by Grace Bowman
3. Keep up the act when things go wonky-shaped
After the crying and sad faces, agree to do something about this. You need to throw people off course. It will be easier if you at least pretend that you would like some help. Just make sure that you keep them all at a distance. Listen to your thumping-hard heart as you remember that you said you, ‘will definitely go and see somebody’.
It was a mistake to say it, but now you need to make things straight again.
4. Smile through it
Smile as you spill out your story to a personnel lady who hands you a clump of tissues. Tell her about your old eating problems and how things are unhappy, now the feeling is back in your body. Smile with embarrassment. Say sorry. Say thank you. This is really embarrassing. She thought you were going to say that you were pregnant. She looks relieved. Imagine hard what that would be like and how, if you did get pregnant, it might mean that you wouldn’t have to go to work. Think of all the nice attention you would get, and how people would be happy for you, and send you presents. Think how you could stay at home and stop being ordered around. Snap back into reality and listen as she makes you an appointment with the company doctor.
This is not how it is meant to be. How did I get here? Why am I telling her this? Why did I bring myself to this, when I have been fighting to get away from it?
5. Play along with/play with the professionals
Arrive at the company doctor. Can you see his serious and attentive face? Don’t cry too much, but just enough, so he will take you seriously. Listen to his half-hour of advice:
‘From my experience, it is advisable that you don’t eat some types of foods because they can trigger your manic “up and down” feelings. So I think that you should cut out white bread and sugar. They give you immediate highs and then sharp lows. Does that make sense?’
He actually says you should avoid some foods. Please take this advice very seriously. Any food reduction is welcome. Say thank you.
Oh, yes please. Thank you, nice man. A real reason not to eat some foods. I knew I should be eating less. I was right. Thank you.
Also make sure you take the anti-depressants he offers for your wonky-shaped unhappy feelings. You are worthy of these pills, which must mean you have a proper problem. No one ever gave you anything like this when you were starving. There is something physical that may be able to be fixed. Then nod quietly when he tells you about the psychotherapist.
Oh no no no no no. Please no more whitecoats. Just some pills, which might make me feel happy and better. I don’t understand. I am over things like that. With foods. I ‘had’ an eating disorder; I don’t ‘have’ one. I told you, remember? I told you about how I got better, and went to Cambridge and was a great success and then came to London and got myself a proper job and made everyone so PROUD of me. They are so pleased with me. I can’t tell them that I have slipped. More secrets. More whitecoats. More funny looks from caring people. No no no no no.
6. Play the good girl
‘OK, then, Doctor.’
Watch the doctor as he flicks through his notes. Make sure you say thank you. Go on.
Twenty-four
When I arrive at the house of my new whitecoat there is a woman walking out of the door with tissues in her hand and a wet, reddened face. I wonder what story brought her here and who she is seeing. I stare at her tissues and her wet, red face and wonder why I don’t react like that when I see the whitecoats. Perhaps if I gave up some tears or some tissues, then they would think things are better and leave me alone.
This time, I have ordered the whitecoats in myself. I almost asked for their help, and so there is a conflict between something I think I must need and something I have avoided time after time. I mustn’t let things slip, or let her say or do too much to change me.
I go up the stairs and sit in a clean, richly wallpapered, green room. Things are warm and homely. There are no plastic chairs here. My Chelsea psychotherapist lady is Spanish, and she is beautiful and slim. My whitecoat is sparkling in her designer suit. She asks me how I am. She looks interested and engaged. I can’t think why she would be so interested in me. I remind myself that I am better, and ask myself again why I am here.
‘Fine. I’m good, thank you. I’m fine. Thanks for asking. Yep, thank you,’ I state. ‘Thanks for asking.’
There is silence. She doesn’t react too well to my pleasantries. I want to puncture the air which is expanding between us. I hate silence and stillness, but my lips are locked and my chest is stiff and I start rolling my eyes around the room to search for some kind of distraction.
I spy with my little eye, something beginning with …
She does not break my silence. How long are we going to sit here? She continues to breathe calmly and smile, and she looks right at me.
something beginning with w …
What do you want me to say? I think. I’m not sure what I should say. I do feel fine today. I feel OK, honestly. I didn’t though, not then, not when I was crying at work, or on that particular night or that forgettable day, but now I am here and I do feel OK. But I don’t say it out loud because I am scared of her.
‘What do you want to get out of these sessions?’ She looks at me carefully, trying to work me out.
I don’t want to answer her now because she has annoyed me, I’m not sure why. I get embarrassed when people try and break me down. I would much rather it was the other way. I feel like she is testing me, pushing me and trying to tackle me from all sides.
‘Are you angry?’ she asks. ‘Why have you been feeling like this? How did you get here? What about the beginnings? I would like to know. Can you tell me?’
But I don’t really feel anger, I just don’t. I don’t get hot or fiery, not much. I float in the air, placate, make things nice and I try to make people happy.
