by Grace Bowman
Grace’s friend looks at her out of the corner of her eye.
‘That’s a brave thing to do for Cambridge.’ The boy on the steps looks towards Grace.
‘Sorry?’ Grace hasn’t really been listening.
‘Your dissertation. What is the exact title?’
Grace feels embarrassed. ‘Well, it’s something like, Flirting with Food: Fasting and Feeding in the Brontës’ Novels. Do you know much about the Brontës?’
He does, of course.
Grace continues, ‘Have you read Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley? It begins with a quote from there: “Men of England! look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline.”26 So, yes, that’s it, really. I didn’t think about it being brave.’
‘Oh my God. For Cambridge, yeh. You’re talking about eating disorders, right? That’s so not a traditional topic, is it?’ He flicks his hair.
Grace shrugs her shoulders and looks away from him. She wonders from his comment about her apparent ‘bravery’ if he thinks that she is bound to be a failure, or if he thinks that she is stupid (most likely, as he is a very clever postgraduate English Literature genius) or, worst of all, if he has guessed her secret. This bothers her for some time. Grace covers her eyes from the sun, from his smile and from his tilted, peering head and hopes he will forget all about her and her fixation with all things to do with eating disorders. Grace wonders if she should never think about anorexia again, but it keeps lurking. She keeps reading about it or encountering it in various places even when she isn’t looking. She didn’t realize it was something that was present all those years ago, even if it didn’t have a name then. In fact, she hadn’t really thought about it in that kind of a universal way, only really in relation to herself, and now she has folded it away behind her, she tried not to do that either.
Grace wonders what it would be like if she hadn’t become anorexic, if things would have been different. Maybe she wouldn’t have had such a different-from-her kind of friend. Perhaps she would have been more confident, sociable or popular? But she struggles to remember what she was like before the anorexia took over, what she looked like, or sounded like, or how she laughed (did she really?).
Grace’s mum says to her, ‘Why don’t you bring your friend home to meet us? If she’s your best friend then we should definitely meet her.’
But Grace remembers that she can’t bring her friend home because she doesn’t want the two worlds to meet. Things are secret in one world, and not in the other.
The only downside to having one single-focused best friend is that now the people in college, who she tries to keep at a distance, think that she is being rude:
‘She doesn’t like us.’
‘She thinks she’s above us.’
‘She doesn’t make any effort.’
Grace prefers them to think that, because it is too hard to have to make an effort, to reveal herself to them completely or to join in with their unbalancing student life. Sometimes she has to go along to dinners and say things like, ‘I think I am allergic to that’ or, ‘I’m not feeling very well. I think I have a bad stomach’ or, ‘I don’t have very much money so I won’t have the full meal like you.’
She sits at the table and drinks her glass of tap water, and smokes her cigarettes, and plays with her napkin and pretends she is having a good time. She would really rather be alone, sitting at her desk in her bedroom, or reading a book, or thinking about things. It is good to have a lot of time alone, to figure things out, Grace thinks, because nothing the other students say seems to make much sense. Cutting off is just easier. Grace is busy thinking about topics such as how many teaspoons of mayonnaise go into an ordinary shop-bought sandwich, which is not a topic for discussion. And when she has finished with that line of thought, she has to discard the facts she has just learned because she knows that it is ‘very wrong’ and ‘bad’ to think like that (like the old Grace, who only cared about fat and calorie contents).
Usually the other students laugh or shout and it makes her feel uncomfortable that she isn’t joining in, so she has to concede. They interrupt her plans – she has to eat everything, she has to drink cocktails and wine and eat pizza and puddings. Then it feels like she is scrambling for days trying to get her grip back on things. The whitecoats would be happy with the disruption, Grace thinks. They would be so pleased that things are being taken out of her control. It is not that she doesn’t ever want to have fun, but she is just trying to keep things balanced, don’t they get it? Can’t they try and understand? She doesn’t want to have to stand up at the head of the table and say, ‘Tonight I won’t be having any chocolate cake or any pitchers of creamy cocktail because I have old problems with food and I would rather not eat and drink too much. In case it makes me veer to extremes.’
Because then they would never look at her the same way again. So instead, they talk about work and people she doesn’t know and what they are going to do with their future. Grace has no idea about her own. Some of the people round the table have got interviews and jobs lined up. They are all thinking about the end of university, but Grace is only really starting to get into it. She doesn’t really have any job ambitions. Everything got drained away with the anorexia and it hasn’t come back.
Grace goes to see a career advisor.
‘So, what is it you are interested in? What would you like to do?’
Grace smiles, ‘I don’t know. I don’t really have any ideas about jobs, not office jobs where you sit all day in front of a computer and file things. I don’t know.’
Grace thinks about her perfect head-dream. In her head-dream she lives in a clean flat, which has white walls and bare floorboards. It is peaceful and no one gets in the way. She has a personal trainer who comes to train her every day, and a special chef who never lets her eat more than she should, and keeps her completely in shape. This, she is sure, is the answer to her problems. As long as she has a flat stomach and thin thighs then she can forgo everything else. It’s as simple as that.
