Misfit

by Charli Howard

  ‘WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE?!’ she yelled. ‘YOU LOT – GET THE HELL OUT OF MY SISTER’S HOUSE!!!’

  We legged it as quickly as we could. I and a few others had to get a bus back to the train station in the pouring rain. Because it was the Christmas holidays, none of the trains were running; eventually, I got home around five hours later, to my screaming dad who currently had my family round for a post-Christmas tea.

  In case you were wondering, we caused over £30,000 worth of damage.

  ‘You could’ve thrown Dave’s Rave when I was there,’ Dave’s sister said disappointedly when we got back to school.

  8

  The Year We Do Not Talk About

  I was a misfit.

  I was now at an age where being naughty was no longer acceptable or considered ‘a bit of fun’. As you know, I’d always been mischievous, but this time I’d well and truly gone too far. I could no longer hide behind the innocence of childhood and had to take responsibility for my actions. I’d helped cause £30,000 worth of damage in somebody else’s home, after all.

  After Dave’s Rave, it seemed like everyone had had enough of me. It could’ve been paranoia, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that friends were distancing themselves from me. Adults kept reiterating the fact I was on a ‘slippery slope’, or making out that I was one teenage pregnancy away from an ASBO, which didn’t exactly inspire me to be better behaved. If enough people tell you what a pain in the arse you are, or how you’re not going to amount to very much if you continue this way, you’ll finally end up believing them. I believed I was worthless, and so I treated myself badly. The eating disorders, the bad behaviour, the low self-esteem were all connected, but all I could see were separate issues with one thing in common: me.

  The other problem about being known for your behavioural issues or for getting into trouble is that some people like to hide behind you when the going gets tough. It’s easier to blame you for everything that goes wrong, than to woman up and take some of the rap. I was used to being in trouble. Not a week went by when I wasn’t told off for something, large or small. When other girls got into trouble it was as though the world had come to an end. Their parents would scream at them down the phone saying how disappointed they were in them, whereas mine were just used to it by this stage.

  However, unlike a lot of parents, my mum and dad were very honest about the fact I wasn’t an angel. Whenever I’d get into trouble with someone, they’d often sit back and listen while parents complained about how I’d led their precious little darlings astray. I used to wish that my parents would argue back and defend me more, but they never really did. But now that I’m older I’m grateful that they didn’t always defend me. They didn’t blow hot air up my backside and lead me to believe I could blame other people for a situation that went wrong, when I was equally to blame. I was being taught the importance of owning my mistakes.

  Not long after Dave’s Rave, for example, I got invited to the most boring house party ever. I’d been invited by a girl called Faye, who was one of those girls who loved letting me take the blame for things that went wrong, and her parents did, too. They were so bad that my dad actually told her parents to stop blaming me for everything that went wrong, and they stormed off in a huff. (Thanks, Dad!)

  I wanted to leave twenty minutes after arriving there. The Playboy Mansion this was not. I was sat in a room with boys who I doubted could spell the word vagina, let alone had seen one. Midway through the evening, some guy got a packet of white powder out and asked if I wanted a line. I said no, then left. Later I was told that it wasn’t cocaine – he was an idiot who’d been mugged off by a dealer who’d clearly sold him crushed-up paracetamol. What a prat!

  The day after the party, Faye deleted me from her social media accounts, telling me her parents didn’t want me hanging around with her any more. Someone had stolen jewellery from the party and her mum was filing a police report; Faye had the cheek to ask me if I’d done it (I’m a lot of things, but not a thief). Her parents also found out there’d been ‘cocaine’ at the party, and because Faye saw me talking to the guy who had it, they naturally assumed I’d had something to do with it. I started to wish that people would realize that underneath the facade I was a good girl, after all.

