Life Without Limits, A (6 page)

There are a lot of beautiful people in Bondi, and they all seem to be thin and fit. It wasn’t long before I felt the return of familiar twitches of anxiety over my body image. Just as powerfully, though, I also felt the pull of the beaches and the ocean. The upshot of it all was that I soon rediscovered my love of sport. If you love sport, Australia is a wonderful place to be.

In August, on a whim, I entered the City2Surf, a 14km run from the Central Business District to Bondi. ‘It’s a suicide mission!’ I wrote in my diary. ‘I’m sure there’s no way I can run it all, but I will give it a shot!’

What a fuss I made! It seems laughable to me now. The race itself was so uplifting. I was swept along by the atmosphere and the 50,000 other competitors. It was a thrilling experience. ‘In the end I worried about nothing,’ I wrote. ‘The race went brilliantly – better than I ever could have hoped. In fact, really, really good. I just got into a rhythm and kept going.’ Inspired, I started running along the beach and cliff tops, although my idea of a long run then was half an hour.

I learned to surf, even if it took me months just to be able to stand on the board. I never gave up, practising every day, despite the indignity and pain of the thrashing the ocean gave me. It was just such a joy to be out on the waves. I was also swimming again, and took part in the 2km North Bondi Roughwater Ocean Swim in January 2000. It was much easier than I thought it would be, and I came fourth or fifth in my age group. I started to think it might be time to train a little more seriously.

Sydney was buzzing with millennial energy and I felt that changes were also taking place inside me. I wrote down my dreams for 2000: ‘To be happy with myself and always make others happy. To be confident and give others confidence in themselves. To smile, to surf, to laugh and make others laugh. To read more widely. To try to be more tolerant of my weaknesses and of others, and not be so hard on myself all the time. To make people happy is the main one, I think. Biting my nails has to be in there somewhere too.’

I am pleased to say that I have more or less kicked the habit of biting my nails, although it does return sometimes if I’m anxious. It wasn’t until I was cycle-touring in the Andes at the end of 2008 that I really cracked it. But I feel I’ve almost ticked that one off the list.

The other resolutions are more like ongoing guidelines to live my life by, particularly the one about the happiness of others. There’s a crucial distinction between that and seeking the approval of others, which I sometimes confuse it with. I have received so much from people in my life and have always felt a strong desire to make others happy in return. It was a mantra of mine then, and it still is now. As much as anything, that was what drew me away from my path into law. I couldn’t reconcile it with the practice of representing companies whose policies or products you might not agree with, or with charging two or three hundred pounds an hour while you did it.

Instead, I was hit by the revelation that I should take a master’s in international development. I was almost certain I wanted to go into aid work, and this was one of the established ways in. Even thinking about it made me excited. It was what I was interested in, and something I felt that I would be good at. On 17 January 2000, after taking the advice of, among others, Jon Sadler, I resolved to pursue it. From Sydney I applied for courses in the UK and was accepted on one at the University of Manchester. The main problem was that I had no money, but I managed to secure a scholarship of £10,000 from the Economic and Social Research Council.

I left Sydney in March and travelled on my own through Asia for six months. That was an amazing time; I met so many fascinating people. By now I was really tackling one of those other resolutions of mine – to be more tolerant of others. When you’re growing up, especially in Norfolk, your friends are very similar to you. But as I saw more of the world I met people from different walks of life, who wore different clothes and believed in different things. I might not have agreed with them all, but I learned to be much more accepting. I am now proud to number among my friends just such a wide variety of people. I am still not that tolerant of smokers, I have to admit, but I am working on that.

In Asia I travelled through Indonesia (a country I loved so much I was to write my master’s thesis on it), Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Burma and India. In Laos, I became a vegetarian. The screaming of the pigs as they were slaughtered in front of us, then roasted, is what finally did it for me. But, even before that, healthy eating had become more of a preoccupation than it had been in Australia. It wasn’t so much a weight thing, more a question of what was available. Fresh fruit and vegetable stir fries were abundant, so they naturally became the bedrock of my diet. Just as naturally, I started to lose weight, and I liked that.

