The truth is, for all my invented perceptions and lively countenance, I believed I was dying inside, if not completely dead and buried already. The worst part was that nobody even knew it, not fully. They couldn’t have, because it was only I who lingered in that desolated cave of my mind. Bulimics are very often contradictory in this way; they can be social creatures and lead lives of total normality – quite well, might I add – and yet, remain some of the loneliest people inhabiting this earth. The loneliness I endured during that time of my life is something I hope never to experience again.
It’s more than just the feeling of being isolated. I was disconnected mentally, physically and emotionally from the entire human race, it seemed; I didn’t even feel part of it. I was a subspecies of the people who walked the streets and went about their daily lives. I was not part of the world they’d built and lived in. I was like a half-formed variety of what they were; a critter that was intended to be like them but was never finished. I was unworthy of the space I took up in that world and the lies I showcased in order to fit in. At long last, I was the living rendition of the monster that lived in my reflection. It was this realisation that sucked me deep into that bottomless vat of depression.
In bed at night was when I felt it the most. A hole had been carved in me and was growing bigger by the day. The physically overwhelming emptiness caused by fasting and purging had permeated right to all seeds of emotion, killing them away. I would have chosen uncomplicated sadness over this; sadness at least retained some purity and a confirmation of some emotion. I would have chosen anything but this. The sensation hurt like hell. That’s where I was and I’d known it for a long time now; I was in hell. I just knew I would die here and when that time came to pass, I would be alone. Even she would have abandoned me by then.
***
I am 15 years old. I’m walking down a long corridor in Dublin’s Mater Hospital. I’ve never been here before because nobody has ever mattered so much to me that I should visit. From the outside, the hospital resembles something along the lines of a university or state building, perhaps. Amidst beautiful grounds of well-kept grass and flourishing flowers, there sits the Mater itself. It has an overbearing presence about it. Though intimidating, it holds in its stance an air of architectural magnificence, as if concealing something truly spectacular from the world in which it dwells.
The only ominous thing about this place is the steps, which run high and very wide, leading you into its heart. The pillars that rest above those steps blockade its front door. They are almost frightening and resemble a stone cage that could hold the biggest and most dangerous of all beasts. As I get a little closer to them, I think how a terrifying monster must live here, deep within the walls.
Inside is a mishmash of old and new; mahogany wood panelling colliding with steel-like floors and desks. It feels wrong, like the original purpose of the place has been compromised somehow and has resulted in an offensive distortion. Very suddenly, I don’t trust this place and I don’t want to be here anymore. It scares me almost as much as the thought of why I am here in the first place.
I’m sitting in a chair that has been designated to me, beside an open door where light spills out into the hallway. This must be the old part of the building. It’s very dark for a hospital and boasts statue after statue of various saints whose names I can’t remember. Fear grips me and glues me to my seat, as I chew away at my nails and tear at the skin around my cuticles. The room spilling out light is quiet, with soft murmurs drifting their way into the hallway. The priest was in there today, I was told. I don’t dwell on this fact and forget it the moment I remember it. I don’t want to think about how many people have died in that room or in that bed. The thought makes me cower slightly and all my childhood fears of ghouls and ghosts are instantly sparked up again. Just as I think I’ll burst out of my seat and run crying down the hallway and back out to the beautiful gardens, it’s my turn to go into the room. I take a deep breath and then hold it for as long as I can.
The decor of the hallway, which resembled that of a church, has abruptly disappeared and been replaced by cold steel and pale blue bed sheets. The room has that clinical smell that only a hospital can have. My sister is weeping and I can tell she is suppressing a somewhat violent sob. All the sombre faces attempt to refigure themselves into faces of assurance. They fail but I appreciate the effort nonetheless. All eyes are on me, my gaze falls upon the hospital bed and I well up with emotion, a heavy lump in my throat and a cold dampness over my heart.
My father smiles at me from his steel bed. I hardly recognise the man bar that smile, which I’ve seen a thousand times before. There are wires everywhere, running in and out of him. On the other end of each wire, is connected to one or more of the ugly machines that flash bright lights and make beeping and buzzing sounds.
‘You okay, babe?’ he asks in a voice that does not belong to my father. I nod uncertainly. I have no words.
I have a very vague recollection of the day my father was struck by a heart-attack. At the time, I had no idea of the severity. He had suffered with heart related problems before, including something called Bell’s palsy, which made one side of his face drop completely for a while. But this was different because he had never looked like this before. Mum had warned me that Dad wouldn’t look ‘too great’ and that a quadruple bypass was a very big ordeal. If only I had known what she meant then; perhaps I wouldn’t be so struck with horror now. I don’t know how my face looks because I’ve lost all sensation in it. It can’t look very pleasing because everyone around me resumes whatever conversation they were having before I entered the room. They’re talking about the priest from today, but I zone out from the conversation.
