Misfit

by Charli Howard

  It was crazy, but it made sense to me at the time. And now I had another reason to be thin. I had a boyfriend, and a very good-looking one, to say the least. On the internet, I’d seen photos of the girls he hung around with and the competition I faced. If I wanted to keep him interested now that I’d turned down his offer of sex, I’d need to become thinner and thinner, until I was delicate and elegant – like the girls in the magazines, with their perfect relationships.

  7

  Dave’s Rave

  I was sixteen, and utterly obsessed with being thin to the point of being considered desperately ill.

  I was frequently staying with my dad at his flat in London at weekends, the umpteenth place he was now living, when model scouts began approaching me in the street. They’d hang around popular teenage places like Camden or Topshop on Oxford Street, hoping to find the next supermodel, and you’d occasionally watch eager mothers parade their daughters up and down in the hope they’d get spotted, too. But in my case, rather than getting signed, which is what you’d assume would happen if you were scouted a few times, it was always a case of never quite being good enough for agencies.

  Getting scouted was a repetitive cycle. An agent would enthusiastically approach me in the street. They’d tell me how wonderful I looked. They’d hand me a business card. I’d be high on cloud nine. I’d gear myself up for days and go to the agency, full of high hopes and full-blown anxiety, starving myself even more ferociously for days in advance, wondering if this was my lucky break, and praying that it was. They’d ooh and aah for a bit, then would break the news that I’d be ‘perfect’ if it wasn’t for my hips or my height or whatever other reason. They’d tell me to lose weight, and to come back when I’d lost it.

  Umm, HELLO?!?! They had approached me. And after reeling me in, the answer was always the same – lose weight or your dreams won’t come true. Looking back, I still can’t believe that was even legal.

  I wasn’t fat, although at the time I thought I was far from skinny. I was tall by everyday standards, but at 5 foot 8 inches tall, I also didn’t meet the standard model height criteria. I just didn’t seem to fit in model-wise: a misfit, as it were. Being me wasn’t good enough.

  Rather than being supportive of me modelling, Mark seemed … well … irritated whenever I mentioned being scouted. His friends would say how cool it was, but he’d sit there rolling his eyes. He could’ve easily been a model – he was so handsome, and looks-wise I didn’t compete with him in the slightest. But in a weird way it was like he hated me getting any form of attention.

  Modelling was seemingly becoming more and more unlikely, though that didn’t mean I didn’t continue to dream about it, or attempt to reach my goals. Needless to say, at this time, my eating disorder was at an all-time high. It was the biggest part of my life, and dictated every minute of every day. Every decision was based on whether I’d have to eat: obsessively counting calories, jealously comparing myself to every girl I met. My obsession with modelling validated this behaviour.

  Maybe if I kept losing weight I would get signed, and happiness would finally be in reach. I hadn’t felt happy since the first time I compared my size to the other girls in the Angelz back when I was prepubescent. In my mind, the two were connected forever. As far as I was concerned, ‘happiness’ meant being ‘thin’, and being thin was achieved by watching EVERYTHING you ate.

  It was also around this time that the career questions began. Everybody seemed to know what they wanted to do with their lives. One girl knew she was going to be a ballerina. Two girls knew they wanted to be vets. Dave the Woman wanted to get into childcare. And I didn’t have a bloody clue.

  Nothing stood out to me, unless you counted modelling as a career prospect (which it isn’t, by the way). Any other jobs I liked the sound of were considered ‘fantasy’ by my parents, like working in television. Besides, this was at a time when EVERYONE and their dog (probably) went and got a university degree. If you didn’t study something, you were considered a failure. And the last thing I wanted was to feel like I was letting people down again.

  I had a truly amazing careers adviser who I went to visit at least three times a week, in the hope that she could spark a realistic interest for me. In fact, she encouraged me to become a model, after I’d told her I was interested in working in television.

  ‘Have you thought about modelling?’ she asked. ‘You could do it. You should send your photos off to different agencies. A lot of people get into TV after being models.’ She printed out a list of the country’s best agencies for me, and I told her I’d submit my pictures.