  Since my praying phase had ended, I hadn’t thought about God at all really. Lauren the Goth read satanic poems in her dorm room at night, but religion didn’t play on my mind that much. I didn’t come from an overly religious family, but each morning in assembly we’d have to sing religious hymns and pray. Because of my behavioural problems and the pressure this was putting on my mum, I was constantly made to feel I was doing wrong. I then began to wonder if God was watching my every move, creating bad karma for me every time I messed up, or if he thought I was a sinner. If I smoked down by the garages, which had become a daily occurrence by this point, I began to wonder if I’d go to hell for it. Good girls didn’t smoke, did they?

  I hadn’t applied for confirmation with the girls in my year. But when the girls in the year below were asked if they wanted to go ahead and do it, I jumped at the chance. For the longest time, I’d been made to feel like a nightmare. This was a chance for me to be holy – the type of daughter to be proud of. Now was my chance to be good.

  I wanted to make my parents proud. I was so tired of being a difficult part of their lives. Anorexia is typically a selfish illness, but I didn’t want to upset them – it just happened.

  I was anxious on the day of my confirmation. I wore a beautiful pink fifties-style dress and pink cardigan, looking like butter wouldn’t melt. I was so nervous that when I got to the altar I forgot to bow to the vicar, and quickly spun round to correct myself, bowing awkwardly. I truly hoped no one had noticed, but my headmaster had all right.

  I may have thought a man in the sky was looking down on me, but luckily there was someone in human form doing it for him.

  ‘I knew you’d mess up,’ the headmaster whispered as I went to sit back down.

  I guess the underlying factor in all of my eating disorders was that I wasn’t happy, and hadn’t been for as long as I could remember. So much of that was down to how I felt about myself. I mean, let’s face it – if I was a happy person, I wouldn’t have been purposefully starving myself, would I? Happy people don’t do things like that. They do things like surround themselves with friends, or other happy things, like yoga. And I did neither.

  My anxiety repeatedly told me how unliked I was and that no one wanted to hang around with me, so I didn’t see the point of making any effort. And because I hadn’t eaten properly for such a long time, not only was I no fun to hang out with, but I barely had the energy to walk across the school campus, let alone balance on my bloody head.

  The irony was that I still truly believed that becoming thinner would make me happier and solve all my self-esteem problems – and did it heck! Eating disorders made me even more nervous, and even more upset, and even more isolated. Obsessively watching what I ate created problems, rather than solved any. But the cycle just continued, and that goal weight was always reducing, and always out of reach. When nobody was looking, I’d cry in my dorm, wanting to pull my hair out from the anxiety.

  People didn’t know how to act around me. They eventually gave up knocking on my bedroom door and inviting me to breakfast or to any other mealtimes because my answer would always be: ‘I’m not hungry.’ Then, in some other bizarre twist, the Brain Deviant would tell me the reason no one knocked on my door any more was because no one wanted to hang out with me, so I’d stay in my room and not socialize with anyone at all. I even stopped hanging around with Dave the Woman, convinced she hated me, too. I once overheard some friends talking about me in the common room and about how they’d tried to get me help, but how I’d refused it. Like I said earlier: you can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves.

  I’m not a doctor, but in my experience eating disorders do not stem from nowhere. You don’t just wake up one day and think, I know! T
oday I’m going to make myself sick for no reason! or, I wonder how many hours I can go without eating, just for the lolz! They develop from a combination of factors, but predominantly low self-worth: the feeling of never being good enough or ‘right’; the type of personality to please and to overachieve; creating an internal database of every negative or mean comment in your head so that you can never escape even the tiniest criticism; getting conflicting messages from the things you see and read in your day-to-day; and other pressures.

  Everyone handles things in different ways, but when I had anorexia and bulimia I’d become overwhelmed by these things. The thoughts built up in my head and consumed me, like I was drowning in a pool and couldn’t come up for air. The list of reasons why a person has an eating disorder can be endless, but it’s important to remember that everyone who’s dealt with one has their own issues to contend with, and to not judge them on that. Who’s to say that one problem won’t affect somebody else differently? You can’t. Humans are complex, and everyone deals with problems individually.

