Yours, Leanne
The importance I once placed on the superficial validation of men, shocks me to this day. To a large extent, I’m still ashamed of these diary entries because they highlight the lowest and most embarrassing parts of who I used to be. But in fully understanding myself and the mentality that enabled my bulimia, they are a necessity and stand as proof in my own mind of just how low one individual can sink.
There has never been any blame in the development of my illness or at least not in my own head anyway. I have never recalled a person, circumstance or singular reason as to why I became so sick. But the factors that contributed to my illness stretched far and wide and tapped into every aspect of the life of any contemporary teenager. Western culture I believe has a great deal to do with this, as it has not only shaped civilisation as we know it, but continues to demand ongoing change from the society by which it is inhabited. As this western culture grows through its own evolution, it alters and contorts that same evolution of the individual. The influence of the media on me throughout my disease was something that I could not ignore upon reflection. Is this to say that the media alone was responsible for my bulimia? No, clearly not. I think we’ve come far enough in our discussion now to know that this isn’t the case. But to attribute nothing at all to the hierarchal industries that define contemporary beauty, would also be a gross lie.
***
18th November 2007
How I feel about myself: 1/10
How I feel about my life: 7/10
Woke up this morning and quite simply wanted to die. I felt like the most revolting person on the planet. From my horribly spotty face to the piles of fat that cling to and consume my whole body, I felt like I would be prettier in death than as I am right now. Surely no woman is meant to look like this. If what magazines tell me is true, surely I am behind the human race in evolution. I am the genetic garbage of mankind. But no more. I can make myself worthy of more than this if I try and I have the discipline to show it. I love school but perhaps I need to put it on the back burner for a while, as there are more important things to be dealt with now. As such, I have allocated a few weeks to be selfish and think about nothing but myself.
Do other girls think this way? Perhaps. But with a bit of luck, telling myself these truths will eventually help me shed the necessary weight so that once it’s finally gone, I can adopt a healthy lifestyle from then on. I am currently about twelve and a half stone. The goal is to get down to nine stone before starting college next year. This is possible. And I will do anything. My friends need not know. I’ll tell them about it when I’ve lost the weight and when I’m in the process of ‘living healthily.’ If losing weight is unhealthy well then by God, I must make myself the most unhealthy girl in all of Ireland.
I’ll be carrying this out by doing several things. Firstly, I have gym membership and I WILL use it every day and moreover, I will exercise even more at home until I feel it’s finally making a difference. If I could become addicted to exercise, I think things in my life would become simpler. But that’s not going to happen so for now, I will bully myself into enjoying the pain of extensive workouts. I will be following a STRICT low-calorie diet. I’m allowing myself about 500 calories a day. On a rough basis, this will consist of: an apple and coffee for breakfast; three rice cakes for lunch; and finally, chicken and lettuce for dinner. I am to drink two litres of water a day and will hopefully remember to take the necessary vitamin tablets at each meal. This will hopefully be enough to transform me from this horrible creature I’ve turned into something that can just mildly resemble the women I see all the time now.
I also heard of what’s called the Maple Syrup Detox Diet. Apparently, loads of celebrities use it to shed pounds fast. I’ve heard of some celebrities dropping around 20lbs within a fortnight while on it. I like the sound of it because it’s a lot of weight loss and very little time. I don’t have time to lose weight the normal way because I feel like a ticking time bomb. Not to mention the fact that I just can’t stand being this size anymore. I have to fix this NOW. I eat nothing for about ten days and instead, drink this concoction of water, maple syrup and cayenne pepper. If I can get enough breathing room, I’ll try it for as long as I can.
My main problem at the moment is being given the space to carry out any diet at all. Aside from the girls now breathing down my neck because once or twice they noticed me skipping my lunch at break time, my mum – in a totally counterproductive way – has been on my back and I think would notice my attempts to carry out any of the above. I just need to dodge her suspicions as much as possible. I can just lie to the girls, but my mum will be more aware, as she lives with me. But it is manageable. A growing obsession with the gym will be encouraged, as she’s all for it. So that’s one thing down. The diet will be slightly trickier. She works most days or is out of the house, so I’m sure I could have breakfast and lunch covered. It’s just dinner. But perhaps if I just lie to her about what I’ve already eaten that day, she might just go along with what I want for dinner.
Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll feel better about myself because I’ll have started the weight loss plan. My potential is my biggest weapon and one of the reasons for how I’ve rated my feeling on life today. Moreover, I rethought my life. And though I am disgusted with how fat I have allowed myself to become, my life is good. And I know that with some discipline and control, I will match how I look to how good I could look in time and how great it could be. All those celebrities, models, actresses – there’s no way they look that way without a little discipline. If they can do it, so can I. I’m only 17 but one day, I will be more famous than all of them combined and I will be damn sure to look the part.
I’m going out tonight using Natalie’s I.D. So once I’ve had time to get over the trauma of finding something slimming to wear, I plan on simply drinking myself into one final oblivion, in celebration of what is to come. I will do this. I know I can.
