Thin

by Grace Bowman

  It is hard to understand this, and because it is hard to understand, there is not always sympathy for this plight. Some would say that anorexia is pure self-indulgence, anorexia is caused by vanity; she has been staring at her reflection for too long; surely she should try to pull down all the mirrors and stop being so self-absorbed.

  ‘Just get on with it, love.’

  Anorexics are disproportionately self-absorbed, there is no way to write about this illness without confronting that; it is where the illness takes them, only further inwards, as they reject the outside. The mirror actually means very little because the object that is seen in it is translated and altered depending on the mood on the inside. And that object – that body – is always hovering below her, as if it is a detached and separate entity, something which the mind must suppress. Why else would she stare in the mirror a hundred times a day, checking the millimetres of fat on her thighs? Why else would she chastise herself for days on end for the three pieces of popcorn she ate before bed? The body is the enemy, it must be weakened and shrunk and suppressed. It is controllable, it is physical and alterable. Food equals fat and starvation equals thin. How can she live with herself if this less than perfect body actually is her self? The equation petrifies.

  I continued to not-eat because what I perceived in the mirror image did not shock me like it seemed to shock other people. It didn’t make me scared to see something so thin; it was more intriguing than anything else. I just observed it, almost like I would do with an animal in a zoo. I saw its movements and bony bits, and I didn’t really relate them to any particular part of what I termed ‘me’. I squashed the remaining flesh and I saw it as countering me because I didn’t feel that it represented who I was. The fat didn’t need to be there and I could do without it. I could be this image of myself in my head without any of this surface, surplus body.

  I covered things up because people stared at me. I wore layers of clothes because I was so cold and frozen that I needed to wrap up. Layering also played another role; I felt ashamed that everyone thought I had failed. It was better to keep my head down, not be seen, not see anyone else and not be in anyone’s photos of Christmas or New Year. The hair on my arms was getting thicker. My head hair was dropping out in clumps on to my hairbrush. I convinced myself that it was better to wear a hat, because of the cold escaping through my head. I always had ways of rationalizing my behaviour and logically explaining things away, especially what I saw as other people’s flawed perceptions of my own body.

  Achievement

  As my weight continued to decrease and I became more and more shocking to look at, I continued to increase the amount of activity I was doing. I followed a semi-normal existence in terms of my day-to-day routine; I was shopping, talking, reading, studying, watching TV and exercising (of course). My breaking-down body was held up only by a tightly focused mind, which continued to try and hold up its own illusion. This ability to focus on achievement and studying is common to people suffering from anorexia.13 It is hard to understand how someone who is not-eating, and is therefore in a starved state, can carry on with such intense activity. In one sense, it is a powerful distraction from thoughts of food and the intensely painful hunger which you crush, and in another, it is part of the bigger issue, that constant need to achieve intellectual aims, while ignoring the issue of emotional maturity.

  Achievement had always been something central to my life. I did not want to let anyone down. I believed that I had made my family, teachers and friends happy by being good, strong and achieving things, and I wanted to continue with this (this was not necessarily their view of things, but my self-made one). I wanted to make them proud. Academically, I just wanted to get better. In my bettering, I believed there would be this happiness, which I had not yet found. I placed huge pressure upon myself to achieve everything I set my mind to, and the terror of the thought of failure was paralysing. In the end, my anorexia may well have been some

  sort of withdrawal from this conflict between the desperate need for success and the consuming fear of failure. Becoming anorexic was temporarily a break from the whole cycle.

  The irony is that although I was focused on achieving academic, external things – I was hugely articulate when describing world affairs – when it came down to my own emotions or expressions of my feelings, it was as if I no longer had access to my own senses. Looking back, my senses seem numbed. My speech was constrained by what I felt I had to say so as not to upset anyone, my sight was in food-focused tunnel vision. I did not taste, I stopped the enjoyment of it and I laced it with guilt. Smell was the one sense that remained strong, and it became stronger as I stopped eating. Smells of bread and cake and fish and chips seemed to possess me. Amazing how the smell of the body spray I used at this time fills me with a sickness and sends a tremor through my body, immediately transporting me back.

  Family and friends tried to ask what I felt; they tried to talk to me. They must have wondered why I didn’t talk to them or ask for help and why I was so closed up. They stared at me as I sat on the sofa, playing with my salad. I was in a different place from them, somewhere else where things were ‘absolutely fine’. I refused to respond to what my body was showing outwardly; instead I only listened to my internal drive. They were crying and not sleeping and not eating (most irritating to me), and pulling the hair out of their heads trying to think of ways to reach me, and I was just sitting there making notes on my books, making further plans to achieve.

  As an anorexic, it is almost impossible to connect with those feelings everyone is desperate for you to express. The answer nearly always is: ‘I’m not feeling anything. I’m just feeling fat, big, huge, yuk, flab, skin, lines, sick-making fat.’

  There is a blockage. Fat is the only thing that is being felt. The aim of everything is always to get back control, to achieve and to be better, and feelings seem irrelevant to this. The cruel reality is, however, that in each self-bettering comes more self-battering. When doctors and friends and family told me to be still, to switch off, to relax and rest, I could not understand what it meant. I was anxious; there surely must be more I could achieve; there must be things I could do to be better – to be thinner – to be better.

  Anxiety

  Anorexia nervosa (of nervous origin) and anxiety by definition sit side by side. Anorexia fixes and controls (temporarily) anxiety – it provides a single focus for fear to be played out – and anxiety builds and feeds, grows and festers beneath the surface of the anorexia. Indeed, the issue of anxiety and its relation to problems of identity formation is often cited as a key factor for some people who suffer from anorexia.14 Anxiety has prevented these individuals from experiencing and overcoming risk situations. As young children, something has inhibited them from being able to explore enough. They therefore have been unable to learn by experience; they have not faced up to their fears. As a result they fail to find a set of limits or edges, which define their sense of self15 and so they try and forge a sense of identity through losing weight and changing their shape.

  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.16 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.

  Outside v Inside

  Anorexia has been described as having ‘biopsychosocial’ origins (its influences are genetic, psychological and sociocultural ones).17 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),18 orthorexia (an obsession with healthy eating)19 and stressorexia (serious over-exercise).20 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)21 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 1694.22 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 witho
ut really addressing the issue.

  Categorizing

  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’).23 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.