by Grace Bowman
My memory of this time is dominated by impressions of figures from the outside of my anorexia trying to do exactly that: aiming to disrupt my self-control. There was a constant intrusive presence of psychiatrists and nutritionists, family and friends, intent on taking away my internal power, which I found and owned for myself, focusing on spoiling the lines of the character of Grace I had so neatly sculpted. And because none of us had the same shape in mind for the outcome of things, I used whatever power I had to fight them, not the eating disorder. I drew an invisible circle around myself. If I didn’t share anything of myself – no words, no thoughts – then I was convinced that I could continue on my own.
The amazing thing about the initial stages of anorexia is that it does seem to imbue you with a surge of physical power. In eating less and less, it appears that you have more energy. The restlessness and the anxiety, which come from the hunger, translate themselves into a jittery, edgy, get-up-and-move impulse, which only drives you further. Then, all of a sudden, the illness begins to consume you, and while the body consumes very little, it consumes you even more, and so you become encircled by it, by a fear of losing control, a fear of letting go of this hold over your weight, over food and over everything. Then it becomes all quiet and blank, and you feel like you are floating out of your body, above people’s voices, detached from the world. To engage you need to be able to feel, and when feeling is too difficult, there is shutdown and closure, and days which pass by without any thought external to that of the body and how to suppress it; how to keep it under further pressing control. So instead of empowering you with total control of your every move, the reverse happens. You look like a child, you appear small and childlike and so that is how you are treated.
Within a matter of months, my invisible circle got so big that I would barely let anyone touch me or talk to me. If I did talk, it was all on a top layer, on a level which didn’t get near my skin, a level which was not a part of me, but was external to me. The more that I continued to starve – in fear, in addiction, out of control – the more I became alienated from myself. I wasn’t even able to remember what I used to talk about, think about or how I even started to think or talk from the inside. No, suddenly it was all from the outside. I was talking for the poorly me because she wouldn’t talk, in the way that someone might try and voice the feelings of an elderly person who they falsely assume has no right or ability to speak for themselves.
‘No, she doesn’t want any food, thank you very much.’ Perhaps the self-alienation was the only way of coping. I was removed out of my own pain. It wasn’t happening to me but to a version of me and so it was almost bearable.
In my interpretation of this time, I see what the doctors and psychiatrists tried to do; how they were trying everything they knew to change me or to move me. But I have the power of the whole in my hands now. I have the power of hindsight, retrospect and reason. The memory must remain as it was, framed in anger and pain and with a critical edge, where the hospital and the waiting rooms and the cottage cheese talks are seen out of focus and in one dimension. This is the only way to truly see inside the anorexic mind and to break through the invisible circle which deflects away those who try to travel inside it.
Bearing Witness
An anorexic uses her body as a vehicle for expression of emotion, fear or anger, and in this she implicates those looking on. History provides us with many examples of people using food and appetite as a voice in different ways. The suffragettes used hunger-striking as a political instrument; in religious contexts, food abstinence has been an articulation of repentance or atonement. It is a powerful weapon, a weapon of demonstration, an act of implication, used in a variety of cultural situations.
It seems that many adolescents who develop an eating disorder like anorexia are unconsciously using it to express their feelings, often towards their families. Some theorists believe that there are personality traits that many people who develop anorexia nervosa have in common. One of these is a wish to please their parents and to be universally liked.8 A result of this is that they have not allowed themselves, or been allowed, to express feelings of anger or upset, nor have they felt that they have the voice to do so. Many parents of anorexic children will say that those daughters and sons were obedient, quiet, loving, good children when they were younger.
That goodness, which the anorexic feels is so much a part of everyone loving her, means that she will do anything to keep up a polished exterior. This is the way she has learned that things work, and the whole family learns the same pattern. Because of this, the anorexic chooses a silent and secretive way of demonstrating her feelings; she keeps her secret starving to herself so as not to cause harm, not to displease. She makes a statement, she thinks, in the nicest and quietest way possible. In retaining that goodness, and in not talking about issues of frustration and anger, a sense of pride is retained. Pride (such an important and precious feeling to an anorexic) is still intact in not-eating, but more talking is actually done through this act than has ever been done before. She slowly tips the balance of power; she asks to be recognized and she asks to speak.
‘Confront me and my power on show,’ she challenges.
‘Witness me,’ she says.
I did this. I asked my family and my friends to watch me self-destructing – I made them, forced them. I sat them down in front of me and I carried on. We watched each other over the dinner table. I tried to pretend that I wasn’t interested in my plate at all, and that I couldn’t stand the idea of food, but instead it was really the opposite. I was counting the seconds until each meal, I was blisteringly aware of the size and shape of every crumb on my plate and on theirs. I suppose – without knowing – I wanted my family to witness this thing that was happening to me. I wanted to tell them that I couldn’t cope, but that I was not sure why I couldn’t cope or what the problem was. I needed somebody’s shoulder to cry on, but I did not want to cry out loud. I was so proud of my status, my achievements and my successes that I did not want to admit any fallibility. I wanted to be strong, and in my not-eating I was stronger and more resilient than they had ever seen me, but I was also forcing a confrontation. I was forcing a conflict. I was refusing to eat their food.
