The World Was Whole

by Fiona Wright

  On the first day in the hospital, I curl on my bed and cry for a full hour after every meal, and I keep thinking, I can’t do this, I can’t do this, I don’t think I can do this. I panic at the piece of meat that’s on my plate for dinner, I gulp for breath, great ragged gasps that hurt my sternum and then I sob outside the dining room because I hadn’t realised, somehow, that I’d gotten quite this sick. I’m so afraid of what I’ve done and of who I have become.

  A week in, on my first day of partial leave, Laura drives me to Parramatta, for my first real coffee in a week. I order cake as well, and she beams, although she doesn’t say a thing, and it is beautiful. Afterwards, we walk through the streets so we can sit in a park in some sun. Outside the library, strips of brown paper are tied to the rails of a fence, printed with calligraphied text. The strip that I unfurl reads, no winter lasts forever. I’ve been in treatment for eight years now. I still don’t know what I can hope for, how to make, or wait for, the season’s turn.

  RELAXED, EVEN RESIGNED

  In the year when my friends first started drifting into the workforce, our degrees not even printed yet, one of my best friends landed a job in a local council, an entry-level position in its education and outreach department. His supervisor was a man in his late fifties, who had worked for this one council for almost thirty years; he knew the organisation and its operations in exquisite detail, knew its history and the changes to the ‘core values’ and ‘service mission’ and ‘key language’ that regular waves of external consultants had pressed upon it across the years. My friend was fascinated by this man, not because of the long and deep perspective that he carried with him, the kind that seems unthinkable to any barely-twenty-year-old. My friend was fascinated by him because every day, regardless of workload or weather or any other ever-changing variable, he would stop what he was doing on the stroke of twelve o’clock, and eat a ham, cheese and tomato sandwich at his desk, a sandwich on white bread, that he had brought from home. For the two years that my friend worked for this council, his supervisor never varied in his routine, except for one single week when he was renovating the kitchen in his home. In this week, at noon, the man would walk to the local café a few metres down the road, and return to his desk to unwrap a white-bread sandwich of cheese, tomato and ham.

  At the time, we both found this hilarious, I think in part because we were so new to the world of work, to offices and corporate cultures and the sweeping exhaustion and disbelief that hits so many of us in our first full-time roles (I remember saying, once, I can’t believe I have to do this again tomorrow, and the next day, and the one after that as well; I lasted less than six months). We could only see this habit, this ritual, as rigidity, as a dearth or even death of imagination, of being utterly stuck in one’s ways. Our own adult lives were still so new and novel that we couldn’t understand how newness and novelty might fade peacefully and happily, without their dulling being anything other than dull. But I have kept returning to this story, I think, because it’s taken me so long to recognise the value of my own quiet rituals, and the joy and even succour that they bring.

  In part, this has been a gradually accumulating knowledge – as I’ve aged, I know I’ve slowly grown more accustomed to my own self, more accepting and appreciative of my ways, less concerned by the idea that others might find them aberrant or strange. As I’ve learnt, too, to live with my illness, and its unpredictability and constant flux, I’ve slowly come to lean more heavily on the small patterns and pleasures that I know I can repeat and rely upon, even and especially when my body and my world feel frayed. But the process has also been abrupt, more recently, because the comfort and importance of routine, quiet and simple as it is, is also far more obvious when it is interrupted.

  Towards the end of last year I ended up in hospital. I want to write, I ended up in hospital again, but it was different this time – for the first time, it was an inpatient stay, instead of the day programs I’ve always checked in to instead. Day programs have always been a sensible option for me: they usually run over two or three, occasionally four, days in each week, and so rarely required me to step away entirely from my (freelance, casual) work – I’ve always been a ‘highly functional’ anorexic – and they’re also easier to access, because their size is not constrained by the number of beds on the ward, unfailingly too few. But I know too that day programs always felt safer to me, because they felt limited and delineated in the changes they could demand: because they tend to run from the mid-morning until the early afternoon, beginning with a morning snack and ending just after afternoon tea, the control I was asked to relinquish, each time, was only partial, leaving breakfast, dinner, and supper still under my small command, weekends still mine to do with what I would. I also never thought I was sick enough, medically compromised enough, frighteningly thin enough, for an inpatient hospital stay, mostly because I never went to hospital when I most needed to, when I was at my lowest weight. And because I hadn’t done it then, doing it later seemed like both a failure, and a waste.