‘My childhood was happy,’ I tell her. ‘My family are wonderful and supportive and loving. I really don’t think that it is to do with the beginnings. I wasn’t pushed or made to feel like I had to do these things. I was always like this. It’s just me.’
‘So you don’t feel angry with your parents for things? Most people do,’ she advances.
Now I feel like I am choking. What is there to blame them for? This is no one’s fault.
Please don’t blame anyone. Please don’t put any blame on to other people. This is entirely my fault. I was made like this, or I made myself like this.
I tell her something with my teeth gritted. I tell her something that I am feeling because I think that is what she wants to know.
‘I’m annoyed at work. I’m frustrated with the photocopying and the tea-making and the smile-wearing.’
‘But it’s not about the work, is it? The work is not the real feelings. How are you really? What have you eaten today? How are things going with food? Do you still struggle sometimes?’
Her Spanish accent rolls off the tip of her tongue and her words land in front of my face.
I can’t believe she mentioned it.
Please don’t mention it. I didn’t think you would.
‘That is FINE. Fine. Everything is under control now. This is not the issue. I have got over that. I put on weight. I got better. I eat everything now. I’m not even that fussy any more. I promise. It’s just that now I eat what people want me to, I don’t have anything to project things on to when I’m a bit out of control, so I get down sometimes. I have lost the thing that made me feel high; anorexia took me above any worry and made me feel like I was removed. That’s all. Why do we always have to go on and on about feelings and thoughts? That is all I do, all day. I think and over-think. My head is whirring like a food processor and it hasn’t got me anywhere.’
Then there is silence again. I have given her my theory and she has given me hers. And there is stalemate.
I go every week and we sit. Sometimes she tells me that I have actually lost weight, which I think is irrelevant. I can’t/don’t/won’t agree, and I don’t like the way she is looking at me and thi
nking like that. She is actually taking up one of my evenings, when I could be at the gym running on the treadmill after indulging in biscuits and fatty sandwiches and wine.
She tells me to close my eyes, and try to relax, and to take deep breaths because I am stressed inside, but I stare at her perfect legs and wonder what kinds of exercises she does to keep them like that. All of a sudden I am here being asked old questions and feeling like I want to remove myself from this scene as well.
Silence continues.
I need to say something. I feel like I am letting her down. I don’t want to sit here for much longer like this, leaving work early to see her. It doesn’t feel right any more. I don’t want to be in this place, not now.
She looks at me, and she smiles.
I take a deep breath.
She looks at me and says, ‘Why don’t you make some changes to your life? Do something you really want to do? What do you think about that? You shouldn’t be afraid. If, as you say, this work isn’t for you then take the creative path you have always wanted. I know you have the talent.’
I nod quietly. How can she possibly know that? I don’t want to disappoint her but I know that I would never allow myself such dangerous exposure. What if I failed? What if I tried and someone passed judgement and told me I was no good? How could I cope with reality then? The head-dreams would melt and I wouldn’t be able to get to sleep any more.
‘What things are stopping you?’
I sit and I smile. ‘Nothing. Nothing. It’s a good idea, thanks.’
And so she asks me again and every week I reply,
‘You are right, it’s a good idea. You are right.’
Voice
That is the odd thing about anorexia: it is seen to vanish when the body is mended. It moves from body-side to inside, and perhaps it is more dangerous when it cannot be seen. What may start off as a panic button for a fear about growing up and leaving home, and about having to be perfect in everyone’s eyes, turns into a chemical addiction to food. That addiction continues even after it has been beaten on a physical level, because mending your relationship with food does not equate with mending your own self-esteem.
As I started to return to food, and to my body, I became hypersensitive. I felt things from the outside. I could feel other people around me with a strange intensity: I could sense the surge of the crowd, the breath of a stranger, the whirring noise of the traffic. Normal daily events seemed to be enhanced and magnified. As an anorexic, my senses were numbed, nulled and restrained, and then I jumped straight back into the busiest, noisiest world, which initially overwhelmed me. I took it all in with equal intensity, especially other people’s views of eating disorders. These were things I hadn’t been able to hear before, and it was if they were now magnified, these conflicting voices about what I had suffered, and how it related to the fabric of our society.
Perhaps the most intriguing element of eating disorders and the one thing which it is common to overhear, on a bus or in a shop or in a busy café, is about how impossible they are to understand:
‘I don’t get it. I mean, I would never think like that. I can’t even get my head round how it starts. You eat. You are born to eat. It’s one of the only things that you need to have as a human to survive. It’s something from birth. It’s not like alcohol or drugs or cigarettes – addictions like that come later – you start them, you start to drink or smoke one day, but this one, it’s like fighting something elemental. Eating, like sleeping or waking or moving, is natural, it’s innate. It starts from in the womb. Why can’t they just eat? They should stop being so vain. All that self-obsession is boring. I don’t even know how that kind of chain of thinking begins.’