The hardest thing must have been that they were not able to give me a plaster, a bandage, some Calpol or a cool flannel; instead, they had to watch me be ill, and not do anything immediate about it. Inside their heads, and in the meetings with the psychiatrists, nutritionists and family therapists, and in endless conversations with friends, with experts – with anyone who might have any idea about what was happening to me – they just wanted to know what they had done wrong and how they could help.
Harder still for my parents was that the treatment I was initially offered was limited and they were left powerlessly watching from the sidelines (anorexia is particularly good at alienating those around it). As with many eating-disorder patients, the first stop was my doctor’s surgery. I was lucky that the GP I saw that day was sympathetic and that she immediately saw the signs. Perhaps this was because I was not as advanced in my illness as others, whose levels of secrecy and closure prevent GPs being able to diagnose correctly.9 I was more open; I was falling and ready for someone to catch me. The next stop (and the only free one available to me) was to be an outpatient at the local psychiatric hospital. This immediately threw me. I didn’t see anyone else like me, and I didn’t know why I was sent there. It made me feel worse. Unfortunately, this is the norm for many patients, because provision in specialist centres is so sporadic, and because even where there is provision, waiting lists are long, leaving the sufferer to shrink, the problem to grow and the parents to simply, wearily and desperately hang on.10
It must have been impossible to watch this, to witness this. The consequences of the illness are potentially enormous: anorexia has one of the highest rates of mortality for any psychiatric disorder.11 If unresolved, the end result of anorexia is death. This is not a shock statement, it is a reality: up to 20 p
er cent of those seriously affected die, and rates of suicide are cited as up to 200 per cent higher than in the general population.12
Like nineteenth-century hunger artists who starved themselves and then displayed themselves as living skeletons, gawped at by people who paid to see these miraculous figures on show, I made my body into a performance.
‘Here I am.’ I didn’t say, ‘starving myself’.
‘Here I am.’ I didn’t add, ‘not eating my dinner’.
‘Now watch me.’ I didn’t exclaim, ‘throwing my pasta down the toilet!’.
‘And for my final trick of the evening – 200 sit-ups on a totally empty stomach. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, mums and dads, boys and girls, and goodnight.’
‘Ta da.’ (Circus round of applause.)
Memory
As my body began to close down all functions that weren’t critical to its survival, I think it also stopped me remembering my experiences. It was like there was not enough weight to support them. My focus was so single-minded and so food-driven that the events and the people who surrounded me barely existed in that same time. Because a lot of my actions were not conscious, breathing ones, they were not admitted. I can find them only through thinking of a face, name, room or date, or by flicking through old letters and photos.
In the telling of my memories, it is not always possible to write them as if they were lived and breathed in fine detail. The detail could be made up, of course. The memoir would then become full and lifelike; like a beautifully crafted novel. You would see subtle angles of light, floating through windows; I would present you with puffs of cigarettes dissipating into the thick air. The text would be cluttered with the landscape of description. This is not the memoir of a full brain, but the memories of a fog-filled one. My narrative is fragmented because my sense of self was fractured. It is this that I am trying to reflect. Lucidity and clarity aren’t available when, as an anorexic, you are totally self-absorbed, unable to contemplate living without your addiction.
In the memories that I do manage to capture – those days, hours or minutes that I did hold on to – I have to look through a further layer; that of myself looking in on myself, far-removed from the space in which I lived. I did not feel the moment, but I acted as if I was ahead of it, almost as if I was trying to control time. The only way to deal with the pain of the starving and suffocated body was to step out of it and make every thought a rational one. I was a protagonist in a rather difficult situation, dealing out my lines with composure and authority.
Sometimes the memories I am unlocking are viewed from such a distance that the scene is shown and the faces of the characters are visible, but only certain colours are clear. I am in a pub, sitting with my friends, and all I can see is a bright striped cardigan that I am wearing, and a grey-looking smoky surrounding. I am listening in on the conversations but my hearing is impaired by the noise I was then making to block things out. Characters enter and converse, but what they are saying is muffled. I wasn’t really listening to anybody else – not properly – so nothing registered. I was held fast in my own world and all entrances were blocked. It is frustrating. The colour of my cardigan diverts me off course; it is blinding.
I can only build the scenes in my memories from the fragments of senses to which I am allowed access. The cold is always there. Real chilling-to-the-bone cold. The cold that comes when the circulation is motoring so slowly that it barely moves; instead it conserves the energy it requires and it reduces and reduces more. The painful cold is the only thing I can really feel, apart from the noisy, unremitting, whirring inside voice, which speaks so quickly and constantly that it leaves no room for analysis. It is all about action. People aren’t even recognizable as individuals. They are simply voices which ring with no particular accent, just one of intrusiveness. They are always interrupting because my inside voice seems to be in permanent conversation. Outside voices want to talk about their angle on things and whatever they want to say is always wrong, always out of time.
