Thin

by Grace Bowman

  The presence of a relationship meant that my eating disorder voice was disturbed; it became very disturbed when someone else was constantly there with me. And with its demise came hope, and the slow realization that one day the voice might altogether forget to wake up with me, especially when there was someone else who loved me and supported me, and who I loved, waking up with me instead.

  The Shape of Emotions

  ‘It’s gonna hurt, now,’ said Amy. ‘Anything dead coming back to life hurts.’

  A truth for all times, thought Denver.

  Beloved, Toni Morrison

  As you recover from very low weight and self-starvation – as you put on more weight, and return to the target you are told to achieve – lots of things do improve (perception can shift and rational decisions can begin to be made), but at the same time it can be a terrifying experience. The biggest change for me was the emergence of real feeling. I felt, like many others who regain weight and grow, that I was thrust back into my hypersensitive body. Emotions returned with full force after a long period of nullification. I went from emotional paralysis to a sense of being flooded with fear and feeling. It was as if all of the experience of the last few years had been unlocked and released, and I was initially totally knocked down with it. The first thing that an anorexic looks to do with that intense emotion is to relate it to her size and weight. She believes this is what shapes all of her feelings and moods, and fuels her happiness or unhappiness. It was the same for me.

  At twenty-three, five years after my diagnosis, I still related my happiness to my weight. If I stepped on the scales and realized that I had lost weight, or if I peered into the mirror and noticed that my face was more drawn, and that my size ten jeans were slightly too baggy, I was still strangely filled with that same sense of delirium that triggered my descent into anorexia in the first place. Losing weight and gaining control were still capable of making me happy. As weight went up and down, moods followed suit. Feelings were in quick-shift mode.

  I was, however, strong enough by this point to realize that one way out of my dependency on weighing scales was not to own any. I also decided it best to ignore them completely, not to even step on them, unless, on a very rare occasion, I needed to for some medical purpose (or maybe once in a while in a fit of desperation to check things were still in balance). This was a highly successful mechanism. Once I rejected them outright, they just gradually faded in importance. If I didn’t have access to the anorexia-propelling information, I simply couldn’t do anything about it. I didn’t even have to consciously stop myself thinking about the scales because in the end something in my unconscious took over. Every time I remembered I wanted to weigh myself, I just as soon forgot. Perhaps it was because I had learned that the answers to my questions were never going to be resolved there.

  Recovery, I think, is about growth in different ways, and for me it was about accepting womanhood, responsibility and change. The hardest thing here is to remove yourself from the pressure of normal expectation. Around us, the shape of the body seems to be the most important thing a woman can control. If the women that you are looking up to look like girls – in body, in shape and in essence – then it is hard to think that something different is right for you.

  As an anorexic, you don’t have a sense of what your ‘self’ equals, and so you think that if you can emulate others, something will form around you. If the images you are presented with are long and thin and glossy, it is easier to think you should be like that; it is easier to think that that is how and why those people have got there. You look up to them (models, celebrities, other thinner and seemingly happier people) and think that you will be made by your thinness. You can begin to believe that your success will be built from it, and that your self-esteem will somehow emerge from a thinner body.

  I wonder how we have ended up here. How we ended up using the control and choice we now have as women to fight this battle. There are just too many expectations, conflicting ones, which can’t be forged on one body; it cannot split so many ways and achieve them all perfectly. These expectations have been internalized and they have split us apart.

  For so long, I didn’t know who I was, and which of these expectations to follow. All I could think was that if I presented myself as thin and attractive then that’s what people would take out of meeting me. That’s what they would say: ‘Grace – yes, that slim, thin girl.’

  I liked that. That was a good way to describe me, and it was a good way to think of myself. Then it made it so much easier to take the bad bits (possible failure and criticism). But looking ahead and behind me for the first time, I realized that I had to be more.

  It is hard to accept that you have to find your own level, which is inevitably a different level from everyone else’s. It’s hard to stop staring, to pull away, to stop wishing for a transformation to someone else’s idea of ‘the right shape’. Your inside strength finds it hard to come through, but when it does, you stop the self-rejection. You start to think of yourself as your own unique shape, your own outline.

  Almost simultaneously, once I started to think of myself in my own shape, away from the expectations of others, a grown-up, out-grown anorexia me, I found myself stuck with the question in my head at all moments when I was alone: ‘How do you feel?’ (That dreaded question!) ‘Are you OK?’

  I could at first hear this voice, and then it was my voice, and I owned it. I didn’t preempt it, I didn’t forcibly ask myself. It seemed to come from within me, like a sense check, to make me take a step back, to make me assess myself in the moment. To make me sit with myself in the present and feel things. Feel my body; help me listen to my state of mind. It was a hard thing to do. Perhaps it was my body protecting itself against pain. Like the reflex action of the hand against a burning stove, it protected me from any self-destructive intentions, it got in there first. It irritated me into talking back, and I could tell by the sound of my breath, by the clench of my teeth or by the tightness of my shoulders, how I was feeling, and I could start to answer, slowly.