Yours, Leanne.
***
I suppose it’s a very unfair to claim that any individual in the media is encouraging eating disorders among young girls today. I’m not making that claim anyway. If anything, I think I have a great deal of pity for such public figures. Allow me to explain; you see, as a victim of such effects, I do contend that some responsibility is to be attributed to particular media industries today. The people and organisations who define what beauty is in the modern world seem dead set on alleviating themselves of any implication in such things. But the reality is that when their work influences modern living as it does, they cannot surely escape that involvement. Sure, they may claim it to be art. And yet, art stops being so exclusively when it becomes a dictation as to how people choose to live their lives – albeit healthily or in my case, very unhealthily indeed. Such ‘art’ relies on this societal involvement to fuel its progression in the first place. And while I of all people hold out hope for major changes to take place within these realms that so easily influence daily living, my pessimism leaves me to doubt as much.
As regards the familiar faces that are splashed across weekly magazines and television programmes, I view them not as propagators in this vicious cause, but as victims. The emaciation we see in photographs, which is usually glorified is a result of this monstrous ‘beauty machine’ that has gripped western culture. The ideal of what beauty is has always been there, yes, but I don’t think it has ever before been at such a crucial point, whereby women such as myself are starving themselves to embody it. Surely the human race has come too far to remain so painfully naive.
It’s all very easy to say these things now, of course. After taking my body and mind to some of the darkest places a person can go, one can’t but help retain a degree of anger perhaps even resentment, to the exterior influences that guided me down that pathway. But then again, I’ve had the very good fortune of therapy and recovery to solidify these opinions and perhaps even make them stubborn. At the time, I
never perceived the media this way. The question in my mind at that time was not whether or not it was the right direction, but simply whether or not I could keep up to speed with it. As it turned out, I couldn’t. I realised this again and again throughout my bulimia and every moment of clarification served to fragment me even further. It hurts me still to know that for so long, I endured suicidal thoughts for the sake of ‘looking good enough’.
25th September 2009
How I feel about myself: 0/10
How I feel about my life: 0/10
This is impossible. It feels like life is killing me. And worst of all, I can’t blame this feeling on very unfortunate circumstances or on things that are out of my control; this feeling is a result of my own failings. Sure, I can say – and have been doing so for a long time – that I feel fucked in life because I have an ‘eating disorder.’ Is this the reason I feel like such a failure? No. I am a failure because I can’t – no, I choose – not to do anything better with myself.
I’m just sick of being bad at everything I try. No matter what I do, I seem to do it wrong. It kills me thinking back to a time when I felt I could do anything; when I felt I was good at so many things. I was a good student, got amazing grades, didn’t cause my parents so much stress, didn’t cost them so much money, could write and write and never tire of it, could draw anything in the world and make it almost photographic, could have any guy I wanted and still not give a shit. Now, I feel like a failure who has been making excuses for herself so as to avoid what needs to be done. And what needs to be done is more than I think I can handle. I now feel that this is impossible.
I want to kill myself. I held a scissors to my arm and pressed down. But I couldn’t go through with it – I was too afraid of the pain. I can’t stand this any longer. I can’t live with an eating disorder anymore but at the same time, I can’t bring myself to live as everyone else does. Everyone is going to think I’m a big, fat failure. I want to die. I want to go into a hole and never come out. I hate myself. I am a monster. I’m a failure and I am unlovable. He is becoming more and more distant. He doesn’t want me – nobody does. I am problematic, ugly and unlovable. I want to die. I want someone to kill me. I hate myself. I hate what I am. I just want to give up. I’m nothing more than a problem to the people I love most. I don’t want to be their problem anymore. Please God, save me. And if you can’t, please just kill me.
Yours, Leanne.
***
You would probably assume that looking back on all these vicious words hurts me very badly. During recovery, they didn’t. I was never in denial about how I’d once felt on so many things. Besides, by that point, I was no longer reading them merely to dwell on the horrible feelings they came with; I was reading them so I could see myself fully, all the good and all the bad rolled into one. Both were required to attain any level of understanding about myself and my disease.
I embraced therapy to the best of my ability. If not for the sake of getting better, but also because it just made me feel better at that time. I still had doubts about whether or not it was what I truly wanted and for a while, was convinced that all it would result in was being physically larger in weight. Others around me – my family included, as they now knew about my weekly attendance – passed comments often on how I appeared brighter, more like the person they’d known before. I was happy to please them, as it was something I hadn’t been able to do in so very long. At the same time, however, some days it felt like I had been reverted back to my childhood and like I had to stay in line with all the ‘grown-ups’ around me, as they watched me play in the sand. It’s ironic how one seeks out a sense of control in such a horrific way and while you think you’re gaining more and more, the reality is that you are stamping a guarantee that you may lose that control forever.
