Above anything else, however, fruit would tempt me endlessly. I can sense your bewilderment now. Of all foods, why would someone be most tempted by fruit? I asked myself the same question. My house is and always has been one of full cupboards. My mother’s sweet tooth meant that our kitchen was bursting at the seams with treats and chocolate. Despite this, I showed little interest in these things while fasting. I considered once that maybe I didn’t crave these foods because of their availability. We each want what we can’t have, after all. The problem with this theory is that technically nothing was available to me anymore and there was no reason why my mouth should water at the sight of a fruit bowl and not an open box of chocolates. What made me so desperate for my mother’s fruit bowl, which was always full, was the natural goodness I knew it had. It was as if my body, after so long without proper nutrition, craved natural excellence only.
The smell of fruit was more tantalizing because my body knew it would service it better than anything else. The smell of that fruit bowl screamed of hydration and physical restitution. It also teased my very eyes. I had never noticed before how vibrant the colours were in a fruit bowl. The combination of sight and smell left me ravenous for that fruit. I thought so often of Eve in the Garden of Eden and even fancied myself a modern equivalent. Eve must have been bulimic, I once joked. Nothing could have tempted her more than the sight and smell of that apple and I thought that had I been in her position, I would have tossed eternal life and happiness out the window for just one bite.
Poor woman, I thought. Of course the will against temptation had to fall on her. She never had a chance.
Being surrounded by food became a strange and almost sadistic pleasure for me. While it tortured that part of me that still wanted to live as I had for so many years, I couldn’t stay away from those smells. It made me strong too. Every moment spent around food tested my ability to resist it. When I did so, she fired up inside me like a revved engine. Her vigour and unheralded zeal in those moments was a compelling sensation and I soaked it all in. Of course, there was only a very fine line that wavered between smelling the food and actually eating it; one slip-up and I knew I could lose complete control of myself. I stayed focused and headstrong on the matter.
Smoking helped. It would curb the hunger pains and provided the entertainment that was now missing due to the absence of food in my life. More than just something to do with my hands, I found myself tricked into believing one could survive on cigarettes, water and black coffee if they needed to. And I did.
Over time, fasting became my natural way of living from day to day. I struggled to remember how I could have ever lived any other way but this. The mind can condition the body to do anything. Our bodies are at the mercy of our own mentality. It’s when the problem is in the mind in the first place that the real trouble starts. Although extreme and dangerous, my illness was never about my actions. They were mere manifestations of something bigger. It was about the mind that guided them and the technical faults in its ability to do so. Under this theory an eating disorder is a mentality, albeit an unhealthy one. It is a way of thinking that dictates our life and how we choose to live it. Through the mentality of bulimia or any other illness, the world and our place in it are seen completely differently, as if a new shade has been cast over their original appearance. Through my mentality of the time, everything in the world was seen through a bulimic light.
Bulimia nervosa is a cyclic lifestyle and consists of three main stages, which are repeated over and over. Unaware of the trap I had by now fallen into very deeply, I was in the first stage of bulimia. The behaviours of a bulimic may be documented in their reoccurring fasting, bingeing and purging. For me, this cycle was daily and sometimes even hourly. But looking back, the trend dominated those two years in a much broader way too. I had been fasting on and off for months before I ever considered purging. But after so long without eating – or even just eating properly – I found myself in an uncontrollable state, which had to be remedied. Purging would become an intricate part of my life but I would reach rock bottom before finally getting to that point.
The Binge
I’m unsure of my age. I look relatively older, maybe 18, but feel as small as a six-year-old. I can’t be certain. I’m alone and surrounded by tables of food, displayed beautifully and just begging to be eaten. I know I shouldn’t eat anything; if I do, I will ruin all my hard work thus far and then I will balloon in size. Instead, I just smell the food for a while. As I breathe in, I move my mouth in a chewing motion, pretending that I’m eating that delicious odour; this way, I can persuade myself into believing that I’m inhaling the food itself.
Everyone wants me to eat. My friends, my family, sometimes even those vague faces I drink with are all nitpicking at me below the surface, willing me to feed myself. I know that they can see I haven’t been eating anything and they’re all just itching to say something. My family would just love if I kept eating; I would stay they’re fat little girl for ever, exactly how they want me. And why would my friends want me to stop eating? We’re each in one big competition after all, contending with one another to look the best and to be the most attractive. They would never admit to it but I know this to be the case. I won’t lose. I’ve lost too many times before. I’m going to win, I think to myself.
Yet for all my reasoning and determination, I can’t stop looking at this beautiful food in front of me with my mouth watering up. The very air that surrounds me has been polluted with the allurement of this food, wrapping itself around my flaccid body, beguiling all my unsophisticated senses. If only there was some way of eating it and then making it disappear. Maybe I could invent a time machine that would allow me eat the food, fondly remember the sensation of doing so and later return to the moment before I put anything in my mouth and stop. Sometimes I do miss eating the way other people do. But I’m convinced now that all is not what it seems.