  But all across that year I had been barely coping with my illness. I’m still not entirely sure what happened, or why, except that (I want to write, again) I made small concession after small concession – a skipped lunch here, a halved portion there – and although I told myself each time that it would just be this once, each time it very quickly became habitual, became instinctual, set into stone; because I felt fine, physically, I was able to look away. In hindsight, too, I know that this had something to do with my work – that in that year, I’d had more success with my writing than ever before, more than I ever really imagined for myself – and so the thing that I’d always been striving towards, without really realising it, no longer seemed to be perfectly and purposefully impossible to reach. And it didn’t feel any different from the year that I first became ill, the year after I left high school, and was no longer able to prove myself through the external, future data of my final year score. Back then, I felt lost, ill-equipped and anchorless. More recently, I felt unmoored. And so I looked away and I felt fine and I kept writing ‘n/a’ in my food diary and I’m all the more ashamed of this because I’d sworn to myself, years ago, that I’d never again fall victim to denial. By the time I started phoning hospitals, my eating was as bad as it had ever been and my weight was dropping every time I stepped onto the scales. It took eight weeks of negotiating with four different private hospitals, one of which was interstate, before I found a doctor who’d accept me, regardless of how difficult my physical illness might make treatment of my mind.

  The shock, when I finally entered the hospital, was immediate and awful. I was shown into my room, leaving my bags behind to be searched for contraband – scissors, cigarette lighters, artificial sweeteners, or any kind of food – and it was tiny and beige, the single bed, with its white, waffle-weave blanket cordoned off from another, exactly the same, by a sickly-green curtain on a plastic rail. The coathangers had no hooks, but were built into the wardrobe, evenly spaced along a rail that automatically collapsed if too much weight was brought to bear upon it. Alex, who had driven me there, sat beside me on the bed – there was no chair – and I said to him, blankly, I didn’t expect it to look so much like a hospital. Almost immediately, I was given a laminated menu from which I had to choose my evening meal. There were three options, none of which I thought I could manage, and when I tried to explain this to the nurse, a beautiful, cropped-haired woman with a nose ring and an eyebrow that seemed almost permanently cocked, she kindly but firmly said that regardless, I had to choose, and so I closed my eyes and pointed. I felt painfully alert, all the more so because the other patients seemed relaxed, even resigned, into their routine – they filed together into the group room, into a line outside the nurses’ station, to the row of chairs beneath the medication window, they gathered their jumpers before heading downstairs to the dining room, all so seemingly conditioned and unthinking that I had to ask each time what was happening; no-one ever thought to explain.

 
But more than this, the shock was visual. The hospital that I was finally admitted to was only really willing to take me because it is run by a renegade, a psychiatrist who set up the place in order to treat the patients who fall through the cracks – there are many, and they are veritable chasms – in the systems in place elsewhere. People who are too thin to be accepted into other programs, with directors unwilling to gamble on the medical risk that the critically underweight pose (these people are usually told to gain some weight and then come back, as if that were a simple thing to do). People who have multiple and complicated diagnoses or behaviours, such as self-harming as well as self-starvation, or PTSD as well as bulimia. And people like me, who have medical conditions underpinning their eating disorders, which make regular, unrestricted eating of full-sized and varied meals far more difficult, and possibly even unattainable. What this meant, though, was that the other men and women on my ward were often visibly, viscerally unwell – some with bandages up their arms, some confined to wheelchairs to prevent their hearts from giving out, some so thin I couldn’t help, at first, to stare. I’d never, in all my years in treatment, seen people this unwell. To my shame, it was days before I could speak to them properly, days before I could even see the thinnest among them as properly human.