Recovery in general was an up and down battle. Some days I wanted it so badly, while on other days I neither cared for it nor wanted it. And on occasion, I went as far as to believe that everyone around me was utterly against me. I convinced myself that they had no interest or care for what I wanted anymore; that the only interest they took in me was always related to what they believed I ‘needed.’ Throughout my therapy I seemed to be entirely dependent on others; my family, my friends and Michelle herself. It felt to a large extent like I had surrendered something of great proportions, like I had handed myself over to a more powerful force. I wondered sometimes if these people would still be around once they had ‘fixed’ me. This was a dangerous thought and threatened the development of my recovery because it fuelled the idea that once finished and once ‘fixed’, I would have nothing left. I would have nothing left of myself or of the people around me. This was the risk I thought I’d taken and it wounded me deeply.
Changing my eating habits became a little easier, although stopping them was still a struggle in itself. It’s just not that simple. You don’t flip a switch and undo all that you’ve been taught for so long. As I grew to understand my actions more and how my subconscious ways of thinking dictated to those actions, I found myself thinking on the surface level when it came to food.
In this way, I certainly saw improvements in my eating. I avoided fasts as much as I could, attempting to replace them with healthy eating. But the purging was very difficult to break. The phrase, ‘it’s a daily battle’ is an understatement in this case. It’s an hourly battle, every minute was a challenge for me. For other people, eating is just a natural part of their day. It fuels their day. But for a bulimic, eating and the consequences of eating are what your day revolves around. Every meal is agonized over, trying to consume it and hold it down thereafter. Equally, the time spent not eating is usually spent obsessing or worrying about the next time you have to eat and what will happen to your body when you do. Each meal is more weight and getting past this notion was incredibly problematic for me. Time and endurance were the only healers as it turned out and to this day, I still struggle.
Getting help for an eating disorder is naturally one of the hardest things a person must do. For the most part, this is because before you may go down this route, you must first accept that there is in fact something wrong with you. I never wanted anything to be wrong with me. I never wanted to be sick. On the contrary, I had built an entire fabrication around myself that I was a hard-working, would-be successful girl who generally maintained a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed demeanour. To admit the truth was to contradict this facade, which I wasn’t ready to do for a very long time. Even harder than admitting the lie to yourself, is doing so with the people around you. It would be at least a year and a half into my illness before I ever made the admission to friends and family that I was sick and that I had been suffering bulimia nervosa.
Once I had accepted and more importantly, admitted, that I had a problem, the changes I saw in myself were of monumental proportions. Be that as it may, opening those doors is like opening a can of worms. This is true in particular cases, such as my own, when you choose to share your story with others so earnestly. There remains now, as there was even at that time, a paralysing fear. It is part of the reason I kept my secret life with bulimia hidden for so long and a fear that embodies everything that is wrong with the common mentality surrounding eating disorders. I was afraid then – as I have been from time to time since beginning this story – that people would not believe me.
It was the one factor that ensured I would keep my hidden ‘friend’ shut away from the rest of the world both during my illness. Why this fear remains so powerful relates back to the matter of denial, which I believe many if not all bulimics and anorexics alike, experience at some point while sick; usually at the beginning I would imagine, but that’s not to say it can’t last years and maybe until it’s too late. To explain it better, I may begin by saying that I spent so long in denial about my mental illness that acknowledging the problem was arguably the biggest hurdle towards recovery. Not fully trusting the notion, it took months of tears and heartac
he on both my part and that of my loved ones, to finally solidify this to be fact. Consequently, the possibility of others not believing me was what kept me caged for so long. Disbelief would surely threaten everything I had worked towards as it would compromise my own fight against denial and my own faith in that what my friends and family were telling me was true. I was bulimic. But if others could not accept this, I wasn’t sure if I had any chance of fully committing to the idea myself.
I broached this issue once with Michelle. I had been struggling at university since I first began in September of 2009. Mid-way though my second semester of that first academic year, I thought I would drop out. With high fees to pay and my families low finances, I knew that my bulimia had cost me my education. Financially speaking, I could never remedy the damage that had been done.
As fortune and apparently sympathetic souls would have it, the college offered an extenuating circumstances route that students could avail of in the case of bereavement, illness and so on. All that was needed was a letter of clarification from both my doctor and my psychologist. This was not a problem, as Michelle had been treating me for several months by then and my doctor had given the referral, as well as a prescription for Xanax to help curb my out-of-control anxiety. So, I was granted extenuating circumstances due to illness. It didn’t remedy all finances but certainly made my continuation in university possible at least.
Alas, I met the entire ordeal with a level of dissatisfaction. When Michelle and I addressed the matter she asked very directly, ‘What’s the problem, Leanne?’
‘What if I’m not really that sick?’ I asked in reply.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, I have you and all these people in college now thinking I’m really sick with anxiety, an eating disorder and God knows what else. But what if you’re all wrong? Maybe I’ve just convinced you all of something that isn’t really there.’
My Secret Life Page 18