When I see a very thin girl mindlessly scoffing her meal at a restaurant, I think to myself, That must be the first meal she has eaten in months; because it’s just not possible for anybody to eat in this supposedly ‘normal’ fashion and still remain that skinny. If this is the case, then my contention that I am a freak is correct. Not only do I function under an evidently eccentric mentality by comparison, but even my body cannot operate as others do because unlike these bodies, mine simply can’t absorb food without erupting at the seams of my waistline.
Despite this knowledge, I start to give in to all those pressing temptations. I dive into the spread before me, hoping that if I chew loudly it will drown out the screaming voice in my head. It’s too late for her to stop me now anyway; a few bites and I’ve already ruined myself so I may as well commit fully to my sin. I’m eating only a very short while before I start to get pains in my stomach. I knew this was a bad idea and suddenly I can no longer drown out that screaming in my head; it’s all I can hear or feel now. I finally stop and realise that I’m lighted-headed, as if I’ve been pumped with hot air and the only thing holding me to the ground is this gall at the base of my torso.
I fall back into bed, where I’m almost certain I came from in the first place. Everything has gotten a bit blurry now. I’ve lost track of time and it’s dark outside so I can’t see anything properly. I wipe my mouth where a bit of drool had been trickling down and am suddenly aware that something isn’t right. Grabbing a nearby hand-mirror, I can just about make out my face in a ray of light, the source of which I do not know. As if an apocalypse has decided to take place in my head, all horrors of the world seem to crash down on top of me, igniting trepidation and hysteria. All my teeth have fallen out. I open my mouth just wide enough to see big pink gums and my tongue falling around in my mouth, no teeth to keep it fenced in.
‘Mum!’ I start screaming, but to little avail because it sounds too muffled for anyone to hear. ‘Mum! Come in here, Mum! My teeth, I need help!’
***
&n
bsp; When I finally woke up, I was temporarily still convinced that there wasn’t a tooth left in my head. After a few moments of lingering distress, I slumped back on my pillow, reassured that it had just been a dream. But my uneasiness was always difficult to shake off and these nightmares usually left a moody and irritable residue to each new day’s premiere. They were quite common by that point in my life. Perhaps they had even become nightly occurrence but thankfully I didn’t always remember them. They were more or less the same from night to night; I would start bingeing on food in whatever the given circumstance and would somehow finish the dream with no teeth and an alarmingly realistic foreboding that would persist long after waking.
They were only dreams and given I had never read too deeply into them in the past I wasn’t about to start doing so now, regardless of the context. Besides, I had little interest in dwelling upon the subconscious when my conscious reality had begun to reach such a point of turmoil. An eating disorder comes about as a consequence of a great number of varying factors, as we have seen and continue to explore. What enables it to persevere and adopt new manifestations is often subject to the ongoing lifestyle of the given individual. As well as feeding on the person whose body it inhabits, an eating disorder feeds on the environment in which it lives. It is mutable in this way. Its ability to bend and contort as a means of fitting the necessary mould is both skilful and an absolute requirement to guarantee its further existence.
I suppose, it is this faculty that determined my eating disorder as bulimia as opposed to anything else. It took a measure of time though; I suffered an eating disorder long before I acted out any bulimic behaviours. The problem is that these words, phrases and concepts to which we attribute such mental illnesses are too ambiguous in their meaning. They are umbrella terms that have been generalised to a point of mild obscurity, if not total equivocation. Moreover, our understanding of them is usually very primitive, perhaps even completely ignorant, in comparison to the complexity of the particular disease. An acquaintance of mine, with whom intellect had not graced and who was aware that I’d struggled in this way, once highlighted my point perfectly.
‘Aren’t you, like, anorexic or something?’ he said to me. Yes, he executed his question exactly like that. Needless to say, I was unimpressed. But there seemed little point in lying; I had only recently written an article for my university newspaper in which I detailed my story, hoping to God some good may come out of it. Instead, I got this guy.
‘No. I’m bulimic’ I told him.
‘Oh right, yeah. That’s the one where you make yourself sick, isn’t it?’
‘That’s the one.’ If monotone sarcasm ever had a moment of prodigious notoriety, that would have been it. Well this is just brilliant, I thought to myself. Two years of emotional and psychological depravity and in one sentence, this guy had defined what it is to be a bulimic, convinced himself of whatever meaning he gave it and I imagine that in his own head, the matter was now completely resolved and closed for ever.
If I worked under the terms that this person set down for bulimia, for example, then what was I before I began purging? I don’t think it is so simple that I could say I was anorexic for some months and then later turned bulimic. Perhaps it would make all this much easier for us to comprehend if we opted to believe the above. But in doing so, we would disregard the accuracy with which we are attempting to analyse an eating disorder. Sometimes I wonder if it’s possible to be bulimic without displaying bulimic behaviours such as purging. But then I realise that nobody would understand this, not without understanding her and how she conducts herself. The fasting process I underwent prior to my bulimia was, you see, part of it. It was key in the cyclical behaviours that are governed by a repetitive mentality. One doesn’t merely resolve to never again let a meal rest in their body. Something has to provoke the thought and more than this, something has to make you really believe it.