  To be fair, it was three days before I really spoke to anyone – I felt too disconnected, too distracted, so that even answering the questions of the nurses and the therapists felt like dragging words into my mouth. The first group session I attended was horticulture therapy (it wasn’t until days later that I thought, you couldn’t make that shit up), and a softly beaming middle-aged woman showed us how to pull the leaves and runners from succulents to place in our own small pots. She asked my name, and if I have a garden (I do, and it’s largely succulents, because they’re difficult to kill), and I could tell that she was trying to draw me into conversation, but I just couldn’t do my bit. She turned instead to the pile of dismembered plants in front of her. They regenerate, she said, still smiling, and then, it’s exactly like a metaphor.

  That first night, after I collected my evening meal from the top of the cafeteria counter, perched so high that I had to ask a taller patient to pass it down for me, I lifted the plastic cloche from the plate and started bawling. When I couldn’t stop, the nurse asked me if I’d like to sit outside until I felt better and I nodded mutely, and then spiralled in seconds into a full-throated panic, bent double and choking on my breath. Part of the terror, I knew immediately, was that I hadn’t realised that I was this sick, that I’d be so incapable of coping with the kinds of meals I had been quietly avoiding, that I had looked so steadfastly away. My parents came to visit me that night and I told them, I can’t do this. I just can’t do this, and I want to go home.

  I mention these things only because it took three days for my discomfort to shift, for me to feel less constantly imperilled, for my sense of my own personhood, my personality, to slowly start filtering back in. It only took three days until I could read again in the enforced bed rest (I was allowed to take this in my room, as long as I kept the door open; we were accompanied into the stall if we used the bathroom), instead of simply lying there, curled up on my side, facing the wall in numb and shut-down disbelief. My parents had brought me the quilt from my bed at home, one that my mother had made years ago from gold-toned fabrics sewn into a pattern of autumn leaves, so that my room looked less institutional; also a bunch of Cécile Brünner roses from their front garden so that it smelt less like industrial bleach. It only took three days until I made my first sarcastic joke. Four days until I was asked to explain the routines around meal time to a new patient – a woman I immediately liked for her bright-blue hair and enormous plastic earrings shaped like fists with the third finger sticking up. On my fifth day, I did a load of washing in the communal laundry, once I figured out who to ask to have that room unlocked, and it felt wonderful, so wonderful, to be doing something normal and practical, pegging out my underwear (albeit alongside other people’s underwear) on the rickety clothesline.

  On that third day we had some rare free time on our hands, because one of the therapists had called in sick, and were allowed to walk together as a unit, accompanied by two nurses, to the local shopping centre. As we filed up the concrete ramp and through the entrance, we passed a small family, two women, one holding the hand of a dark-eyed toddler, the other, much older, absently rocking a huge black pram. I was walking with a woman who’d so shocked me on my first day, chatting about the part of Sydney where it turned out we both grew up, and as we passed that family I saw them startle, stare. Of course they did, we must have looked a sight: about a dozen skinny, grey-skinned, absent-eyed men and women walking past like a small horde of the undead; I wondered if they knew they lived so close to a psych ward. But I’d forgotten this, already, had adjusted enough that this truly extraordinary circumstance had become ordinary enough for me to handle. We were given five minutes inside the supermarket, to buy soap, shampoo, stationery or magazines (as long as they weren’t about fashion or food), before ambling back, head-counted, to the hospital. The butcher next to the supermarket was named ‘No-Mis-Steak’, its backlit sign printed in Comic Sans.

