Thin (15 page)

I was always an anxious child. I was never a free-flowing spirit who ran with every new and dangerous thing. I thought of every possibility in all action; that way I would not be disappointed or surprised. I preferred the limits of my imagination (which felt and sensed everything in extraordinary filmic detail) rather than the reality of a canoe or a rock climb or a fun fair. For other people, adrenalin came in the form of breaking the rules, taking a risk and playing with fortune. But that path offered nothing to me except terror. I was a first child, and always cautious. I was sure of my academic identity, but the shelter of my home environment and the sense of safety I grew up in perhaps did not allow me to fully develop a sense of edges for myself.

When it came to my anorexia, I was convinced that if I gained any weight, I would spiral out of control. I was not confident of my own limits. I was terrified of what was on the other side of weight gain and who I would become if that happened. But my fear of weight gain was not like any other fear I had known. It was not like my fear of dogs or dentists or strangers. It did not send my heart racing or make me sweat or shake. It sat deep inside me and it reverberated loud inside my head, a voice on repeat, repeat; a record stuck. I had become scared of eating, scared of what would happen with every mouthful, but at the same time I was fascinated by food. I did not cross the street to get away from it, like I did when I saw dogs or dentists or strangers; I walked towards it, and I stared at it. I lingered in front of shops and I hovered around its smells. It did not make me jump with anxiety like flying and roller coasters and heights, it made me salivate.

Could it have been that anorexia was a reaction to my anxious and fearful personality? Could it be that anorexia is in my genes? The genetic story is an impossible one to ignore and more and more research is heading this way.
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There is evidence to suggest that there is a higher prevalence of eating disorders in families where relatives have suffered from anorexia or bulimia. This is some comfort, to think that you have not brought it upon yourself (as everyone is suggesting), but that it was going to happen to you, whatever you chose to do, or not to do – the anxiety, the anorexia, your personality … everything.

Anorexia has been described as having ‘biopsychosocial’ origins (its influences are genetic, psychological and sociocultural ones).
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Doctors and scientists and sociologists do not necessarily agree on how or why it starts – or where it grows from. We can therefore be confused into believing that eating disorders are all too mysterious and strange and that those who experience some form of them must necessarily be mysterious and strange too. Many people seem to be satisfied with such a flimsy conclusion; that eating disorders are everywhere, that an inexplicable plurality of factors causes them – culture, self-obsession, things that happen somewhere else to weird people. However, despite emerging evidence on the genetic front, many of these issues that are explored in a discussion on anorexia are societal ones, which affect and surround us all. That is the thing about anorexia; it uncomfortably reflects back society’s ideals gone wrong, the misshapen view that perfection and happiness are obtainable through the body.

As an anorexic, the job of trying to imagine myself with a bigger, so-called healthier body, which everyone kept asking me to do, was made more difficult by the presence of the perfect, glossy images of the ideal body which surrounded me. (In 1996, there were far fewer celebrity-focused magazines than there are now, but it was still something that I was hugely aware of.) I thought that I couldn’t be doing anything too bad because I still had bits of flesh, fat and curves where celebrities seemingly didn’t. Even though they
were thin like me, they were thick with gloss and shine and health. So how could I be so wrong?

I looked at the images and compared them to my mirror image. I stared hard at the outlines. I played spot the difference. I couldn’t understand why people were telling me that I was going to die. How could my body be the object of all this attention and ever-increasing shouting, thumping pressure, when the pages of the magazines told me that I was emulating, and that I was emulating well? Explanations and revelations of the perfect and imperfect body were at my fingertips. Lots of pictures and images and words went in from the outside and I soaked them up. And the more I went inwards, the harder it was to look outwards and see what was meant by a ‘normal’ shape and a normal diet.

Anorexia nervosa is now joined by other similar body-based obsessions (some media-coined, others medically verified) related to the perfection of body shape: bulimia (bingeing and purging), yogarexia (an addiction to yoga),
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orthorexia (an obsession with healthy eating)
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and stressorexia (serious over-exercise).
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It is almost openly acceptable to have an out-of-balance relationship with food and exercise, to be addicted to thinking about it, to be eating food or not-eating it. All of these addictions form their own set of internally constructed rules. We equate our success with how much we weigh. The end result of these fixations must surely be that this denial and control actually become what we are about. When it comes to food control we can literally be aiming to reach nothing. In America, retailers have created a size specifically for the nothing-women: size zero. Perfect for those who want to equal nothing and to find, in this nothingness, something that they don’t seem to find in their own flesh.

Commentators have argued that the seeming increase of
cases of eating disorders (particularly bulimia)
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is linked to our society and to our obsession with thinness as a model of beauty. They might say that our perception of beauty and happiness is not one from the inside; it is not inherent, but is made up by our changing environment. Our society equates success with thinness; we are told that they go hand in hand; a successful woman is one who is shrinking. Flesh and fat are considered to be the anti-thesis of power, control and achievement. Often, a celebrity female’s success is based on an image of persistence, of self-control and of willpower over her body. Could it therefore follow that the anorexic girl who cannot conceive because her periods have stopped, who has reverted out of womanhood, and who represents a sense of closure and isolation, is telling us that she has attained total perfection? She has blocked out to focus in.

There is much denial of the culpability of magazines and models and the media in ‘causing’ eating disorders. A direct causal link seems too strong to me. There is a distinction between those who follow a diet from a magazine and leave it at that, and those who develop an eating disorder. But when vulnerability and low self-esteem are exposed, media-generated idealizations of beauty surely further this insecurity and self-loathing. This obsession with the perfect body adds pressure and stimulus to the potential to turn the fight further inwards. The messages transmitted by some magazine editorials, by advertising and the fashion industry, are confusing. One minute it is, ‘She’s too fat.’ The next, ‘She’s too thin.’

