So here I was – prepubescent, lanky and already obsessed with my figure.
2
God, Sex and Other Obsessions
The more I didn’t want to think about sex, the more it flashed up in my head. SEX. SEX. SEX. As far as I was concerned, sex was bad, but I was worse for thinking about it. I was eleven, and my bad behaviour was part of my daily life. It was the only way I could distract myself from the chaos in my brain.
Soon the hand-washing started. I genuinely believed I had badness on my hands. If I washed my hands twice before break time, it would make me ‘clean’: pure from these disgusting thoughts. I’d have lunch, then have to wash them twice again with soap, making sure I got the froth right in between my fingers. But wait – what if I didn’t clean them right? What if there was a bit of ‘badness’ left over on them? OK – time to do it again. Oh God, did I miss a spot? Do it twice again, just to make sure.
As though spending half my life by a sink wasn’t enough torture, I spotted a Bible on the bookshelf of my room that had once belonged to my dad. I picked it up and began reading it.
I remembered a priest at my old Catholic school saying God forgave you for your sins no matter what, as long as you prayed for forgiveness and truly meant it. Suddenly it was as though a light bulb went on in my head. This was it. This was the cure to all of my worries, and it had been on my bookshelf all this time. If God knew I was a good person, then I wouldn’t have to worry about the thoughts I couldn’t control. I’d be good – and who doesn’t want to be good?
I began thinking that I’d have to thank God for everything, which became tiresome, but necessary. Every night before bed, I would have to read ten pages of the Bible to show my loyalty towards him, then pray afterwards. Then, if I felt like I hadn’t prayed properly, I’d have to do it again and again and again until it felt ‘right’.
But it never felt right. My efforts were never good enough. I’d sometimes pray until I was so exhausted that I’d fall asleep on my hands still in the praying position. Then I’d have to pray to apologize for not praying properly.
I remember some boys in my class making a jokey comment about something sexual, and me laughing along as though it didn’t bother me – because that’s what normal kids did: laugh about sex, because it’s silly and funny and naughty. I then became consumed by guilt that I’d laughed about something so impure and dirty and wrong. God wouldn’t believe I was serious about repenting my sins now, would he?
‘I promise I wasn’t laughing with them,’ I whispered to myself in a toilet cubicle. ‘I was only doing it to look cool, I promise.’
Sometimes it felt like my brain was purposefully trying to look for things to obsess over, which would then give me an excuse to pray. As soon as I thought of something bad, I started the cycle again. It got to the point where anxiety felt so normal to me that calmness didn’t feel right.
In social situations I’d hide my hands under the table so people didn’t think I was weird, or would go to the toilets to pray instead. Then I’d have to re-pray for offending God by praying in a public place rather than a church, or for doing it somewhere as gross as a toilet.
I now call it the Brain Deviant, because that feels quite fitting – an evil part of your brain that doesn’t want you to be happy, an imaginary demon that clings on to your insecurities and likes to make up weird scenarios in your head to make you feel guilty.
From the outside, you would have never guessed I was dealing with these obsessive, intrusive thoughts. I was the class clown. I was popular. I was invited to every birthday party, every sleepover. Everybody wanted to be my friend. (I’ll stop bragging now.) Yet I constantly wore a smile on my face to mask how petrified I was of the cloudy, jumbled mess that was unravelling upstairs in my head. And so, as much as I obsessed about displeasing God, I became equally obsessed with trying to show the world I was a normal girl – one without fears or worries, and one who could have a laugh about normal things. So I tried desperately to hide the anxiety I felt.
Not talking about it is precisely what the Brain Deviant craves. It revels in the fact it drives you crazy. That unsure, anxious energy is feeding it, keeping it happy and alive and bubbling. It leaves you feeling even worse.
I enjoyed the high of doing something ‘rebellious’, as I called it at the time (aka being a prat), because the excitement helped reduce the constant anxiety I felt. But now I was due another obsession, which, unbeknown to me, would change the course of my entire life.