  I know that makes her sound a bit dodgy, but she was sound. Unlike a lot of adults, she took our career prospects seriously and told us not to listen to parents who had their own ideas of what their children should become.

  ‘You don’t want to wake up in thirty years’ time having followed somebody else’s dream,’ she said, and this advice is so true. Your decisions may not please certain people at the time, but you’re not put on this planet to please other people. Unless you’re hurting someone, why shouldn’t you go out and achieve your dreams?

  On top of this stress, my dad then announced he had to go for a nine-month tour. In case you were wondering, that’s not like a band tour, where musicians get drunk on a tour bus and have a bunch of groupies following them around. The military isn’t exactly Thorpe Park and my dad’s life was at risk from the second he went. I couldn’t understand why he had to do this.

  This tour wasn’t the longest he’d been away from home – one year, he spent the entire twelve months away, and on Christmas Day we spoke to him over Skype. But was money worth this way of life? Nine months was another awfully long time without seeing him. This meant more anxiety for me, wondering if I’d ever see my dad alive again. Combined with the fact that I was physically weaker than I’d ever been, operating on barely any calories per day, I was a mess.

  On the day before he was due to leave, my dad offered to take me for a driving lesson.

  ‘I really can’t drive today,’ I said. While I may not have been shaking with nerves, my insides were wobbling like jelly. Nothing was making sense, and hadn’t done for days, like I was having some sort of out-of-body experience.

  ‘No, come on,’ my dad said.

  Reluctantly, I got into the driver’s seat and began driving into town.

  ‘Please can I stop?’ I said nervously, dreading a roundabout ahead.

  ‘You’ve got this!’ he said. ‘Come on!’

  I was about to drive round the roundabout when my mind turned to mush. I accidentally put my foot down on the accelerator rather than the brake. My dad tried grabbing the steering wheel, but I shot across the roundabout and straight into a brick wall, hitting an ancient lead drainpipe. The car was completely screwed from the outside, the blue paint smeared across the brickwork.

  ‘Oh, bother!’ my dad said.

  Just kidding.

  ‘F*CK!!!’ he yelled in the middle of the street. ‘F*CK!!! F*CK!!! F*CCCCKKKKK!!!’

  A crashed car and a bill for a broken wall was the last thing he needed the day before he left. But it also showed how bad my anxiety had become. I was an absolute nervous wreck. If I didn’t feel like a freak before, I certainly did now.

  When it came to losing weight, I did everything and anything I could to help lose it. Nothing – and I mean nothing – was off limits when it came to accomplishing my goal weight. You name it, I tried it. Whether it was legal or not didn’t matter. I was willing to risk everything, including my health and sanity, to be thin.

  Eating disorders are a Brain Deviant’s dream. It gives you something for your OCD to cling on to and to obsess over (like how ugly you are, how unpopular you are, how many calories are in the food you’re eating, getting down to an ‘ideal’ number on a scale, etc.), as well as feeding your anxiety – making your weight seem like the be-all and end-all of the world. It makes you believe that if you’re thinner you’ll have more friends, a boyfriend,
that you’ll be successful and in control of your life, or that you’ll be prettier.

  As far as I was concerned, being thin meant I would be liked by the girls in my class. It would mean I was paid attention. It would mean boys (i.e. Mark) would take an avid interest in me. Most of all, though, it would mean I was beautiful and ‘model material’ … and who wouldn’t want that? My life’s happiness boiled down to numbers on a scale, and only I had the power to achieve that.

  In reality, my eating disorders did none of these things. They made me unsociable, because I was too afraid to go to a party and give in to temptation where food or alcohol was involved. I’d rather spend my time burning calories in a gym than hanging around in a common room watching TV with my friends. I began to get attention, but not in a good way: people thought I was acting erratically, but they didn’t know how to deal with it, and so opted to brush the situation under the carpet.

