Fragile

by Nikki Grahame

  First, make the most of whatever help you are already receiving, because as you get older it gets harder and harder to get that specialist help and the places you will be sent will become more harsh and more uncaring.

  Second, you have to make the decision that you want to get better. To do that, try thinking about how different your life could be if you weren’t stuck in this battle to be thin. Because your life in the future will be better than what you are going through now, I promise.

  And my advice to mums and dads worried that their kids are developing anorexia or an eating disorder? Get professional help as quickly as you can in the hope you can nip it in the bud, before it becomes more difficult to reverse patterns of thinking.

  And please, please, don’t be dissuaded by doctors or friends who think your child is ‘being faddy’ or ‘just in a phase’. Trust your instincts and don’t stop fighting until someone helps you. Because I know only too well that is what your child is screaming out for you to do, even if they are saying the total opposite.

  But most of all never stop believing that things can get better. I am living proof of that. However much someone with anorexia might doubt it now, there is a fulfilling and happy life out there waiting for them, once they choose to live it.

  I never, ever thought I would find such a special life and it took me almost 11 years of fighting to reach it, but now that I have, I know it has been worth every little bit of effort along the way. Because, as I have discovered, there is an amazing, special life out here for everyone.

  It has been a horrible, long and painful journey, sodden with so many tears and bruised by so many knocks and setbacks. But I’m here – and it is good.

  I’ve learned that the outside world doesn’t have to be scary. Yes, it can be tough and there are pitfalls and people who want you to fail. But there are also people who will stand by you however bad everything gets. However much sadness and pain fill your life, they are still there beneath it all, next to you.

  And those are the people who make your life worth living. So for them – Mum, Dad, Natalie and Carly – thanks for showing me my life was worth fighting for.

  EPILOGUE

  After my first stint in the Big Brother house, I was on top of the world. Finally, after years of dealing with painful feelings of rejection and loneliness, the public had shown me that I was accepted and loved, simply for being who I was. Offers of television work came flooding in and in between projects my life was an endless stream of glamorous parties and gigs. It certainly appeared as if I’d left the insecurities of my past behind, and I felt as though anything might be possible.

  It would be misleading for me to claim that I ever let go of my eating disorder completely, but after Big Brother I felt more liberated from it than I ever had before. Whilst I was in the house I ate the same evening meal as the other contestants. I allowed myself to be cooked for by someone else (although I did insist on having my own cutlery and crockery). Anyone who has ever struggled with anorexia or OCD will know what a momentous leap forward that was for me, to relinquish even that tiny bit of control. I had a new life, full of new faces, new places and new possibilities. For the first time in as long as I could remember, health and happiness seemed to be within my grasp.

  Unfortunately, it just wasn’t that simple. Over the next five years, my illness continued to rear its ugly head on several occasions. Sometimes I’d be able to push the destructive voice of sickness to the back of my mind. Other times I’d lose the struggle: anorexia would completely dominate my thoughts and I’d be consumed by the desire to exercise compulsively and avoid food.

  As I write this epilogue, I have voluntarily chosen to put myself into medical care again and I am attending the Inpatient Mental Health Unit at St Vincent’s Square in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Today, I weigh just 36 kilos. I know, logically, that I need to gain weight but despite the constant support of the wonderful staff here, I am struggling. The following pages document just what happened. How did the vibrant, confident young woman that I was when I left the Big Brother house deteriorate and once again succumb to her illness?

  In May 2009, I published my first book (this one, in fact), which is the story of my life. I called it Dying to be Thin. I wanted to share my experiences to help young people battling an eating disorder and to allow others to really understand the illness. It was tough reliving my experiences and opening up old wounds, but eventually the book was finished. I’d had a huge hand in organising the launch and when I surveyed the celebrity guests who attended that night, I felt a massive sense of accomplishment. But there was one person in attendance who darkened my mood: Danny, my then boyfriend.