We are left wondering, always believing, hooked into an industry of perfection, which is never obtainable, because they are always changing the model we should be operating to.

In today’s consumer culture, we have a choice as purchasers and we appear to have control of what we want. We live in
an ‘if only’ society: if only I had a bigger flat, a nicer car, a new pair of shoes, bigger breasts, a slimmer body. We have somehow managed to convince ourselves that these things will solve unhappiness. And ultimately we have decided to fight this battle out of dissatisfaction on our own territory, on ourselves – travelling inside to the point of self-annihilation (as with anorexia) to find the answer instead of questioning the outside influences which might be making us feel and act this way.

Even with this understanding that anorexia reflects uncomfortable truths about our society’s ideals and expectations, the fact remains that anorexia nervosa (although only having the definition/name since the late nineteenth century), can be traced back a long time before this. Before the emergence of the glossy magazine, before feminism and post-feminism, before the suffragettes, anorexia goes back to the late 1600s and to Richard Morton’s description of a seeming case of the disorder in his
Treatise of Consumptions
in 1694.
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The social context may have changed, the perfectionist culture may exacerbate it, but way before any fashion for the female waif, a self-starving illness was around. It has been around for a long time. The diagnosis and knowledge of the illness may have increased, but the underlying disorder remains the same.

For a sufferer and for the family trying to make sense of this illness it is hugely confusing. They are left picking up parts of some theories and discarding others according to their own particular experience. It is frustrating that, given the magnitude of the illness and its apparent omnipresence, all of this research and media debate and discussion have not found a satisfactory conclusion. It is as if we have been conditioned to think that it is absolutely impossible to do so. Perhaps it seems easier that way, because it allows anorexics to get on with what they do best (keep
starving), families to avoid changing their embedded behaviours and society at large to keep theorizing and gossiping, but without really addressing the issue.

When writing down my experience of my eating disorder, it seems easy to make assumptions about other people’s experiences, as if we all suffered the illness in the same way. I am aware that this is not the case. I cannot speak comprehensively for over a million people in this country. This labelling was something that I encountered myself as an anorexic, and it really angered me. I felt that the psychiatrists and the books I read wanted to box me up. They wanted to confine me within the conventions of what my illness supposedly represented. And I rejected them.

‘I’m not like them,’ I told myself. ‘I am above them. Totally different. My illness is unique to me. In fact, I’m sure I do it better than other people do. This is my story. One person, one version, individual.’

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, self-starvation was seen to be an indication of bewitchment (‘subject to the malefic influence of witchcraft’).
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And, in a sense, this is what had seemingly happened to me – I was taken over. I was removed from any knowledge of myself. I was bewitched (fascinated) by this obsession and I was bewitching (fascinating) to look at. Perhaps this is why there is the sense that eating disorders are too mystifying to deal with; that they evade understanding. There is a feeling that those under this trance-like behaviour are somehow strange and at odds with normal conventions; eating is normal.

I wanted it to be mysterious too. I (like many others) didn’t want to solve it, because with solving my problems would come a realization that it might be about normal issues and
that I might have to deal with those. It might be shown to be about my desire to please people, or my fear of failing, or my lack of a sense of identity. It could be about the fear that I would not fit in at university, be accepted, pretty enough, clever enough or match up to my previous successes.

I liked to think of my case as unique, I liked to think of my illness as having its own terms, I liked to think it was because I had that habit of over-thinking things. I endlessly intellectualized this illness and tried to make it my own. But as much as I try to deny it, I hear my very words spoken by other people who have experienced an eating disorder; the same metaphors, the same order of the same words and thoughts and events, almost as if we have read the same script. It is as if we have been invaded by the same virus, which transforms our words and our thoughts so that we are simply mimicking it in our own separate bodies. It is a terrifying realization, to hear what you feel to be parts of your self, who you are and what you feel as an individual, literally recited by other people. Pretending that you are somehow a rare and special person is an ineffective message to other people. It only propels the myth that anorexia is something over there on the margins of society, which can be ignored. I don’t think I am special just because I suffered from anorexia nervosa and I don’t think it was caused as a result of me being special in the first place.

Words often used to describe the prevalence of anorexia nervosa are ‘epidemic’ and ‘plague’. As exaggerated as they might sound, they are an accurate reflection of the way it manipulates and intrudes into every facet of a person. In 1873, ‘anorexia nervosa’ was given a name. Ernest Lasegue, one of those who laid claim to discovering the illness, said that he found that those he encountered with anorexia were so alike in form and behaviour that he was able to see the resemblance and make his diagnosis without hesitation.
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As I dropped below six stone, three months after diagnosis, things got to the point where something different had to be done. As with many anorexics, my illness reached a new level of physical seriousness. There had been some intervention, but at the same time I was still deteriorating – I had continued to make progress with my self-starving. I kept going because it was my intention to do so, and I firmly believed I could control and manipulate my single-minded intentions. It was true that as my body initially weakened and my muscles softened, I gained an immeasurable mental strength and focus, but eventually my body became so frail that it seemed to lose interest in its own cause, and it started to give up. At this level of severe weight loss, doctors can identify several physical symptoms of anorexia: low blood pressure, a slower pulse rate and a lower body temperature.
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With this physical collapse, which threatened all faculties (continuing and prolonged starvation can lead to a loss of fertility, osteoporosis and heart, gastro and kidney problems), I watched myself give in to it.