‘I wish I wasn’t so fat,’ Olivia said with a sigh one day in the playground, squeezing the skin around her waist between her fingers as though it was slime. ‘I hate how everyone is so much skinnier than me. No boys fancy me because of how chubby I am.’
‘You’re not fat,’ I said, and genuinely meant it. Yes, Olivia may not have been the smallest girl in our girl group, but it didn’t take an expert to see she was far from overweight. But she was utterly paranoid about her weight, and, in turn, she began making me feel paranoid about becoming ‘big’, too. Compared to the madness in my own brain, it was almost soothing to focus on something as solid as my shape.
‘My mum says you and your mum are lucky you’re both naturally thin.’ She sighed again. ‘My mum says you’re lucky you can both eat whatever you want and not gain a single pound.’
Now, another person may have disregarded that comment the moment it left Olivia’s lips, barely giving it a second thought. But for some reason those words struck a chord, and would stay lodged in the back of my mind for years to come.
Until then, I’d never paid much attention to my body. I didn’t know being thin was enviable. In terms of weight, I thought women were either fat or thin – not that you could force your body to be one type or the other. But the way Olivia expressed her jealousy towards my mum and me made me feel special.
Olivia calling me ‘thin’ gave me a sense of euphoria. I was skinny and lanky at that age. Being complimented on my size was a brand-new feeling – and for the first time in a while I felt happy. It made me feel proud. It felt exciting to be envied for once, when I felt I constantly lived in Anja’s and Emma’s shadows – the girls who all the boys fancied and who everyone thought were pretty. The only time boys took an interest in me was when I traded them rare Pokémon cards, or joined in on winding teachers up.
High on cloud nine, I went home that night and repeated to my mum what Olivia had told me.
‘That’s not true,’ my mum answered. ‘I have to run a lot of miles every week to keep my body healthy. I watch what I eat to stay slim. It takes work.’
My mum and dad have always kept in shape. It feels as though my mum has always had a perfectly flat tummy and thighs that don’t touch, while my dad has a six-pack – even now, in his fifties. Growing up, I’d be halfway through a morning kids’ TV marathon and they’d have already run miles together, up hills and through woods, for ‘fun’. If that’s not considered abnormal, I don’t know what is.
One summer in Hamburg, our neighbour badly damaged his leg and couldn’t run the marathon he’d trained so hard for.
‘I’ll do it,’ my dad offered.
And so he did. He hadn’t trained a single minute for it, yet ran the entire twenty-six miles without missing a beat.
Although I’m not a fitness fanatic like my parents, no one on either side of my family is overweight, so the chances of me becoming ‘fat’ has always been quite slim (as it were). Aged eleven, I was like a human bin. I could eat as many biscuits and chocolates and crisps as I wanted and still look like a stick.
That doesn’t mean my sister and I lived off junk, though. Far from it. Treats were kept out of reach, although we would climb on to the kitchen worktop to steal a biscuit or two when no one was looking. Dinners were always balanced and healthy, and my lunch boxes even more so, which made me crave fizzy drinks and chocolate like the other kids in my class had, whose lunch boxes were far more exciting and E-number driven.
When you look at photos of skinn
y models or celebrities it’s easy to assume thinness comes naturally to them. But as I learnt a few years later, my mum was right. For the majority of us females, being thin does take work. We are designed to store a bit of meat on our bones. And even if you are naturally slight, it doesn’t make you any more or less ‘lucky’ than somebody else. I just wish Olivia could’ve seen that – or that her mum could’ve praised her daughter instead of passing on the baton of body image issues to the next generation.
After that, thinness became a regular topic of conversation. Emma would point at older girls in the canteen and comment on how thin they were. She’d say she wished she had a figure like mine. It makes me sad that talking about bodies became ‘normal’, when we should have just been having fun. We were eleven.
Olivia moaned constantly about how fat she felt, or how someone had called her fat, or how her mum had told her the puppy fat would eventually come off. The more she spoke about it, the more frightened I became of getting fat, too.