A storm was brewing.

I returned from Asia eleven days before the start of my master’s, full of the virtues of healthy eating and so excited about resuming academic life. My dad drove me up to Manchester at the beginning of September 2000.

But it was now that the idea of healthy eating started to make a plaything of me. It began with the incessant reading of labels. Now that I was back in the West, I had to be careful if I wanted to maintain the healthy lifestyle I’d adopted in Asia. I had already re-established that I liked looking slim. I didn’t want to return to the more decadent path I had followed in Australia. I didn’t want anyone to say to me even something as innocuous as, ‘You look well’, because we all knew what that was a euphemism for. I continued with my new-found enthusiasm for fitness and started running with a vengeance. I was obsessive about it, in my crappy old trainers and second-hand running clothes, pounding through the fog in Victoria Park at six in the morning. Needless to say, the weight continued to fall off me.

I was back into my relentlessly driven mode, but this time it was eating me up more than ever. My best friend on the course was Naomi Humphries, who had a first-class degree from Oxford in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. I didn’t know it at the time, but she tells me she found it hilarious how competitive I was over every piece of work we did. We were the strongest students on the course, but she was far more naturally intelligent than I was. In Naomi I was confronted with something I hadn’t come across before – a rival in the classroom. It fuelled my competitiveness so that it burned even more ferociously. I had to beat her, and every time I didn’t it made me seethe. Naomi was very driven too, but for her it was about improving herself; for me, it was about improving myself
and
beating everyone else.

Naomi was a very good cook, and she knew I wasn’t eating enough. She would prepare me meals and slip added fat into them. Once she made me a pea and potato soup, swearing blind that that was all it was. Unbeknown to me, she had slipped in dollops of extra cream and olive oil. She told me that the hot chocolate she had made contained just one spoon of Options low-fat drinking chocolate, but really it had ladlefuls of the full fat stuff.

Nobody liked broaching the subject with me, and when they did I would pass off my skinniness as the result of a tropical disease I had picked up in Asia. I could see people were concerned, but the need to control my eating overrode everything. I started swimming, and then took up water polo. I was awful – couldn’t catch, couldn’t throw – but there was no hiding my weight loss in the pool. It made me even worse at water polo, because I was easily brushed aside. I was also getting very cold in the water. I played because it was an excuse to swim around like a lunatic and because there was a great social scene. I wasn’t drinking much, but I would always go to the pub to meet people. And when I didn’t I worked flat out on my master’s, well into the night, before getting up at the crack of dawn to go running.

It was an unhealthy lifestyle, but I couldn’t stop. Working relentlessly is an addiction; anorexia is an addiction. It had started off in the usual way – with the question of body image. But when you’re so driven and compulsive, it turns into a competition within yourself. Each day, I would try to eat just a little less than the last. If I succeeded, that was a good thing. To do the reverse would be to give in to temptation, which was weakness. Occasionally, I would have a binge on crisps and chips at a party and I would berate myself for it. I had lost control. That meant punishment would follow.

But I was already punishing myself. My body was feeling the strain. I used to wake up in the night with an aching jaw, because I was grinding my teeth. That was partly through the stress I was putting myself under on the course, but anorexia affects your sleep patterns. Nowadays, my teeth are almost non-existent at the back, and I wear a gumshield in bed.

My hair grew dry and then started to fall out. I smothered it with conditioner. Downy hair, meanwhile, started to grow on my body. My periods stopped. I knew I was too thin, but I couldn’t escape from what I was doing. I wanted to be rid of the chokehold it had on me. It’s so mentally draining. Eating less may start as a means to an end, but in an anorexic it soon takes over as the end itself. You lose perspective. Yes, on some level I knew I was too thin, but you don’t realise just how bad you look. In a mirror, you don’t see what everyone else sees. Concerned friends might tell you you’re looking thin, but that’s exactly what an anorexic wants to hear. When people said it to me, I just thought, ‘Great!’