  Part 7

  FINDING MY SHAPE

  Twenty-five

  I am twenty-four. I have decided to leave my advertising job. I bumped into it at the right time, but now things are different and I have to face my fears and try something I really want to do at this moment, and for myself. It has been hard figuring out exactly what that is because the anorexia manipulated a lot of my desires.

  My dad always says to me, ‘Nobody has willpower like you.’

  He is right. Above any kind of pain I will shift things to make them right. I lost weight because I wanted to be thin and happy. I wanted some time out of the pressure, to try and sort myself out. Then I put weight back on because I decided it was time that I moved away and escaped. Then I hid things, because I wanted a fresh start. Since then, I have started again and again, so that no one would know the horrible, disastrous old me. Recently, I let some things slip because I felt like I wanted someone to give me some direction. Now I want to change things again. This is a different kind of change, and one that has been building slowly. It is a change that will not be aggressive or forced; it will be one which I will embrace and sit with and take my time over.

  Enough. Enough.

  I want to be twenty-four years old, and beyond this old version of myself. I go to speak to my manager to tell him that I am leaving. He tries to get me to stay, he gives me time, people to speak to; surely I can’t be serious? But of course I am, I have decided, and he will not sway me. I smile.

  If only he knew!

  It is strange not having to get up and go to my proper job every day. It is different spending the days alone. But now the anorexia has moved away, it is easier to do. I have got my boyfriend, we live together and we support each other. It really doesn’t seem necessary to restrict myself any more. Things are slower and quieter and I don’t feel the need to run anywhere. I need to momentarily step back, instead of charging on to the next thing to achieve. A bigger achievement w
ill be to heal myself.

  I sit on my sofa. I sit with my cup of tea and my chocolate biscuit and I start to think about my story and how I got here. I start to tell my story to myself. Now I am at home, in my London flat, on my own. Thinking things through, slowly, like I have never been able to do. I get up from the sofa and pace around the room. The jumping, thumping voices seem to calm down. I start with a line in my head. I think it might be a good way to start a novel about a girl with a big secret, one which she has sat on for years and years. I repeat a line to myself:

  ‘If I share a secret with you, do you promise to tell everyone?’

  The words spin round and round in my head. I sit at my desk and I start to tell this story. Hours have passed and I have forgotten all about going to the gym. I meant to go at three o’clock and now it is six, and actually I am quite hungry. It wasn’t the story I thought I would write, but this one seems like the right one to tell, to begin with. There is a reason for it being told and a reason for it being read. There are things beyond me, things that I think will make sense for other people. It is not an inside story any more. It is the sort of story I wish I could have read; a story close to home. I decide to make myself some dinner. I eat it and I move on. I breathe out loud. Calm breathing. I start to climb in and out of my memories. They are really hard to find. The story of the girl is the story of this girl.

  ‘In her story lies her survival.’

  Yes, I think to myself, I think it does.

  I balance on the edge of the pavement as a giggle of schoolgirls in grey uniform runs past me eating hot pizza. Laughing loudly, screaming. Was I? Am I? I can’t quite decipher. I imagine the taste of melted cheese on top of red ripe tomatoes on top of hot, sticky dough. I haven’t thought about that for years – what I was like before. Who was I? Who would I have been, right now? I have just lived through every day and moved on. I haven’t dared look back. I stare at the girls in the grey school uniform and I think about when I was at school. Standing in line for my lunch at the canteen eating egg mayonnaise sandwiches in white bread for lunch followed by chocolate crispy cake, washed down with a carton of creamy milk. I see myself sitting and laughing with my friends, my multitude of best friends. We are talking about our adventures on Friday night, about boyfriends, about universities, about almost being eighteen. About the freedom and the excitement it will bring us. About being proper grown-ups. We play with our hair and we put on our lip gloss and we saunter through the school, in charge of the corridor, on the edge of a new world:

  ‘I’m Grace Bowman. I am eighteen. I am on the edge of a shape at the moment. I have just finished my A levels. I’m going to go to university and I’m going to study drama. I have got a boyfriend but that probably won’t work out because I think I will want to be independent when I go to university and meet lots of new people. I enjoy going out, dressing up in my high heels and dancing until it’s morning. I have four best friends and we do everything together. We are all eighteen and we’ll be friends for ever. I can’t wait to get away and travel around the world and see lots of new and different and exciting places. I don’t want to stay in one place all my life, like I have, in the same house. I have loads of ideas about what I might do when I finish university. I can’t wait to see what will happen.’

  I’ve just taken off my school uniform for the last time. I choose an outfit to wear, a new outfit to try on, to represent me.