I voiced my concerns to Mum, who looked at me as though I was mad. I could never be fat, she said, because we didn’t come from a big family. I only needed to look at my grandparents’ bone structures to see that. But I wasn’t convinced.
The word ‘fat’ had such negative connotations, and I could see how upset and ashamed it made Olivia feel. It would take one ‘You’re fat!’ slur by some immature arsehole in the playground to ruin her entire week. People used it to put girls down. It was easy for boys to call Olivia fat when they knew it would strike a nerve with her, even though it wasn’t true – and if it had been, so what!
Any of the older kids considered fat were ridiculed, and Olivia didn’t want to become that. Fat meant lazy. It meant no boys fancied you. It meant unpopular. It meant a series of things that I didn’t want to be.
The Angelz were now the most popular group in primary school. At least, that’s what Emma said, who’d learnt about popularity from her older sister. Although I wasn’t an expert in the dictionary definition of the term, I’m pretty sure she actually meant ‘cool’.
Emma was becoming far more competitive as time went on. She began placing us in order of popularity, or beauty, or intelligence. According to her, Anja was the prettiest, then her, then me, then Olivia, then Hannah. She also, apparently, ranked quite high in the ‘popularity’ stakes, though I did come second to her, which was better than being bottom, I suppose.
I began getting annoyed with all of this nonsense, but it was difficult to argue with her because she was still my friend. Even though she would say mean things occasionally, I still would have preferred to have her as a friend and be part of the Angelz than lose her. We may have been the most ‘popular’ girls in our school, but there were still tiers of popularity in the group to abide by as well.
For example, if one girl wore glitter on the side of her face, you wouldn’t be allowed to wear it in the same place. If more than one girl fancied the same boy, it would become a war over who was ‘allowed’ to ‘have’ him. If one girl had her birthday at a bowling alley, another girl would have to book elsewhere. The rules were very complicated indeed.
Apparently I was getting too ‘out of hand’ and ‘badly behaved’. My parents were warned by the school that one more step out of line would see me expelled. It was all small stuff – pranks on teachers, disrupting lessons. But it was enough to zone the Brain Deviant out – and all my misdemeanours were adding up.
Our year group was due to go on a school trip to the planetarium. We were all excited to stretch our legs outside school – or, as I liked to call it, ‘prison’.
The day started off well. The forty or so students in our year made our way to the U-Bahn (the German Underground), and we were told to be on our best behaviour because we were ‘representing the school’.
Trains are boring, aren’t they? In fact, this whole school trip was boring, and we hadn’t even started it yet. I glanced around the carriage at the boring teachers and boring classmates and boring view and boring …
But wait. What was that?
It was a button. A big, shiny red button, with ‘EMERGENCY STOP’ written above it in German, along with some other funny words. It was practically calling out to me. I couldn’t ignore it.
SCREEEEECCHHHHHH!!
The train pulled to a halt, and everyone on it began muttering and mumbling, trying to work out what had happened. An announcement was made over the tannoy and the train pulled very slowly into the platform. The driver came all the way down to our carriage, peering inside and then shaking his head once he saw a bunch of kids.
‘Who set off the alarm?’ our teacher said, and everyone looked around. The thing is, no one actually knew. I’d done it when everybody’s backs were turned.
‘What an idiotic thing to do,’ she said. ‘There’s a one-thousand-mark fine for that.’
Although I was young, I knew that was a lot of money.
‘Was that you?’ Emma hissed once the teacher had looked away, and the rest of the Angelz looked at me with wide eyes.
‘Er … yes,’ I said, and suddenly realized how stupid I’d been. ‘Do you reckon they’ll know it was me?’
‘Duh!’ Hannah said. ‘You’re the naughtiest person in the class!’
‘I’m sure it will be fine. Just don’t tell anyone,’ Anja said, and the Angelz vowed to keep it between ourselves.
But then some teacher’s pet overheard what we’d said and told on me. The next morning I was hoisted into the headmaster’s office.
This time, I knew I was in big trouble. So I lied and said I couldn’t remember pushing it.