  I’d met him a year beforehand and very quickly became totally infatuated with him. He was a friend of a friend, and we’d met at a restaurant during an evening out. He made an instant beeline for me and I remember thinking I’d never met anyone quite like him before. He was the life and soul of the party, telling hilarious stories, buying everyone drinks, dancing on tables. His enthusiasm for life was infectious and I soon found myself under his spell.

  Just days later, we had become inseparable. Our relationship grew extremely intense, very quickly – I even introduced him to my mum within the first week. He would always suggest where we should go, pick me up from my house in north-west London, chauffeur me from door to door and he paid for absolutely everything. In retrospect, I think there was a part of me that enjoyed not having to be responsible for any decision making; life had been a whirlwind since Big Brother and people were constantly making demands of me. Now, I never had to worry – everything was taken care of and Danny was totally in control. Or so it seemed.

  Danny was always making extravagant gestures like meals in expensive restaurants and nights out in central London; he’d buy me clothes and jewellery. To many women he would have been the perfect fairytale fantasy but I quickly discovered there was a dark side to his apparent generosity and fun-loving spirit. He’d become angry and occasionally violent. He’d use dangerous measures to scare me or get my attention, like swerving his car across the road when I was in the passenger seat.

  He was also incredibly possessive. I came to the horrible realisation that his initial desire to spend every minute with me wasn’t because he couldn’t bear to be parted – it was because he simply didn’t trust me to be without him. He would constantly want to know where I was and who I was with. Sometimes he’d follow me around London in his car. Other times, he’d ring me over and over again during a night out and if I didn’t answer my phone, he’d resort to calling my friends, demanding that whoever I was with tell him exactly what I was doing at that moment. It was embarrassing.

  The strange thing was that sometimes he would make me feel so safe and other times I was terrified of him. He’d shelter me from the world – but on the condition that I did everything he said and behave exactly as he wanted me to.

  One incident with Danny will haunt me forever. We were driving to see my mum and granddad when suddenly he stopped the car in an isolated spot. It was dark, with no sign of civilisation for miles around; he knew I had nowhere to run. He said he had something to tell me, but first he snatched my phone from me and removed the battery. Then he told me, in graphic detail, how he had once killed someone. I was shaking uncontrollably, unable to speak or to react, I was so scared. The way he told the story, and the circumstances in which he chose to tell me, left me in no doubt that he wanted me to know just what he was capable of: it was a warning.

  I was truly in over my head. Foolishly, I’d agreed to let him move into my flat quite early on in the relationship, when everything had seemed perfect. So, even though it was clear to me that we weren’t working, it wasn’t as simple as ending it and walking away – even if he hadn’t bullied and frightened me into staying with him. The cash he had flashed when I first met him turned out to be technically not his. In reality, he was in debt and he began to rely on me for money. One by one, he managed to isolate me from my friends. H
e even caused a rift between my mum and me: she saw how he was treating me and, understandably, didn’t approve.

  My self-esteem suffered a catastrophic blow. In the early days of our relationship, I’d been reasonably happy with myself and my body. We went on holiday to Thailand at the start of 2009 and there, I ate as freely as I can ever remember doing. In the extravagant surroundings of our luxury hotel everything seemed surreal and this allowed me to relegate anorexia to a very small part of my mind. At the same time, though, Danny made it very clear that he wanted a thin, glamorous girlfriend. He’d look at gorgeous, curvaceous girls in magazines and on the television and say they were ‘fat’. I feared if I gained too much weight, he’d start to look elsewhere.

  By treating me like a princess one minute and screaming, threatening and bullying me the next, he chipped away at my self-confidence. He himself also had body image issues – I found a stash of illegal slimming tablets amongst his things, which brought the entire issue once more to the forefront of my mind. Looking back, I think this situation may have heralded my relapse – it was the first sign that the happiness I felt in the aftermath of Big Brother wasn’t destined to last.