  I’d stand for hours looking at myself in the mirror, putting myself down. I often wonder how I’d be now if I’d spent that time telling myself how wonderful I was instead. ‘You’re disgusting,’ I’d tell myself. ‘No wonder you don’t have a boyfriend. Look at you. You make me sick.’

  I’d clutch at any fat I could find, desperately wishing it would shrink or disappear. I’d cry over cellulite, wondering why I seemed to be the only girl in my class with it. Even though I knew I was eating less, and even though I could see the scales dropping each week, I still looked in the mirror and saw fat. I couldn’t explain it – but then anorexia is hard to understand.

  I wasn’t able to eat anything without checking the calorie content on the packet first. Flipping the food packet over to check the calorie content was a tic in itself. I started to believe food companies were lying to me, or may have made a mistake about the calories stated on the pack, so would round up the calories to the nearest whole number to make sure they hadn’t under-calculated the true amount. Afterwards, I’d fill a notebook with all the foods I’d eaten that day and total them up. If I went over by just one calorie, it would send me into a meltdown. I’d work out for hours in tears to burn any extra calories I may or may not have consumed, often until I felt like fainting, or until I needed to lie on the gym floor to recuperate.

  At sixteen, I was too young to have my own credit card, so I borrowed a friend’s to buy cherry-flavoured diet pills off the internet that would swell up in your stomach when taken with water, which stopped you feeling hungry. I don’t need to tell you how stupid and dangerous that was – Jesus Christ, people have died doing that very same thing. I took the recommended dose, but they didn’t work, because they’re designed for chronically obese people, and I was already anorexically thin, and so I’d take more – yet they still didn’t work properly.

  For a few weeks, I attempted the ‘apple a day’ diet, which is pretty self-explanatory, but because I had no energy it consisted of me having to skip lessons and sleep all day. My skin broke out and my headaches were horrendous. Instead of studying, most of my time was spent googling the calorie intake of food, or browsing images of thin women for ‘thinspiration’. Name a popular food choice and I could reel off the calorie amount in each packet like some sort of anorexic Rainman. Pro-ana websites – online forums where girls encourage each other to be thin – became a refuge, and only they seemed to understand how my brain operated.

  I was completely hooked on numbers and weight loss. Deep down, I knew I was crazy, but these forums made me feel just that tiniest bit sane. Other people obsessed over numbers as much as I did. Girls (and boys) would discuss various outlandish diets, posting photos of how much weight they were losing, and I’d feel like a failure in comparison. In fact, if I so much as dared to type ‘I want help for my eating disorder’, people would make out I was ‘weak’ for not being able to keep up with them. How sick is that? I thought these anonymous users were part of a supportive network, but in reality the sites were just a competition of who could become the thinnest.

  I now not only felt like a failure in real-life, but online, too.

  Mark never did break up with me properly. He cheated on me with none other than Sarah Davies – you know, Joe’s girlfriend and my first girl kiss who I didn’t actually want to kiss. She rang me up crying, saying it was a mistake, and then Mark called and said how sorry he was.

  So I, being the desperately insecure girl I was, forgave him, of course. It wasn’t Mark’s fault at all! It was Sarah’s. She was a nutter anyway, wasn’t she?

  Then, one day, Dave the Woman and I discovered Mark was throwing a party – a party that his alleged girlfriend, aka me, was not invited to. Joe messaged me asking what time we were getting to the party.

  Mark’s having a party? I typed.

  Yes … Joe said, then must’ve realized I hadn’t been invited.

  Awkward.

  Dave and I rocked up to her house that weekend and watched through the upstairs window as hordes of girls pulled up to the party that Mark was hosting in the field behind – which was owned by Dave’s mum, the cheeky git! He was already stoned and drunk by this point and totally revelling in the attention.

  ‘Who the hell does he think he is?!’ I snapped.

  We drank some vodka for a bit of Dutch courage, then made our way down. There were about fifty people there by this point, setting up tents on Dave’s mum’s land.

  His face dropped when he saw us.

  ‘W-what the hell are you doing here?!’ he slurred.