  However, I think it’s important for me to reiterate how lucky and privileged I’d been in the grand scheme of things. In hindsight, my problems were no worse than those of the majority of teenagers across the country. In fact, I can say that they actually didn’t match up at all. Sure, I didn’t love school – but who did? And fine, I was growing up during a time that fetishized size zero – but so was everyone else! But there is no denying that my anxiety and eating disorders made the usual teenage stresses ten times worse. There are people in the world whose problems far surpassed my own, but who didn’t end up starving themselves or abusing themselves as a coping mechanism. The fact I was able to restrict food and starve myself was, in a sick way, a privilege. I mean, in a world where I had access to food I also had the option of turning it away.

  But I did have some issues that were big to me. For one, I felt well and truly abandoned. I didn’t want to be in education and couldn’t understand why I still had to attend this boarding school when my mum lived so close. In hindsight, I wasn’t being abandoned at all: my parents wanted the best for me, and this school was one of the top in the entire country. But when you’re sixteen or seventeen you don’t care about how good your school allegedly is, or where it ranks in The Times Best School List. You want to feel free.

  I’d have blazing rows that lasted for months and months with my mum and dad, where I begged to leave and go to a normal college near their house, but they refused. My housemistress would call me into her office repeatedly, telling me to carry on with school and not to give up now. After one particular argument my parents drove me back to school on a Sunday as a punishment. I hitch-hiked home in the car of some randomer I’d met down at the garage on the outskirts of my school’s campus (another one of my bright ideas), and my mum and dad drove me straight back. My mum thought she had a problem child and so would get the school to deal with me; my dad was always away working, and she felt alone in having to handle my behaviour.

  The deputy headmistress yelled at me in her office and told me I was acting selfishly, which, when you hate yourself enough already, isn’t really what you want to hear.

  Isn’t it funny how things are viewed differently at the time and then in hindsight? In my teens, I genuinely believed nobody liked me. I genuinely believed people didn’t have my back. But so much of that insecurity was down to me and my issues. I’d later hear down the grapevine that people thought I was funny and caring in school – none of the traits I believed I possessed.

  They might’ve thought I was a dickhead at times, because I undoubtedly could be, but the girls in my class did actually have my back – more than my teenaged insecure self cared to admit. For example, there was the time I got caught smoking in the art block, and a girl managed to persuade the teacher I needed the cigarette for an ‘art project’, or the time I smoked in my dorm room and the smell reeked the entire corridor out, and my friends helped spray deodorant everywhere so that I didn’t get in trouble or set the fire alarm off. There was also the time I ordered a fake ID from the internet and it accidentally got sent, nameless, to the headmaster’s assistant, but my friend was in the office at the time and managed to grab it before he studied the card properly.

  But, like I often focused on the negatives (‘You’re so ugly!’, ‘You’re useless!’, ‘Your parents hate you!’), I tended to dwell on and obsess over the opinion of girls who weren’t so nice to me. That’s the thing – you’ll always meet some mean girls in life, and when we left school some girls truly began showing their colours. But there are also a load of great ones who aren’t out to get you, and if you open your eyes wide enough, you’ll notice them from a mile off.

  I was heading back to my room one evening from the gym, exhausted from exercising on an empty stomach and feeling as angsty as I usually did when I needed to make myself sick and didn’t want to be caught, when I saw that there was a note stuck on my door.

  Fancy a chat? My office. 7 p.m. X

  I recognized the handwriting straight away and my stomach dropped. It was from my housemistress, who was the scariest teacher in the entire school. Since she had become my sixth-form housemistress I’d tried to stay out of her way as much as possible. To see an ‘X’ at the end of the note was the weirdest thing of all. Was she on crack?!

