency contact, when he realised he didn’t know any more who he should nominate. It’s the little things, he says, I’ve got a handle on the big stuff, but the little things still kick me in the guts. I tell him this is always, always how we operate as human beings, that the big things are too abstract, somehow, for us to ever really have to deal with, but the tiny ones, the everyday occurrences and injuries, are our undoing, as much as they are the things that bring us joy. The small transfers of energy that shock us, sudden and electric. The hidden things that they illuminate.

  A colleague and I turn up a bit too early for a comedy show on a Saturday night, and wait in the courtyard, in a line of sorts, behind the theatre. It’s drizzling with rain, and the cold’s just starting to bite, we’re all grouped under a canvas awning and holding our beer bottles by their necks so our hands don’t get too icy. Someone we can’t see is smoking near the fence, and their exhalation drifts vaguely over our heads. My colleague breathes in deeply, sighs. I’ll always miss smoking, she says, always. I just loved it so much.

  After the show, we walk to a small bar that’s opened nearby; the bartenders have made a playlist of 80s ballads and 90s hip-hop that’s blaring from the speakers and has everybody singing along. There are fat pieces of chalk on every table and on the bar, which means that there are very detailed sketches of penises on every table and on the bar. A woman in a red paisley dress, with dark hair knotted at the crown of her head and luscious, fierce brown brows, closes her eyes and dances as she waits for her drinks to be poured. A man walks up behind her and she startles when he touches her, then beams unreservedly and sinks her body back against his chest.

  I catch a train into the city, in the late afternoon, and hear a young woman’s voice somewhere behind me: it smells of seaweed in here.

  I wake in the middle of the night with Alex clutching at my shoulder as if he is pulling me in, somehow, pulling me back from some kind of blind danger. Are you okay, he asks, and I foggily tell him that I am, though I’m confused, he says I’d cried out in my sleep. I tell him I’d been dreaming that I’d held a party in my house, it was late and the lights were low and buttery and I wanted everyone to leave but they just wouldn’t. My guests kept sitting loosely in small groups, talking and enjoying each other’s company and I just wanted to be alone; I can’t stand feeling powerless, beholden. Alex laughs. He laughs, a sound that cuts right through the still and silence of this hour of night, that’s your nightmare, he says, your nightmare is a party? Oh, I don’t say, but it was and it still is.

  A middle-aged man in the café I’m working in says to his teenage daughter, I don’t know, there’s a lot of q words on this menu.

  On Anzac Day, I organise an afternoon picnic with a small group of friends. I don’t like long weekends; they mean nothing to those of us who freelance and one more day full of people for those of us who fizz with the static of anxiety. I don’t like Anzac Day; I hate the overblown nationalistic clamour, the excessive, slurring public drunkenness, the press of bodies throwing away money playing two-up in the pubs. So I gather a few friends in a park tucked away on a backstreet of Erskineville, the ground mossy beneath some spindly, leaf-dropping trees, the light as thick as golden syrup. We chew on oaty biscuits and drink sweet champagne from oversized cups, just enough to get gently tipsy, and as we’re packing up I realise that I’m desperate for the toilet. The closest pub is a few streets away and I’m in pain by the time we get there, I can’t think of anything besides my bladder. I rush inside and I feel like a horse in a stall when I finally get to a cubicle. The relief sweeps my whole body and is gloriously physical.

  I walk the long way home as the sun begins to set; the temperature drops alongside it. I’m wearing a dress, and open-toed shoes, and can see my toes turning purplish-blue in protest. Inside, I turn on my ceramic heater for the first time this year, set its thermostat for thirty-five degrees and hold my hands and feet directly in its blast. My shoulders and spine unfurl deliciously and I think: these two moments of bodily transcendence, of pure pleasure.

  Alex invites me to a Passover dinner at his mother’s house, and I go along although I’m terrified by the thought of ritualised eating, of some kind of sacred or symbolic food making me throw up, what it might mean to bodily reject a sacrament.

  There are a few other non-Jewish guests at the table, and one, a beautifully soft-eyed girl, asks if Passover or Yom Kippur is the more important holiday, and Alex’s brother starts debating this with his friend, before saying, Yom Kippur is a fast, which is a pain in the neck, and Passover’s a feast, which is way easier. I almost choke because the words seem so incongruous to me, sitting on a heavy chair at a formal table, feeling so unequipped for what is set to follow.

  Alex and his brother make wisecracks at each of the small ceremonies that accrue to make the ritual. We eat flat crackers which get called ‘the bread of affliction’ and I know it’s awful to find poetic resonance in this but I can’t help it.

  Alex’s mother clearly adores his brother’s soft-eyed friend, and when she distributes a set of coloured masks, intended for children and representing the ten biblical plagues that were called down upon the Pharaoh, she gives
this friend the mask labelled death of the firstborn, the final plague, the most prestigious and important one of all (I get boils). The affection between them is beautiful to see. I drink a lot of sacramental wine, which is sweet and sticky and strong. I have to rush to the bathroom to throw up my dinner, painfully and suddenly, although nobody notices but Alex, and he knows enough to not say anything at all.

  A tiny woman in an oversized shirt that reads SURVIVE NOW, CRY LATER grins at me as we cross the road together.

  Alex and I go away for the weekend; I’m thirty-two years old, and it’s the first time I’ve ever done this, had a holiday weekend with someone I am dating. Alex is still teasing me about the caption on a photo taken at a recent awards night that I dragged him to, in order that I wouldn’t feel so nervous; it read Fiona Wright and Partner and the moment he saw it on Facebook, he’d texted I’M PARTNER, and I’d replied NICE KNOWING YOU BYE; he keeps dropping the word into sentences the whole time we drive to rile me up.

  At dusk on the first day, we sit on a small balcony and watch a mob of kangaroos foraging along a row of olive trees. I’d just that morning read a description of a kangaroo’s face as ‘part dog and part deer’ and I can’t help but think of this, though Alex calls them Australian meerkats for the way they spring upright when they hear us talking, their front paws tucked in and ears swivelling in our direction. Moving slowly through the orchard, like this, they look cumbersome, their long hind legs mismatched to their small front claws, but when they bound away from our car the next morning, in full and rapid flight, they are all sinew and speed, and almost frightening in their grace.

  We have breakfast in a country café, at a table underneath a blood-red spider grevillea. A young couple sits nearby, and their two children, a tow-headed boy and his long-limbed older sister, start dragging out toys from a box we hadn’t noticed beside the kitchen door. The girl makes a tower from small blocks of lacquered wood, and when her brother doesn’t help her, cries out, why won’t you do what I want you to?