Life Without Limits, A

by Wellington, Chrissie

  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.

  At least now I understand the problem. Learning to see my body less as an object to be manipulated and more as an integral part of me was a crucial step. And in even more simplistic terms, I saw all of a sudden the damage I was doing to it by not eating properly. I am not sure you are ever cured of the illness that is an eating disorder but the key for me was to have developed a healthier perspective about my body. Whereas I used to see it as no more than contours of skin and colour, now I see it as a holistic system that I respect and love for what it enables me to do.

  Uneasily, I started eating more healthily. From the end of term in June until I handed in my thesis (‘The Changing Form of the Indonesian State’) at the end of September, I moved into digs with a guy called Rich, another great friend. He was a vegetarian and superb in the kitchen, and his cooking helped me back onto a more even keel.

  One thing I didn’t let up on, though, was my work. I think Rich, who was also completing a master’s, raised an eyebrow over how hard – and late into the night – I was working and how stressed it made me. But that was an example of energy directed towards a positive goal, and I graduated with a distinction. Naomi was awarded a distinction as well. I don’t know which of us got the higher mark. It didn’t seem to matter so much any more, and that in itself was a sign of progress.

  4

  Development

  It is interesting for me to look back through the diaries I kept during my travels. In June 1999 I was bemoaning my tendency to ‘always try to please people’; five months later, as the millennium approached, I was renewing my lifelong vow to ‘make people happy’. They may sound contradictory statements of intent, but I don’t think pleasing people and making them happy are quite the same thing, even if they are two sides of the same coin. The first is akin to the impulse to worry about what other people think of you; the second is more about the desire to give to other people.

  I would say my life has been dominated by two dynamics: an obsessive lust for control and self-improvement on the one hand, and concern about people and their situations on the other. From the latter has grown, perhaps fuelled by the former, my passion for development. I call it development these days, because that is the name they give it in politics and in higher education, but really it is just the desire to help people and to try to make the world a better place. It played a big part in my life when I was growing up.

  It was the era of Band Aid and Live Aid. The footage from Africa reduced me to tears, and I remember vowing to do something to help. I was an avid fan of Blue Peter, and one episode in 1986 made a particular impression on me. It concerned the famine in Ethiopia and the cataracts that were rendering so many of the Ethiopians blind. I went through to the kitchen and asked Mum if we could arrange a bring-and-buy sale in the village. I wrote a letter to Blue Peter, explaining how distraught I was and how much I wanted to help. They sent posters and an information pack, and we set about planning and promoting the event. It was a success, and we raised £173, which wasn’t bad in the mid-1980s. I was overjoyed to be awarded my first Blue Peter badge. Still got it. Still got them all (I didn’t stop there).

  The television reports gave me my first inkling of a world beyond my own, a world that wasn’t fair or equal, a world of poverty, war, disease and famine. But I also realised that this state of affairs wasn’t necessarily a given, and that we have it in our power to make a difference, to make the world a better place for all. We have that choice. One thing’s for sure, though – if we do nothing, it will be a given.

  Buoyed by the success of the bring-and-buy sale, I set up further projects to raise money. I organised a litter-pick in the village (I hated litter). Then I wrote a version of Aladdin for the stage, which was put on at the primary school, complete with costumes and songs.

  As I went through my teens and early adulthood, other pre-occupations took over, such as studying and socialising, but that passion for helping others has never left me. It was a big reason for spending those two summers of my university years in Boston, teaching children to swim. They ranged in age from three to ten, and seeing them grow in confidence and enthusiasm was so uplifting.

  I remember one boy called Welcome Bender. He was four years old and didn’t really interact with the other kids, although he was exceptionally bright. He was borderline genius when it came to discussing the solar system. He was also afraid of the water. But in time I gained his trust, he slowly grew in confidence and finally he learned to swim.

  His is the case that sticks in my mind most poignantly, because of his fear of the water and the catharsis of his eventual victory over it, but this sort of journey was repeated over and over again in all the children on that camp. Watching them discover something of themselves brought home to me what a wonderful tool sport is in the making of people.

  To oversee that process and help it along, meanwhile, reminded me of the joy of making a difference to other people’s lives. It was an incredibly rewarding experience. When you receive letters and artwork from these kids and from their parents thanking you for helping them, it is pretty special. Still got them all.