  On Valentine’s Day 2009, we argued during a night out. Whilst I can’t remember what we were specifically rowing about (disagreements had become such a frequent thing between us), I do know it got very heated. I told him I was going home, hailed a taxi and was about to get in, when he grabbed me and herded me into the back of his friend’s van, saying he would give us a lift. By this stage, I was too exhausted and drained to argue so I dutifully sat in the back as we sped through north London.

  Suddenly, I blacked out. When I came to, blood was spraying at high velocity out of my head and streaming down my face. The van had crashed. Crying and bleeding, I stumbled out into Upper Street, Islington and eventually found my way to the Whittington Hospital, although I have absolutely no recollection of how I got there. When I woke up, bruised and bandaged in a hospital bed, Danny was there. I had been in the hospital overnight and he hadn’t even called my mum or my sister Natalie – he’d put me in a dangerous situation and had been too self-absorbed to call the people I love. He even went as far as deleting my mum and Natalie’s phone numbers off his phone, and then used the excuse that he didn’t have their numbers to call them. It was at this point I knew for certain that I had to end things. A few weeks later, with the help of my family and friends, I told him to remove his things from my flat.

  That relationship had left me shaken and lonely. After we split, I went off the rails to a certain extent. I went to countless festivals that summer, celebrating my freedom and when I wasn’t doing that, I spent almost every evening in Harrow at the Trinity bar, out drinking with one of my best friends, Leon. Leon was dating a girl named Julie at the time and I instantly struck up a wonderful friendship with her, too. Although their relationship didn’t last long, my friendship with Julie is still going strong to this day. She will be in my life a very long time and is like a mother figure to me. She has welcomed me into her family and she made me a Godparent to her son. It meant a lot to me that I could mean so much to Julie and her son, especially as I can’t have children of my own. Around the same time that my friendship with Julie was forming another particular friendship started to develop.

  I met a guy who was the lead singer and guitarist of a band I loved. Unfortunately, for legal reasons I haven’t been able to name him. He had that rock-star look I adore in men – skinny jeans, slightly grubby-looking and incredibly skinny. Also, I associated music and going to gigs with the liberation I felt after leaving Danny. I looked at him and he epitomised all that: I wanted to be with him and I wanted to be like him. Once more, I began to fixate on losing weight.

  Then he told me he was addicted to heroin. Rather than acting as a red flag, this made me like him even more: I wanted to save him, to mother him, to make him better. He became my ‘project’. All summer long, I pursued him, convinced we were meant to be together. Eventually, he succumbed to my charms and we became a couple.

  Our time was characterised by me putting myself out for him and him repaying this by ignoring me and depriving me of affection. After Danny, I can’t explain why I immediately went for another man who didn’t treat me particularly well – the only conclusion I can come to was that I didn’t feel I deserved to be loved.

  I took him to premieres and posh parties and introduced him to all my industry contacts. And I even arranged for his band to compete in a charity sports event. These were opportunities he could never have engineered on his own. In return, he’d take days to reply to my text messages, tell me he was ‘too cool’ to be dating a reality TV star contestant and frequently disappear without warning.

  We broke up and reunited several times throughout 2010; he also lived with me for a while. During that time I witnessed his attempts to quit drugs cold turkey – he lay in bed, sweating, not talking and not eating. It was agony to watch. He finally kicked heroin in January 2011, when I took him to Champneys Spa Hotel in Henlow Grange for three days.

  Although we remain friends to this day, I knew I couldn’t stay with him long-term. Living with him drove me to the brink of insanity – my flat was constantly messy and when I asked him to clean up after himself, he’d scream at me, calling me a ‘freak’ with OCD. He’d also stay up late into the night watching television when I was trying to sleep and monopolise my laptop so that I couldn’t use it myself. I’ve lived alone pretty much consistently for 10 years so it’s hard enough attempting to share my space with another human being without the challenges of his habits, both drug and housework related, thrown into the mix.