‘So …’ the career advisor looks puzzled.
‘I don’t know, maybe I’ll be a writer.’
The career advisor is confused. There are no boxes to check and companies to apply to for that one.
‘What about management consultancy or maybe banking? I can give you a handbook so you can do some research.’
Grace snarls. ‘No, sorry, I don’t think so. I don’t think that is me at all. I don’t think those things fit with me.’
And she realizes that she doesn’t even know what those jobs actually are, or who the ‘me’ is that she is referring to.
Grace sits on the sofa in her university house. She has finished her final exams and despite a couple of crying fits about papers she thinks she has spoiled, she is feeling OK.
‘So … how did they go?’ a friend asks.
‘OK. I don’t know. I messed something up. I did OK,’ Grace replies.
‘You’ll be fine. You always do well.’
Grace wants to scream.
Grace picks up the payphone in the station and dials the number. She is taking a break from the coffee bar where she is serving out hot chocolate with cream, and skinny, semi-skimmed or regular caffè lattes to London commuters. She likes it when they order a croissant or cake: ‘Would you like something to eat with that?’ she asks them. It is amazing how it works, how they suddenly say yes and break their planned control.
She rings her tutor to find out her results. This is everything that she has been waiting for. ‘Hello. It’s Grace. I am ringing for my results.’ She puts the heavy black receiver in both of her shaking hands to try and steady it.
‘Well done. You should be really proud. You did fantastically.’
Grace goes home from the coffee-shop job and eats her dinner from the Co-op on her own – pasta and green pesto. Then she walks to the kitchen and places her plate in the sink. She sighs. She thinks of washing it up, but she decides not to. She walks to the fridge and opens the door. She tak
es out a chocolate bar that she has bought herself for passing her exams and for finishing with university. She bought it on her own, in the shop. Not to impress anyone or to demonstrate she is eating to a worried onlooker, but because she wanted a chocolate bar.
I just feel like eating one, OK?
Grace takes the regular-sized chocolate bar back into the living room with her cup of tea. She decides that she will eat two squares. Two squares become the whole bar. Grace smiles. She hasn’t eaten a whole, proper chocolate bar for years. The whole bar at once!
I got here on my own, she thinks, I worked hard. Things don’t come easy – I do have to work hard. But I did better than they know. More than they will ever know.
Spillover
A year on from my diagnosis, at the very start of university, I was, from a physical perspective, back into the body that I had left behind. My body was a bit smaller, a bit more fragile, more scarred from the stretch and shrink of my skin, but essentially, to the untrained eye, I was back to normal. I had made a declaration to the world that I was better and that I was no longer in need of any help. In body terms I had made a truly ‘remarkable recovery’, one that people were mostly happy to believe. I had managed to get things back in order. I got a place at Cambridge University to read English. I was seven and a half stone, maybe eight, maybe even a bit more in my second and third years and I was determined not to slip and let anybody know.
I didn’t realize at the time that I wasn’t alone with my problems. I was like many other people27 who experienced problems with food at university or college, even if those problems were not classified or diagnosed as full-blown eating disorders. We did not share our stories, and it is only now, years after leaving university, that I am aware that there were others like me who battled alone with anorexia, or bulimia, or both, but we were all too secretive and too locked in our own self-absorbed worlds to notice.
Bulimia nervosa (recurrent binge-eating and self-induced vomiting or evacuation of food eaten) has a slightly later average age of onset than anorexia (according to different reports, around seventeen to twenty-one years28). It was only recognized as a clinical condition in its own right in 1979.29 It is common for people who have suffered from an eating disorder to swing between both anorexia and bulimia30 and many anorexics do end up using this method of weight control, even if it is only a temporary measure. My experience of the purging element of this condition was infrequent and it did not last long (to be diagnosed a bulimic, the compensatory behaviour – that is how it is termed – has to be happening ‘at least twice a week for 3 months’31). But the fact that I was not an official bulimic is irrelevant to the fact that the behaviour was a relapse. It meant that the recovery of my weight – perceived from the unknowing outside to be solved – did not necessarily equate with a full recovery from anorexia. It is likely that at this time I had an Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (EDNOS). This means that I met with some of the criteria for bulimia and anorexia, but did not display all the symptoms. Again, this is something that is common. Anorexics very often do relapse several times, and an average recovery (being free from behaviours) length is around five years.32 Among those who do recover, a large proportion recover to the extent that they manage the illness in a way that allows them to maintain it to some extent, rather than overcoming and moving on. Getting better involves not only addressing the symptoms of the illness – the eating restrictions – but it also involves exploring the causes of it. This, for me, was to be a separate exercise and one that I could not do in its immediate aftermath in the intensity of university.