  However much your youth may be characterised by these passions and urges, they tend to burst out of you in a blur of unfocused activity. If they are to shape your life as an adult, they need time to come together and settle into something more coherent. That process happened for me during my travels.

  Africa is where it started, encouraged by Jude and her unique perspective. To see how poor the locals were in economic terms, yet how rich in culture and emotion, made a deep impression on me.

  As did the history. I was blown away, for example, by the rock art in the Rhodes Matopos National Park in Zimbabwe, painted by bushmen tens of thousands of years ago with hematite and animal bile. I was in tears as I listened to our guide recount how the bushmen’s way of life has become eroded by the advance of modern ‘civilisation’, even more than their art has been. I felt an emotional connection with the natural world, and an anger rose deep inside me at the destruction of an entire way of life, precious in ways ‘civilisation’ could never conceive.

  Early on in our journey through Africa, I got into the habit of giving out pens to the locals, before realising that this in no way benefits them in a long-term, sustainable way. It’s not as if pens are growing on the trees out there. They will run out sooner or later. Handing them round willy-nilly would just breed dependency, even greed. Then I saw a child in Zanzibar wearing a McKids t-shirt from McDonald’s. It started me thinking about the concept of ‘development’ and the underlying causes of poverty, including the West’s role in perpetuating it. ‘We give presents to the locals,’ I wrote in my diary, ‘perhaps as a means of alleviating our own guilt and making ourselves feel better, when really it does nothing to help people help themselves. In the longer term it actually has a negative impact on their development.’

  It was the six months travelling through Asia, though, that had the biggest effect on me. By then I had decided to take the MA in development studies. To go from arriving at that decision to arriving in Indonesia so soon afterwards was a powerful progression. I immediately fell in love with the country – the lush green scenery, the terraced paddy fields, the ornate temples, the arts and crafts, the local food stalls, the volcanic peaks and shimmering turquoise lakes, the offerings of banana-leaf bowls everywhere I turned, filled with incense and flowers. I was seduced. My love affair with Indonesia was intense, and introduced me to the unfamiliar and the terrifying.

  We visited the island of Siberut, off the west coast of Java, where we walked for hours to visit villages virtually untouched by Western civilisation, surrounded by the dense, vivid green jungle, where handmade wooden canoes are the only means of transport. We stayed in their ‘longhouses’ on stilts. The locals wore loincloths made of bark, and their bodies were covered in tattoos, rendered with a mixture of ash and sugar-cane juice hammered into the skin with a fine nail. On on
e hike through the jungle my walking boots broke and I had to spend the day walking barefoot through thick mud, rivers and foliage that seemed to consist primarily of sharp things. This is what the locals have to endure every day.

  It was easy to feel completely immersed in another way of life, except, of course, that you were not and never could be. I suffered from the classic traveller’s dilemma. It made me ask questions of the voyeuristic, selfish and contrived nature of travelling, as practised by Westerners. I felt very uncomfortable about what I was doing, but equally, how could I turn down the opportunity to visit these societies?

  Another salutary experience came during a forty-hour bus ride with my Danish friend Pernille through Sulawesi, a large island to the north of Indonesia, more populous than Siberut but still largely untouched by tourism. Our journey to the north of the island coincided with an outbreak of violence in and around the town of Poso, a flare-up of the ongoing troubles between Christians and Muslims. Buildings were being burned, people murdered, and pro-tagonists on both sides patrolled the area with guns and machetes. The streets were full of cars, as people tried to escape the violence. There were roadblocks every couple of hundred yards. We were travelling on a local bus, which was hijacked by Muslim fighters. They climbed aboard wearing masks like ninjas, their mouths set in grim, determined lines as they waved their machetes and ordered the driver to take them across town. They walked through the bus looking for Indonesian Christians, coming so close to me that I’m sure they must have heard the blood pounding in my ears.

  After they had been driven where they wanted to go, they left the bus without touching us. The relief was, of course, overwhelming, but it came with more guilt – guilt that we were only passing through, that we had escaped because we were Western tourists. Who knows what would have happened to us if we hadn’t been?

  Elsewhere on my travels through Asia, Burma was under military dictatorship, and in Laos I saw first-hand the toll that the production and smoking of opium had taken on the local population, particularly among the men. None of it did anything to dampen the sense in me of a troubled, unfair world, or the desire to try to do something about it, however small. When I returned to the UK and went up to Manchester, I hoped my MA could be the start of my own contribution, but I also wanted some hands-on experience.