  We broke up for the last time in May 2011. I was on ITV’s This Morning speaking out about my battle with anorexia in an interview with Phillip Schofield. For me, it was a momentous event, sharing private experiences with an audience of millions, but he couldn’t even be bothered to watch the show. I knew then that he would never care for me the way I did him and so I asked him to leave my flat, where he was living rent-free. He begged me to let him stay, but I was resolute – things just weren’t working.

  By the time our relationship ended, the stress and the competitive dieting meant my BMI (Body Mass Index) had dropped to just 13 points (a healthy BMI is usually between 18 and 25 points). In sharp contrast to Danny, he used to beg me to put on weight, saying he would find me more attractive if I was a little curvier, but the words just didn’t seem to sink in. Now I weighed around 36 kilos and I’d got used to my body as it was. I felt it was a body I knew, one I could deal with. In these turbulent times, I needed something familiar to cling onto; after years of being underweight, my malnourished body provided a much-needed touchstone.

  After that final breakup, I felt a double whammy of devastation – it was as though the grief of both of the relationships hit me simultaneously. I was left feeling very vulnerable and incredibly low, emotionally.

  There were some positive aspects during this time, however. In 2009, I became involved with Body Gossip, a charity campaign which allows the public to share their real body stories. I first heard about Body Gossip in my capacity as an ambassador for the Osteoporosis Society, one of the campaign’s sponsors.

  Body Gossip invites everyone in the UK to write something about their body and submit the piece to them via the website. They then have a selection of the pieces they receive performed by well known actors, musicians and television personalities like myself, either in live shows or short films, which they put on YouTube. The idea is that real people are given a powerful voice to shout about all things body-related. I immediately loved the concept and also knew that I wanted to help in any way that I could.

  Although Body Gossip is not specifically an eating disorder campaign, a lot of the stories they receive from the public do fall into this category, as you’d expect. As part of the celebrity cast, I performed a piece written by a fellow sufferer of anorexia at the live stage show. As I read the young woman’s story during the first
performance (at the Hub, King’s Cross, London), I broke down in tears. There was so much I could relate to in her experiences; it felt reassuring to know I wasn’t alone in my body battles and also comforting to think perhaps my book was providing that reassurance for other people, too.

  Body Gossip’s live show was taken to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2009. I made fast friends with the rest of the celebrity cast, who included Shobna Gulati from Coronation Street, Anne Diamond and Cerrie Burnell from CBeebies. The best friend I made, however, was the actress Natalie Cassidy – we became incredibly close whilst performing in the show and remain great mates to this day. Natalie has been an incredible support to me throughout my various trials and tribulations; I like to think I fulfil the same role for her, too.

  Donating my time to Body Gossip, to B-eat (the UK’s largest eating disorder support charity) and to the Osteoporosis Society gave me a purpose. Part of the reason why I have written this book is because I am so motivated by the idea of helping other people and I went into 2010 feeling a little less worthless. During that year, Body Gossip made one of the stories they received into a short film, performed by some of their celebrity supporters including myself. Called This One is For You, it’s an inspiring story of anorexia recovery written by a girl called Laura Nation. Within the first few months, it received tens of thousands of hits on YouTube. As a result of the film, and of my book, I received a lot of emails and messages of support from the public, which comforted me and made me feel significant and valued.

  I’ll always remember the summer of 2010 for three reasons: my nephew Sunny was born, it was the summer I went to no less than 12 music festivals and it was the time when I entered Ultimate Big Brother.

  Sunny came into the world on 17 July 2010 and as soon as I laid eyes on that child, I adored him unconditionally. I wanted to spend as much time with him as I could and was always offering to babysit and take him on walks. There was a part of me tinged with sadness, too, because anorexia has robbed me of the ability to have children of my own. I look at Natalie and the relationship she has with this little person she has created and I know I’ll never experience that for myself, although I would like to adopt one day.