My memories are not one voice. When we listen to or watch our memories they come back in different ways. Stop and listen to one. Furrow your brow and go deeper. Sometimes it is a voice or a sentence that repeats itself over and over. Sometimes you are part of the action, sometimes you are watching through your own eyes. Sometimes there are pictures and no words at all – flashes of things, which pass over space and then disappear.
Putting these memory-stories down on paper gives them a firm reality. Things have come to light in the writing. Emotions that weren’t accessible then have begun to live. The very act of telling this secret story has sparked the regeneration of lost thoughts and feelings.
I can now hear my voice.
Part 2
THIS IS I
This Is I
When I wake up in the morning I think
today is going to be a better day
I can look after myself
Sorted.
But bed is relief away from taste and body
until I wake again with fresh intentions
and broken calorie counts.
My heart is pushing down on my ribcage
in between bouts of hysteria my mind
is so quiet
that it feels as if it no longer
exists?
The lyrics of their tongues seem so out of tune
and pound against my head.
Leave.
You are crushing my skull and there is no
direction left to fight.
You want answers, emotions, feelings –
hissing reverberations of your endless questions.
I clasp at a fistful of air
a cigarette
lines of reasoning
Diet Coke.
You are unconvinced.
Seven
‘Why do you think this happened?’
‘What are you angry about?’
‘Is it something from your childhood?’
‘Stop closing up.’
‘Are you making yourself sick?’
‘Are you taking laxatives?’
‘What are you really upset about?’
‘You are projecting.’
‘Who are you, really?’
Whitecoats. You do wear white coats. But I can see that underneath you are wearing real clothes. In the meantime I am wearing white all the time, because everything is fine. Surely your theories are wrong. There are no bad memories. I’m not a victim of abuse/bad parenting/neglect. I feel guilty taking up your time. This NHS treatment isn’t easy to come by. Please take it to someone who needs it. I’m sure you can see that I am handling this. It can’t always be to do with beginnings, like you think. Sometimes things just happen, people are just made that way, it is a matter of personality. I will work it out. Thanks, anyway. I have read all the books and the leaflets, please don’t patronize me by telling me why I am here. Your psychoanalysis doesn’t work with me. I am a typical case. I’m well educated, well loved, a high-achiever. That’s why. I get it. It’s all so obvious to me. You don’t need to explain. I know you like the textbook cases. It must make you feel like you are on top of this whole thing. I’m not so sure you are. I think you are beleaguered by the fact that I am not going to let you in. Please don’t devalue me by comparing me to the others. Their stories are different. Your white coat doesn’t make you an expert on me. You will never be that, because I won’t allow it. I know how you like me to go back and talk about my childhood. I just shrug my shoulders. I can’t help you. You’re getting colder and colder. Not a very good detective, are you? And, by the way, the books you gave me to read have been most helpful. I have seen where the others have gone wrong. They give me the insider tips. I won’t let those kinds of mistakes happen to me. I have a huge knowledge base. What about you? I can tell you the calorie content of any food and any drink. And I am exact about it, I don’t round things up or down. It’s all very precise.
You know, it’s funny because I actually like white. It
’s pure and clean and empty, but the way you wear it! Oh, you make me laugh. But seriously, I do need you to get out of my space. I’m starting to feel really claustrophobic. I keep running but it doesn’t seem to make things better. There is you and your white coat, and then there are the others, in their white Fiestas whistling at me through their car windows, blasting their music out, piercing my ears. I can’t stand the intrusion of them, you see – the way they look at me (or used to) – not any more, thankfully. I am just trying to push myself a bit further and you are all distracting me. And, of course, there are my lovely, loving parents. Who, in their own unknowing ways, are trying too hard to play me at my own game. They buy me whatever I want. I could order any food from anywhere in the world, and they would make sure I had it. I hate that. I hate the fact they think they know what I will eat, and what I won’t. I am an adult! They even buy me rice cakes. I don’t like it that they know that I eat rice cakes. It was my secret. It’s like I am giving the game away. I need to change tactics. We all have to sit at the table eating together. They, with their Sainsbury’s ready-made Indian meals, and me with my pile of lettuce. What a charade. Let’s not sit here, pretending this is normal. I know what they are trying to do. It’s what you have told them. I can see you coming through them. They are just the bodies to carry your message home when you are not there. It is all so damn facile. I have seen your ideas in my house. Mum returns from the supermarket with every lowfat/low-calorie dish on offer. ‘Count On Us’ – I would rather not! I can’t believe people actually trust these products. How can you be sure that they have counted every calorie correctly? I see how you are attempting to shape me again. You may try, but I am the artist of myself.