My father was a man who prided himself on a clean shave. I remember as a child that he had boasted a full beard and for a time, just a moustache. As I’d gotten older though, he was always well-shaved and I never saw so much as one bit of stubble on his face. He was a tidy man and kept everything about him very neat. But he isn’t tidy now and his dishevelled appearance causes me to think the worst. He is half-slumped back on the pillows, too weak to fully lift himself. His salt-and-pepper hair, usually shaved down to a very fine blade, looks almost shaggy now. I can definitely run my fingers through it if I try. I can’t remember ever doing that. His face, now gaunt around the eyes and with hollowed cheeks, has not been shaved in quite a while and grey stubble laces his jaw from ear to ear. His skin has turned a soured cream colour and because of this, his dark brown eyes – the ones he has passed down to me – look big and heavy, as if it is a struggle for his face to even hold them in place, never mind keep them open.
I exchange glances with my sister. When her eyes meet mine, she fills up with tears again. She knows what I’m thinking because out of everyone in this room, she knows me best and can read me like a book. I can’t stand to look at her too long for fear of crying in front of everyone. Along with my aunt and uncle, my dad’s twin is also here. This is in addition to my mother, sister and brother. I have to hold it in for the time being at least. Besides, I’m distracted by the fresh scars I can see on my father’s body. His hospital gown is thrown awkwardly around him and falling off a little.
Poor Mum, I think to myself. She clearly tried to tidy him up for us. When it’s time to leave, I feel a wounding thrash of guilt because in truth, I don’t want to be here anymore. I shouldn’t want to leave my Dad here all alone but I just can’t stand to be in this room anymore and I simply can’t stand to look at him any longer. One by one, we give him a hug and a kiss goodbye. I don’t want to hug him because I’m afraid of hurting him in some way. And when I kiss his cheek I want to cry because I have never kissed his cheek; he always kisses mine and it hurts me to know he physically can’t bring himself to do it right now.
Mum tries to approach the topic gently but you can only be so delicate with such matters before you merely obstruct the truth. She tells us that they’re n
ot sure if Dad will make it and that she wants us to be prepared for the worst. That’s why the priest was there, I finally realise Dad was receiving the last rights.
As we make our way down the steps outside the hospital, I find that I suddenly hate this building. I want to kick it and spit on it for lying. Looking so beautiful on the outside, it stands as a lie to what really happens inside its walls. The beast that it cages is death and it hides it in that superficial beauty I first believed in. Within those walls lies our biggest fear. I saw it all over my father’s face. At the sight of him on that bed, I knew that what people fear the most is our own mortality. My father was now trapped in that fear, hidden behind these walls. He was living inside the beast.
Lying in bed, I can’t sleep. I have never felt this way before. It is the purest emotion I have ever experienced and roars inside me like a train. My chest feels tight and a dark cloud has descended over me. This is what sadness truly is. It is raw, invasive and unrelenting. I cry myself to sleep, hoping I won’t feel this sadness again when I wake.
***
I remember very little of that chapter in my life. The events prior to this memory and after it have surpassed a point of haziness and just don’t seem to exist anymore. My family can’t understand how I have memories from as young as five but cannot remember something from the age of 15. My father made a full recovery over time but still, I remember nothing of it. I have tried very hard but it seems everything surrounding this one memory has been lost in the archives of my memory. I don’t think I’ll ever know what happened in that time. But that day I visited my father in hospital remains a pivotal moment of my young life. It was the first time, I believe, that I truly felt the sensation of raw sadness. It was the most potent emotion I had ever experienced. I thought nothing could be worse than that, until I lost the capacity to feel more or less anything. My eating disorder caused me to slip into a deep depression and I remember during that time wishing I could once again feel the purity of human emotion, even sadness. I have never forgotten either sensation.
In the weeks that lead up to that faithful doctor’s appointment, my life – as well as the one I also shared unrestrictedly with my bulimia – entered a stage of complete turmoil. For one thing, the academia I once prided myself on and defined myself by, fell to shambles. The transition from secondary school to university had proved to be an extremely emotional upheaval. Everyone had talked to such extraordinary lengths about the difficulties in this changeover; so much so, that it almost felt too cliché to admit that I was struggling very badly. On a very basic level, I simply found that I could not keep up with the workload. In school, I had been top of my class in most subjects. Assignments were carried out with efficiency, as well as to a high standard. But in the realms of that campus and all the university had to offer, I found myself utterly lost.
Schoolwork had always consisted of studying facts and writing about them. Its demands extended only as far as regurgitating what you have read onto a page. My school had been in walking distance of my family home and I found a great deal of comfort in both the uniform which we wore every day – free from the inconvenience of having to select clothes each morning and unifying us in school spirit – as well as the Monday to Friday hours that had been so familiar for six years. In university, the demand for independent study reached new levels I had never before experienced. It was more than the study of facts and I think I began to panic right from the beginning when I realised that much of what I would learn in this place would have to be self-taught.