In this way, my months of fasting didn’t merely provide me with the determination to just lose weight; they instilled that raw and pure belief in what I was doing. Though others may argue that the overall purpose was to lose weight, in reality, purpose had very little to do with it. Belief is a staggeringly powerful weapon and once it existed in its truest form, I abandoned logic because I knew that it could be championed by blind faith anyway. This was how I ought to live and I believed that, for the sake of believing something.
I’ve been told I have an addictive personality. It’s a fair assertion and not something I would deny with too much haste. I’m susceptible to becoming addicted to most things; lifestyles, people, moods, activities, you name it. It’s this aspect to my character that often sanctions and fuels my perfectionism in life. But through all my time spent thinking over those two years, I have wondered so much whether I simply allowed myself to become addicted to that bulimic mentality. Or better still, perhaps I just became addicted to the concept of belief, no matter where it fell. It’s natural for everyone to want to believe in something. I’ve never been an exception; my belief in God, for example, has been unyielding and pure in substance. I’ve had blind faith in Him since an extremely young age, probably since I was old enough to even grasp the notion. I never remember a time in my life when God was not in it.
***
I am seven years old. I attend family Mass every Sunday with Mum and Natalie. Dad and Peter don’t go to mass anymore so I pray extra hard for them. I always link Mum’s arm and Natalie does the same on the other side of her; we get uncomfortable on the wooden benches and fight with one another so Mum separates us by putting herself between us. But today Natalie and I can’t fight because it’s my First Holy Communion and everyone has to be on their best behaviour. Father Peter hasn’t even started speaking yet but I’m already tired.
Last night, Mum put the rags in my hair to prepare me for today. While I was practising singing This Little Light of Mine, she shredded a towel into strips, curled each around a chunk of my hair and knotted it on my head. I hate the rags and usually cry because they hurt my head. My hair is full with ringlets of hair now and my scalp is still sizzling from when they were taken out this morning. I don’t know why we spent so much time on my hair because it’s covered with a veil now anyway. I’m wearing Natalie’s Communion dress, which has been altered to fit me and also to look slightly different so nobody will know it’s the same dress. It resembles a white wedding cake, with frills falling like snow atop its silk threading and a pink bow at every turn. But it still feels too tight because Natalie is smaller than me and I’m too fat for it. I move around awkwardly, my dress making a noise similar to paper scraping on the floor with every gesture.
I’ve been looking forward to today for a really long time. My teacher had everyone in the class make their own poster with a stained-glass candle. They’re made out of coloured crepe paper, all stuck together on one sheet. Looking around, the church walls are dotted with those paper candles. Blues, reds, yellows and greens illuminate the building when hit by the rays of sunlight beating in. I’ve heard of the Northern Lights and how you can only see them in certain parts of the world. Spinning my head around all the colours of the church, I think this is like the crepe paper version of the Northern Lights. All the preparation we did was worth it because amidst the rainbow-spotted walls, I can see my stained-glass candle. It looks just as important as everyone else’s and I feel part of something really big. My candle belongs on that wall the way I belong to Jesus and to God.
After the first hymn, Father Peter starts speaking up on the altar. He’s my favourite priest in St. Fergal’s Parish because he hasn’t got grey hair yet, sings along with the choir and always talks to everyone after Mass. I’ve also never taken confession with him; I don’t like seeing the priests after I’ve taken confession because then they know all the lies I’ve told, how often I fight with my sister and how sometimes I don’t say my prayers. For now, Father Peter knows none of these things and I’m glad. When everyon
e is listening to the readings, I’m looking at the wooden crucifix that hangs at the top of the church. It’s huge and always looks like it’s about to fall down but after so long of seeing it, I never notice it anymore. It should scare me but it doesn’t because there is at least one crucifix in every house I’ve been inside; I’m used to them. But for now, I’m lost in that crucifix at the top of the church, thinking about Jesus and whether he made a lot of money on his Communion day. Everyone says that relatives, like all your aunts and uncles, have to give you money when you make your Communion; some kids make hundreds.
But I don’t want to make loads of money because it means that I have to spend the day visiting neighbours and relatives to collect it. I hate doing that because everyone will ask me stupid questions that they don’t want to ask and that I don’t want to answer. I’d prefer not to go visiting and just forget about the money. Besides, Ms Dilleen says that we’re not supposed to hope for money or presents and that today is special because it is the first time we will receive the Holy Eucharist. If we wish for anything else, we shouldn’t receive the Body of Christ because nothing is more important than that. I don’t want to accept the Body for the wrong reasons because I want Jesus to trust me.
‘You’re lying.’ Gerald said to me in class last week. ‘Everybody wants money on their Communion. Stop lying.’
My Secret Life Page 7