My friends from water polo, Tamsin and Gemma, wanted me to see a doctor (in response to my insistence that I was suffering from a rare tropical disease). I lied and told them I was seeing one. I did, however, go once to see a counsellor at the university, but I didn’t like it and never went back.

In the end, it was my family who snapped me out of it – that, and a photo.

My parents knew I had changed my eating patterns by becoming a vegetarian (always eager to accommodate everyone, Mum cooked me a nut roast that Christmas). By the summer of 2001, though, it was clear to them that I had a problem. They came up to visit me one weekend, and we went for a walk in the Peak District. I could tell by the look in their eyes that they were desperately worried, and it tweaked something deep inside me. A few days later, I developed some photos we had taken on the walk. One of them was of me. I was shocked. Somehow, seeing me there, frozen and isolated in a photo, taken out of that symbiotic relationship you have with the person in the mirror, brought home to me with devastating force how skinny and ill I had become. I looked awful.

I rang my parents and burst into tears, telling them everything.

‘I’m coming to get you,’ said Dad.

He drove up to Manchester and took me home to Norfolk. Term-time was over for the summer, so I was working under my own steam on my thesis, which had to be in by October. Dad took time off work, and I stayed at home for about a week.

‘You don’t have to say anything,’ he said. ‘I just want to be with you.’

I explained everything to him as best I could. He just couldn’t comprehend it, but he was super-supportive. It was such an alien thing for him to have to deal with. He had no experience of it. Not being able to help was agonising for him.

‘Chrissie, you’ve got so much going for you,’ he said. ‘You’re beautiful, you’ve got a great mind, a great body. I just don’t understand why you’re doing this to yourself.’

He was at a loss. But, for me, just his being there and my being able to talk to him about it was enough.

We went for a walk and ended up in a coffee shop. He ordered a cake and tried to get me to eat some.

‘I can’t, Dad,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’

‘Chrissie, I don’t know what to do for you. I don’t know how to help.’ And he broke down.

I’d never seen my dad cry. It tore at my soul. The fact that I’d caused him and Mum so much distress rocked me.

But it was my brother who delivered the killer blow. I went to stay with him in Greenwich, where he was studying. We had talked at length about my problem before, and he had always been sympathetic and supportive, but this time he showed me the toughest love he possibly could. It was what I needed. Our relationship has at times been feisty, and that feistiness helped to complete the turnaround.

‘You’re so selfish,’ he said. ‘Look at what you’re doing. You’re tearing Dad apart. And Mum. You think this is just an eating disorder, that it’s just affecting you. Well, it’s not. It’s affecting our whole family. You don’t care what you’re doing to everyone else.’

He gave me both barrels. This was not the first time that had happened, but for the first time I didn’t give him both barrels back. I took it in silence, because I knew he was right. Matty helped me then more than he could know. He woke me up to what was happening. I might not have shown it at the time, but my gratitude for what he did for me that day knew no bounds.

And maybe being with my brother brought home to me another realisation, which helped me then to learn to appreciate my body and continues to help me now. I am a combination of my mum and dad. If I hate what I see in the mirror, then indirectly I am being critical of them. And to be critical of them is the most absurd idea, since they are the two people I love and respect most in the world. Or, to approach it from the other way, if I love my mum and dad so much, which is a given, then it follows I should love, or at the very least appreciate, my body. I should appreciate me.

Which brings me back to those millennial resolutions, and the one I have tackled least successfully – to be tolerant of my weaknesses. I still have to learn to be kinder to myself. Those days at the end of my master’s were a watershed for me in that respect, as in many others, but I have never quite shaken off that tendency to be self-critical. Indeed, it is less that I need to tolerate my weak nesses, and more that I need to realise that what I’m berating myself for isn’t actually weakness at all. I have an illogical conception of what weakness is. If I lose a race, that is weakness; if I have a bad day’s training, that is weakness. For me, anything short of perfection is weakness.