Most days, I barely made it to the campus, lecture halls or the shelved abyss they called the library. Indeed, I barely made it out of bed. The mornings were the worst; I had always been an early riser and while my peers struggled to wake before 1.00 pm, I always found I could never sleep far past 9.00 am. So by every measure, waking for college in the mornings should have been as easy as it had always been. But upon waking, I suffered something more than just the run of the mill tiredness, my body felt like it had been physically arrested by the might of lethargy and malnutrition. I would lie there with my eyes open, watching the clock as the minutes ticked by. I was not fighting sleep or anything else that would tempt most others to remain wrapped up beneath the covers; I simply couldn’t move. My legs and arms were weighed down by invisible chains. No matter how much weight I lost, I just could not lift my body up from the mattress. I felt like the pinnacle of where all the earth’s gravity travelled to. I was submerged under that weight and could not rise.
‘Are you going to college today, Leanne?’ my mother would ask from the door. To say she was concerned at this point was an understatement. More than my physical appearance and the changes in my personality she had witnessed and commented on regularly, she became most fearful with the development of my apparent lack of interest in my studies. This was not like me and could only be the result of something entirely horrendous. Sometimes it was as simple as telling her that a lecture had been cancelled, my timetable had been changed or just that this morning’s lecture wasn’t important at all. But on other occasions, I did not possess even the mental capacity to do this.
‘No, I’m not,’ is all I would say; end of discussion. She would hover at the door a while, silently expressing both her disapproval and her undeniable worry. I didn’t care. If she felt what my body was feeling, she would leave me alone and not question my decision. Besides, I knew that even if I managed to physically present myself in the lecture theatres on campus, I would not be fully there anyway. If I wasn’t sleeping somewhere in the back, I would be scrawling notes at a very slow pace, mentally incapable of digesting what was being said because my brain was just working at too slow a pace to keep up. This was not the kind of student I was and I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind, I just thought it was a temporary phase that would pass once I became comfortable in my new surroundings. The problem was that I just couldn’t get comfortable here; I’d never known university without an eating disorder and it affected my perceptions of the place greatly. Everything about college became related to an ongoing sense of difficulty and a feeling of forever being behind.
More than this, the hardest thing in my transition from secondary school into third level education was having to accept how truly average I was. I had always excelled in one way or another and it defined me in my own head under certain terms as being a person who just did well instinctively. I was top of the class by nature, not nurturing. This had been who I was. Now, however, I was cast into a system whereby my student number was more recognisable than my own name. There was nothing about who I was that classified me as any different or any better than any other person in a lecture hall. In such a large group, I was guaranteed of the fact that many others were better than me. How I qualified what was ‘better’ came in a variety of forms; smarter, prettier, more dedicated, more ambitious, better dressed, or wealthier. It didn’t matter which because all it amounted to was that, whoever they were, they were a better version of me. What all this culminated to was feelings of total insufficiency and pressing mediocrity. Being average, as I then realised I had always been, further instilled the idea of my own worthlessness both in academia and in general.
The effect my bulimia would ultimately have on my studies was monumental. It drove away all ambition and more importantly, hindered my potential. Missing classes and lectures as a result of overpowering exhaustion was only part of it. It was like my brain had slowed down; like somebody had cut off the oxygen being fed to it and the cells had started to die off one by one. Processing information seemed an impossible endeavour. When it came to assignments, presentations or whatever else was being asked of me, I found that I simply could not mentally grasp the task at hand. It was beyond my scope and understanding by that time. This terrified me. I knew then that I had truly lost myself to my bulimia. We did not share a life anymore because if this was the case, holding on to what had always been of colossal significance would have remained a priorit
y. No, ‘sharing’ was not in her vocabulary and instead, she now owned my life entirely. Along with my health, my personality, my faith and my happiness, she had now taken my education. It was among the saddest losses during my time being sick. To lose my education was to truly lose myself.
As time continued to drag on, the changes I experienced were of prodigious proportions in my life then and what it would go on to become. The biggest change occurred in my relationship with bulimia. Relationships, regardless of their context or the parties involved, revolve around a level of commitment from both sides. I was committed to my bulimia in a way that I had never been committed to anyone before. And yet, the dynamics of our relationship underwent a period of evolution in which it transformed to a commitment of absolute hatred. I had loved her once, I was sure of it. But during the course of a period that has since become the most blurred and distorted of my memories, I began to question her. This was the first step on a road which would ultimately lead me to hate her. And hate her I did. Her voice was no longer a source of comfort or encouragement or even reassurance. It was now a cage that kept me trapped in my own mind. It was the madness that now consumed my entire life and from which I could not escape. After a while, I sincerely thought I had gone mad.
My Secret Life Page 14