  Part of what had shocked me, in those first days, was visual – the landscape around me, both human and environmental, was so different from the one that I’m so used to moving through now, that is my habitat, that I walk through along the same paths, unthinkingly, as I go about my day. Because I work largely from home, my days and weeks are not divided neatly between demarcated places of industry and domesticity – my work desk is two paces from my bed, and I rarely leave my suburb on a weekday – so my patterns of movement and the physical landscape that I press them onto are undivided too. One of the things, I think now, that first felt so fractured about my time within the hospital was that the landscape around me was so different, decidedly suburban, broader and flatter and more quiet than the space in which I now live. My window, once I was moved into a room that had one, overlooked something that may have been a canal, a creek, or a stormwater drain – a thin trickle of water through a steep concrete ditch – and a dry-grassed park backed onto by red-bricked and boxy apartment buildings. Eventually, once I’d been deemed no risk to myself or others, I was allowed to leave the grounds to walk here for fifteen minutes in the afternoon, the dried leaves of casuarinas and bottlebrush seeds catching in my sandals. The place was beautiful, in its own way, tranquil and languorous and filled with birdsong, but I missed the press of buildings near my home, the way they cram up close together, overspilling with wetter, fatter foliage – ivy, frangipani, tibouchina, silky oak. I missed the press of people, of cyclists, of dogs tangled up outside supermarkets, clothes shops and cafés. I felt alien here, and so alone.

  Yet this kind of landscape isn’t new to me; where I grew up, in south-west Sydney, is a suburb the same distance from the CBD as is this hospital, nestled in amongst precisely this sort of spaciousness, these neat front lawns, these undemonstrative but not unimportant lives. It should not have felt that unusual, and all the more so because it is usual for so much of Sydney’s population. I first remembered this, fully, viscerally, during one of my first brief leaves of absence from the hospital – the doctors liked to grant us the occasional evening off, to attend functions or social events, to practise staying safe and sane in our wider, more everyday lives. I caught the train to Central, past Westmead, Parramatta, Granville, Clyde. It was just after 5 p.m., and the train pulled up each time at stations dotted with people in polo-shirted uniforms, reading from their mobile phones or tucking high-vis vests into the back pockets of their jeans. At Granville, a towering Islander man sat down beside me, taking up the rest of the three-seat berth, and offered me a handful of his hot chips. Two women in gloriously coloured print dresses and headwraps held hands and murmured quietly in front.

  When I catch the train at Newtown I don’t see labourers or retail workers, but business suits and Gorman dresses, and the faces that I see are p
redominantly white – gentrification and de-diversification, after all, go hand in hand. It took forty minutes, and not five, to reach Central station; and once there I walked through the back streets of Chippendale to a friend’s house, a purple-painted terrace, past two small art galleries, one theatre, small bars, dodging the tumble of wheelie bins taking up most of the footpath for collection the next day. This place felt much more like my home, I thought, but does not reflect my city.

  It is habit, I think, that builds these kinds of bubbles around us, that we don’t even feel until they’re punctured. I spent so much of that last, long year, habitually and silently ignoring the always-minute degradations in my behaviour and my eating until I was faced with that meat on that plate and suddenly I couldn’t do so any more. But at the same time, so many people in the wider world that year were forced to pay attention to the things that we all ignore, to ‘filter bubbles’, and the way in which they can so easily feed back to us only the kinds of information that we already seek out. Locally, so many people and political journalists were surprised by the very close result of our federal election, because so many of the predictions circulating in the media had been based, those journalists later admitted, on the conversations they had had amongst each other while embedded on campaign buses. I was in hospital on the day of the American election, but hadn’t until then given even a moment’s credence to the possibility of a Trump victory, mostly because nobody I knew had ever voiced their support, nothing I’d read ever gave a reason why someone might do so. (The election came only a few days after a supermoon ascended over Sydney – a moon unusually full, unusually close – which had seen absolute chaos break out in the ward; two patients had been transferred into more acute care after snapping, somehow, another had escaped, and something about this made the lunacy of the wider world seem far less shocking.) In the week after I was discharged, there were two separate news articles in two different Sydney newspapers referring to ‘the goat’s cheese curtain’ and ‘the latte line’ respectively to describe the differences (largely class-based, racialised, but also, more ineffably, having to do with landscape and environment) between the inner suburbs and the Greater West, between the kind of place where I live now and the kind of place where I grew up and where I had so recently been contained.