‘What do you mean, you “can’t remember”?’ the headmaster said, confused. ‘You either pushed it, or you didn’t.’
‘I … I really don’t know if I did,’ I replied, feeling scared. ‘I might have done, I might not. I honestly can’t remember.’
The headmaster made a few phone calls.
‘Wait here,’ he said, and left the room.
A few minutes later, which felt like forever in child land, the headmaster walked in with a twee-looking lady wearing glasses.
‘This is Miss King,’ he said. ‘And she’s a counsellor.’
The counsellor sat opposite me with a sympathetic look on her face, or, more accurately, the face you give mental children you’re trying to analyse.
‘We’ve been talking, and the school is going to arrange counselling sessions once a week to get over this bad behaviour,’ she said.
‘That’s OK,’ I replied, thanking her for the thought. ‘I’m actually fine now. I won’t do it again.’
‘It doesn’t work like that,’ she said. ‘We need to understand what’s making you behave this badly.’
From then on, every Tuesday, I’d get to skip maths (yay) and make my way to the counsellor’s office (boo) where we discussed my ‘feelings’.
‘Now, Charlotte,’ she said during our first session in a patronizing tone. ‘Apparently you can’t remember pushing the emergency button on the train?’
‘Yep. Well, no. No, I can’t.’
‘Hmm.’ It was quite obvious I was lying. I’m the worst liar in the world. Scribble, scribble, scribble. I tried to glance at what she was writing in her notepad.
‘You quite clearly have an obsession with misbehaving,’ she said. ‘Why do you do it? Are there problems at home?’
Well, why did she think I did it? I was hardly Stephen Hawking but it didn’t take a genius to work out it was quite clearly for fun, did it?
‘Because it’s fun?’ I replied, like she was the crazy one.
‘Hmm,’ she said again, jotting it down in the notepad. ‘I don’t think it’s fun at all. It’s actually very silly. It’s like a compulsion.’
I didn’t realize counselling came with a series of lectures, too. I would’ve rather endured maths, if I’m being honest. Besides, a lot of our sessions felt like a guessing game. If I said something she didn’t like, she made me feel like I was in trouble. So I’d second-guess w
hat she expected me to say, even if it wasn’t how I truly felt, so she would tell me what a great counselling session we’d had at the end. I didn’t want her to think I was mental.
‘Who do you think is thinner – Charli or Anja?’ Olivia asked Emma and Hannah in the playground one afternoon. I didn’t think there was much difference between Anja and me, and once again I was confused about why she was judging us.
‘Anja,’ Emma and Hannah replied without missing a beat.
‘I thought I was …?’ I replied, hurt. I felt inadequate, but also silly for caring about it to begin with.
‘You’re not the thinnest,’ Emma said, knocking me off my perch. ‘Anja definitely is.’
I began feeling flustered and irritated. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Stand next to each other,’ Emma ordered bossily. Using her hands as a measuring tape, Emma proved me wrong.
‘See?’ she said. ‘Anja’s the thinnest. Then you. Then me, then Hannah, and then Olivia.’
It may have only been by centimetres, but it was one more thing that Anja had that I didn’t. Anja was beautiful. She had a rich family. She had hordes of boys fighting over her. I couldn’t dislike her, because on top of those things, she was a wonderfully sweet and caring friend (ugh). But now, the one thing that made me enviable had been snatched out of my hands.
‘See!’ Olivia said, getting visibly upset. ‘I told you I was the fattest one!’ She was almost in tears. Olivia was desperate not to be fat in any way, shape or form, like it was worse than death or something.
I didn’t like being lined up like I was in some sort of cattle ranch. I didn’t like how Olivia was now even more insecure about herself, when I spent what felt like my whole life convincing her that her body was fine. But most of all, I didn’t like being in the middle of ‘thin’ and ‘fat’.
Once again, I didn’t stand out. I was average. There was nothing special about me after all. Perhaps if I was the thinnest – smaller than Anja – I’d be considered the prettiest. We may have only been eleven, but I suddenly knew what I wanted to be.
Misfit Page 3