  My anxiety yelled, ‘YOU’RE IN TROUBLE!’ Like everyone with anxiety, I began overthinking everything I could’ve possibly done wrong, jumping to the worst conclusion imaginable. My mind went into overdrive. Had I said something bad without realizing?!

  But my biggest fear, as silly as it sounds, was having my bulimia discovered. In a place where it often felt there was no privacy, it was the only thing I had that felt secret – the one thing I kept to myself. I was conflicted between wanting to be saved from this daily torment and wanting to be left alone to deal with it. Thanks, bulimia, for turning me into a madwoman.

  I reluctantly went to her office for 7 p.m., mainly because I didn’t want her to yell at me for not doing as I was told, and sat awkwardly on a spare chair. Her face looked soft and kind, but it didn’t make me feel any less nervous. Please don’t mention my eating, I thought.

  ‘I got you some biscuits,’ she said, offering me a plate of chocolate digestives and pink wafers. God, I wanted them. Biscuits had never looked so appealing. But my brain started to calculate the calories in each one, how hard I’d worked in the gym to burn the calories, and how long it would take me to burn them off. In the end, I figured it wasn’t worth it.

  ‘Take one,’ she said.

  ‘I’m OK, honestly,’ I replied, feeling a bit sweaty.

  ‘GO ON – EAT THE BISCUITS, YOU FAILURE!!!’ the Brain Deviant yelled, but I looked down at my lap.

  ‘Your friends are worried about you,’ she said sweetly. ‘A few girls have come to me and told me you haven’t been to any mealtimes and keep going to the gym excessively.’

  Huh? What friends?! One girl knew about my eating disorder – if it hadn’t been obvious from my no-show at every mealtime this term, it was when I’d accidentally forgotten to turn my laptop off and left the pro-ana forum on the screen. A friend came into my room and saw it, and had confronted me in private. I lied and said I’d looked at it for research, but the notebook I kept with all the images of anorexically thin women and my calorie counting said otherwise.

  I could’ve sought help then, but I didn’t. She offered me a lifeline but I refused to take it. When it comes to recovery you need to want to get better yourself, and I just wasn’t ready. I was too obsessed with fitting into a UK size-six pair of jeans and sticking below 1,000 calories a day to let go of it.

  But now, as I sat in my housemistress’s office, I felt vulnerable. She was being so nice and sympathetic. I was so incredibly embarrassed that my secret was no longer just with me and my friend, but it was now known by my scary housemistress as well. My lungs wanted to explode and scream for help. This was the perfect opportunity to let the bulimia go. But the word
s just wouldn’t come out.

  ‘Do you make yourself sick?’ she asked, and I felt even more put on the spot.

  ‘No!’ I said a little too quickly to be convincing. ‘God, no. Why would I do that?’

  ‘Well, you have lost a lot of weight,’ she said.

  She sounded concerned, but this made me feel ecstatic.

  ‘Really?!’ I said, trying not to sound thrilled.

  ‘I think you should start going to the nurses’ office at lunch and dinner,’ she said. ‘Just for the time being, and until you start eating normally again.’

  Well, how could I argue with that?

  The nurses would bring me lunch on a tray from the dining room. I’d have to sit there in their office among girls with colds and eat every bite, then show them it had disappeared. Like a toddler.

  But one day, a few weeks in, a couple of bitchy girls in the year above saw me eating a plate of food on my own. I knew they’d start a rumour about me. And that’s precisely what they did.

  ‘You know she’s rexy, right?’ one of them said, deliberately loudly so I could overhear, in assembly a few days later. I stared at her with a face like thunder, and her expression went from bitchy to ‘uh-oh’. First things first, ‘rexy’ isn’t a nice term to describe someone. Secondly, making the whole world aware that someone has an eating disorder isn’t cool, either.

  I was mortified. That lunchtime I told the sisters I was well enough to start eating on my own again.

  ‘I don’t think you’re ready yet …’ one sister said.

  ‘I definitely am,’ I replied. ‘I feel much better now, thank you.’