Alongside this, there is, paradoxically, the permanence of the other voices, which are constantly dealing with issues on the perimeter of anorexia: the dieter’s voice, the dieting industry’s voice, the Government voice, the food guilt, which the whole of society seems to be consumed with. In the small and insular world of a Cambridge college, driven only by the potential success of my next result, I was mostly able to evade it, or maybe I blocked my ears. Dieting just didn’t seem to be a topic of conversation – it wasn’t mentioned because we were at Cambridge University to be strong and successful women, not diet-obsessed girls. Coming out of the shelter of university, things changed and I was thrown back into the centre of it.
As a society our relationship with food is seen to be out of balance. Obesity rates are rising; we are – apparently – what we eat. When you are in recovery from an eating disorder the magnitude of this voice is often stronger than your own internal one. You have trained that internal voice over time to Just be quiet and leave me alone.
But it is all too ready to be convinced otherwise. It is ready to hear all of the food restraints and plans presented by the outside world. It is hard to think that you are an exception to the rule, that you actually shouldn’t be going to the gym every day and reducing your calories, or trying the latest celebrity plans. This is what everyone else seems to be doing and why shouldn’t you? It is difficult to ignore the verging-on-hysteria of a nation gripped by its size and its shape and everything related to it.
The thing to realize is that a super-controlled relationship with food and body weight will not solve everything. It is a fallacy to believe that happiness comes flooding in on the lighter side of eight stone. I could see that every time I picked up a new diet. It was a symptom of something else. It was a symptom that I wasn’t feeling right – and trying to find what I was about through food, like everybody else seemed to be doing, wasn’t the answer. I had been there before.
The Passage of Time
The passage of time is a powerful thing. When people ask how you overcome an eating disorder it doesn’t sound like the most convincing of explanations to put it down to just waiting for things to get better, but this was the case in my experience. It was a slow process to wear it down but the more I fought it, the more I wanted to rid myself of its strangling hold, and eventually, with sustained effort, the eating disorder voice gradually faded out. As with anyone growing up, things change and develop and move on. In my case, living constantly with such a throttling addiction was very tiring and over time I decided to move away from it, importantly for my sake and not for anyone else’s.
A big part of my recovery came down to actually embracing change rather than opposing it. Beneath the chop-change of emotion based on body size, I was bored by permanently thinking about eating and not-eating. I was bored by the frustrating obsession with every inch of my body. I had had enough. Going round in circles over a growing-up issue seemed to be distinctly non-adult. In my early twenties, trying to forge a connection with myself as an independent adult and lose the remnants of my teenage self was an important goal and I wanted to reach towards it. If you are able to admit real responsibility for what you can achieve – if you can start to counter that fear – then you realize that anorexia is something you can put a stop to. I didn’t need it to be a part of my life. I needed to find a new shape without it but, importantly, without pretending it never happened.
That is not to demote such a serious addiction to ‘just one of those phases’. I don’t think it is. The strength of anorexia is such that its remnants are clearly felt, or translated into something else long after the ‘phase’ has passed. The memory of it is imprinted upon you; it threads through you. It is not something that you forget you experienced. You cannot do this because the potential long-lasting consequences for your body range from infertility to osteoporosis to the erosion of tooth enamel. And it can come back. Even if the relationship with food recovers, the relationship with your body and with yourself can remain a fragile one. But my experience is that recovery is a possibility if you allow it to be, and work hard at it. It will be different for everyone.
The process of my getting better, as I look back, did come in a series of thoughts, or moments. The arrival of my boyfriend is one of those instances. I was suddenly pulled away from the
control I thought I had over my life, my body and the foods that it ate. The presence of my boyfriend filled the absence left by the fading relic of my anorexia. It had left me feeling absent. Everything I had known about myself was bound up in my relationship with food. Now I had a new relationship.
Ultimately, the result of the relationship was that I was determined to lock out the anorexic tendencies; and I had found someone that this was worth doing for. He was more fulfilling and more full of potential than any diet was. Momentarily, I stopped caring. I was really determined that I would end this. I would make my relationship work without it.
I do think that things can change, if you are able to sustain a real and lasting relationship outside the one you have with food. Some psychiatrists might say that the ability to have a long-term relationship marks the beginning of the end of an eating disorder. It can open up a new way of living, which begins with ‘we’ and not ‘I’. ‘I’ is slim and controlled and sharp, from the form of the letter, to its sound, to all that it means. And if this can become ‘we’, then ‘I’ gets thrown out of control. In my case, this meant I had to face my fears and confront things that I didn’t want to. I think this is important; instead of continually striving for further self-analysis and self-obsession I directed my energies to someone else. It also meant that I could no longer structure and shape every minute of my day just the way I wanted it. I had to battle with my anxiety.