It is still hard, looking back on my time at university, to see what I was truly feeling. My Cambridge experience is hazy, almost like the memory got distorted, spun out of shape. I cannot see myself clearly; I cannot hold the memory. Perhaps I filtered it out. I chose to use other pieces of me to make up my identity, rather than the half-felt, half-experienced time in this part of my recovery. There was just a sequence of things, which I needed to achieve. Externally, I was ambitious, charged, energetic and intellectual. I did not let the fading insides come into show. This was the way it happened and then ended, without reflection or understanding. There was simply achievement and a series of successes and, sometimes, failures.
I did not know how to define myself or what I stood for, and so I looked for things to define me. When people asked me what I wanted to be, I would try and find words and expressions which I felt represented me, but at the same time words which fled from any real commitment to any one thing. I had been running for a long time. I had been unable to make decisions for myself.
‘It must be in my genes!’ Or, ‘It’s my star-sign,’ I would say.
For too long I let myself believe that this indecisiveness and lack of self-determination was an immovable part of me. I cried at the thought of any real responsibility, or any real allegiance to anything or to anyone. I evaded things I did not want to confront or did not want to do, like I did when I was a little (littler) girl. I let friends down, and I lost contact with people (and they with me) because I did not like to give myself to anything, because I couldn’t face the commitment of it. Then, paradoxically, I would suddenly take on something so great, so huge, that it threatened to overwhelm me, almost as if I was making up for all the other things I had failed to stick at or commit to or decide on.
This behaviour seems to be a common theme in those who have suffered from anorexia. Whether it is an associated personality trait, or a reflex of the anorexia itself, to those people with anorexia life often seems to be a set of polarizing choices. There is success or there is failure, there is black or there is white. There is fat or there is thin. Things around them, and the choices they make, are always in opposition. It appears to tie back to that obsessive, perfectionist behaviour that is often a key characteristic. The obsessive behaviour extends beyond the food relationship into other areas of life. As the food relationship begins to normalize it seems to be common for other obsessive tendencies to take over: a need for symmetry, a need for things to be straight, ordered, tidy, neat and controlled.
In the same way as I could be rigidly controlled, I could also veer to the other extreme. I would suddenly offer up myself to something on the spur of the moment. I would make a decision without any thought, I would buy something expensive, I would agree to something I didn’t want, in a half-shaded thought. This behaviour was the way of coping with my guilt for having avoided so much. That was the way to tell people that I was in charge and that I seemed to be making rational choices, but actually when my restrictive self was thwarted, my extreme veering self was revealed. I was moving from one polarity to the other with no breath in between.
By the end of university, I was four years away from the start of my illness, and I believed it to be behind me. I wanted so much to be something else, something other than an ex-anorexic. I looked at myself and I thought about how it would be impossible, after university, to go back to the house I grew up in, in the town which had far too much knowledge about me. Instead, I needed something separate, something far away, something new to continue my story. The end of university, like the end of school, was something I couldn’t avoid and I simply had to face it, but this time I needed to do it in an adult way. I took it upon myself to invent the next chapter of my story on my own.
In the end, the only real way out of eating disordered behaviour was to turn it round for myself and this is what I did. The desire to get better has to come from the inside, it just has to, and I realize that is a frustrating piece of advice, because in the midst of it, that just seems impossible. But somehow I managed to do it, so I do not think that impossibility is an excuse. It is an excuse you make to yourself because you know it is really hard to break the cycle of anorexia, and you don’t want to have to try something so painful and so very difficult. In my spillover period, the reality of this self-healing became clearer to me every day. I realized again that I alone had to fight my impulses to fall back to the easy option o
f cutting out food or being sick because I felt unable to cope with something.
What became evident was that somewhere along the way I had made the decisions for myself. I was the girl who had decided to restrict her food intake on certain days and not on others. I was the one who had stood in front of the mirror and had chosen to make myself sick when I felt I needed to. I was also the one who had initially decided to go to university and to get out of the anorexia in the first place. Once I knew how self-determining I could be and what a powerful tool that was, I also knew that I had the ability to reject the voice of anorexia outright and all that went with it. This was a hugely important learning.
Part 5
FINDING THE EDGES
Twenty
One day, Grace sits at her desk in her bedroom in her Cambridge house. There is a hot summer stillness which hangs in the air. Results are in, another thing is completed and achieved. Grace can’t seem to sit and relax. Things have been so up-tempo and intense for months that to let go would be to collapse. She pulls out a pen and paper from her desk drawer and starts to make a list.
Jobs/things I would like to do next:
Actress
Can’t just ‘be’ an actress. No money. Can’t go to drama school. Can’t even get myself to auditions for university play. So no chance.
Journalist
Made one application and failed. Obviously no good.
Go back home and save some money
No no no. I can’t go back home now. What would happen if I did that? What a stupid idea. No way. I would be going backwards. I would get stuck. I can only go forwards. I wouldn’t be able to do my exercises or go for a run without feeling like I was doing something wrong.
Reminder: need to do my exercises! Must go to the gym.
They might start buying me low-fat microwave meals and I would feel like they still thought, after all this time, that I had some kind of issue. It’s been three years since I came here. Four years since the label got stuck on me. So no. Anything but. I still can’t. Rather get away.