  ‘I could ask you the same question,’ Dave said. ‘This isn’t even your field. It’s my mum’s.’

  Jennifer – the girl whose beauty Mark had frequently told me about – suddenly appeared out of nowhere, wrapping her arms round my boyfriend’s shoulders. She was undeniably stunning, with huge rosy lips and thick blonde hair. I’d heard she had done some modelling in the past, and that she had had sex with loads of boys, so all the boys fancied her. I hated her even more.

  Mark then put his arm round Jennifer’s waist while she giggled into her hand. Hee-hee-hee, I thought angrily. You won’t be laughing when I punch you in the effin’ mouth.

  ‘I’m meant to be your girlfriend,’ I said in a tone that was equally sad, hurt and confused.

  ‘You’re not any more,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d back off when you heard about me and Sarah, but no. Why are you obsessed with me? You’re just … you’re just … frigid.’ He began chuckling at his own ‘joke’ and Jennifer joined in, looking up at him, doe-eyed. Joe, who’d told me about the party, was watching nervously from the side.

  ‘F*ck off,’ I said to Mark.

  ‘Oh, whatever, Charli,’ Mark replied. ‘Why don’t you go and make yourself sick again?’

  The party seemed to fall silent all of a sudden, though in retrospect I think the blood in my body had boiled so much that it drowned the sound out.

  How did Mark know about my secret?!

  A fist came out of nowhere and hit Mark right in the jaw. Mine, in case you were wondering. Jennifer gasped. Mark looked gobsmacked. It left a huge red mark on his cheek.

  No one knew what to say.

  ‘Come on,’ Dave said, and led me away to her house. Later, Dave’s mum stormed down there and called Mark a dickhead, telling everyone to take their tents down and get off her land.

  Restricting what I eat has always been a coping mechanism for me. Whenever times got tough or too much, I’d starve myself. And when things were really bad, I was starving myself and making myself sick as well. As you do.

  I may have thought I was in control of my body, but I couldn’t have been further from control if I’d tried. My mind was crumbling from the teenage pressures around me, and my only way of dealing with it was by not eating, or throwing what I had eaten up.

  I know what heartbreak feels like. Trust me, I do. An ex’s face plays round and round in your head like a broken record, popping up at inconvenient moments and making it difficult to concentrate on things. You feel physically sick from the top of your heart down to the pit
of your stomach, wondering how you’ll ever get over them or this feeling. You look at their social media pages, waiting to see which girl’s photos they’ll start ‘liking’ next. You think you’ll never get someone better, or love anyone like that again.

  But, somehow, even though you think you’ll never recover, you will get over them. You will get somebody else. I can say this with the utmost certainty, because Mark is one of a few boys in my life I thought I’d never, ever, ever get over – and now he’s just a ghost of my teenage past.

  Also, you know the saying ‘The heart wants what the heart wants’? Well, that’s not entirely true. A lot of that has to do with your brain, actually.

  Here’s my (non-scientific) theory. If it truly came down to what your heart wanted, it would want to feel loved. Am I right? (Yes. Yes, I am.) It would want someone who cared about it – not someone who enjoyed smashing it to smithereens or who messed it about. It’s your brain that likes to play tricks on you and make you believe that this person is right for you, when your heart and gut instinct say otherwise. So who are you going to listen to? Did I listen to my heart, or the Brain Deviant?

  Take a wild guess!

  On top of my obsession with food, I was now obsessed with Mark and his whereabouts. Thanks to the invention of social media, I stalked him constantly, and that exacerbated my anxiety and low self-esteem even further. He loved posting photos of his latest squeeze, which, at one point, was a new girl practically every week. It would break my heart seeing photos of new girls on his social media accounts, but I was hooked on looking it up, as though it would somehow make me feel better. (It never did.)

  Other boys began taking an interest in me – boys who were far more kind and funny and genuine than Mark ever was – but I wasn’t interested. I just wanted him. In fact, the more he didn’t want me, the more I fawned over him.