  I kneel down by the shore of the frosty North Sea. I smile at the camera, with sand in my hands and grains falling through the cracks between my fingers. The sea stretches out behind me – endless miles of gentle blue water. I stand up, turn around and dip my toes in. I step back and look at the ocean: cold, soft, lapping. I do not concentrate on the feeling of my toenail, my toe, my foot or my leg, and how cold and wet they are; instead I look outwards. I step back. I glance across the surface.

  I am sitting in my house, the house in which I grew up. I am eating dinner with my mum. I am sipping a glass of white wine and eating a pizza. I spent a long time trying to escape from this. There must be so much more, I thought to myself. There is something bigger, something I need to see. Now I am looking back out over the fields from the bay window of the house watching these plots in the distance, marking out unvisited areas, new imaginings. I don’t feel the same about it any more, not now I live in the bigger place (the place I had only been able to imagine in my head); not now I have seen what it was impossible to see from where I grew up.

  After some time out, it feels easier to go back to a new job, something a bit more thought through. I am twenty-five. It is six years since the worst year. I am different today, no question. The anorexic version of me is a part of my memory, but she doesn’t feel like she needs to be a part of my present. It is amazing now, but I am able to stop myself thinking about the fat on my stomach, or the depth and width of my thighs. One day like that came along, and then it was two days, and then three in a row. Imagine that! Three days in a row with hardly any fat feelings and a head focused on other things. Even better, sometimes I can’t remember what I ate two days ago. Mostly I still remember today, but I certainly can’t list everything over the last week. I can’t even tell you the calorie content of a pizza, or a slice of toast with butter, or a can of Coke. In fact, it’s almost as if I have been brainwashed not to remember – by my own brain. It’s like I hypnotized myself backwards. Quite often I forget about my body and my weight, I stop thinking about it. I wonder if it is because I don’t need to focus on that any more. In the same way that I don’t remember everything I learned at school (quadratic equations or cumulative frequency). It’s almost there. The sounds of the words aren’t unfamiliar. I close my eyes and think hard to find them, but I don’t really need to. I don’t need them. Like I don’t need to know the fat content of each type of biscuit on the shelves of Tesco.

  The voice, the wrong-speed inside voice, has slowly faded. It is more like a whisper than a roaring shout. Sometimes I faintly hear it trying to come back. Sometimes I punch it out in the gym. Sometimes I breathe it away. Sometimes I sleep through it. Sometimes I laugh so loud that it disappears entirely. Sometimes I jump on my bed and do forward rolls; anything to mix it up, screw it right up, throw it out of the window.

  I know every tick, movement and pulse from inside me. I know the limits and edges of my shape. I know every line I have etched upon myself and every inch of my skin. I did not want to know this before. I hid it under the baggy clothes. I feel it now. It’s strange because I am feeling something I used to hate. It is not so unbearable after all. I have come to terms with it, with me. I feel like I am almost inside a grown-up version of what I left behind – so suddenly, so cruelly – at eighteen going on nineteen.

  At the start of a new me.

  My Story

  Anorexia just lost its appeal – frankly, the view of thin me equals happy me was not fulfilling, nor truthful, nor logical. The equation didn’t make sense. I had been reciting the same lines over and over again, and years later, the thinness had contributed nothing to my self-esteem (that had to come from somewhere else). It took me time to work this out. It took me time to outgrow it, until one day, or one series of days, I decided to stop running away from finishing it.

  I decided to write about it not only because it needed an ending, but also because it left me with a feeling that what I had experienced was confusing, alienating and too painful to ever look at again. Perhaps that is why so many people cannot go back over it, and instead see it as a phase which happened to them, and which they can’t fully explain. I don’t feel satisfied with such a conclusion. I wanted to understand it so that I, and others, might have some insight into where anorexia starts from, and how it is possible to move beyond it. I know that other people have told a similar story from the outside of the illness (as a parent or a friend) or from right inside it where the voice of the illness is a powerful manipulator of the truth, but I wanted to do both. The first, reflective, outside angle gives context but, coming from so
far away, it can only repeat tired explanations and curiously observe something from the edge. The inside view can be a dangerous one which leaps off the page and seems to shout proudly about its power. Other anorexics might be triggered by it being let loose in such a way – even though that is not its intention. It needs the reflection to temper it, to show it where it went wrong, to allow it to sit against something more removed from its self-absorption.

  I really struggled at first to feel my story; my history. I thought it would be easy to slide back into my story because I owned it, but instead I could only see the edges of many stories, and many voices, and none of them felt like they were mine. I was not even sure if I wanted to acknowledge them as mine either. Who would want to admit such fallibility, such self-destruction? I thought to myself. And who would want to put that into writing? This is what an eating disorder does; time after time it pushes you outside yourself, firstly so that you can survive it, and secondly as an act of disengagement because it is all too painful to admit.

  Indeed, I believed that my story involved a folded-up, shameful, forgettable series of memories. The very nature of an eating disorder (the hiding of a problem, the embarrassment and guilt felt at having a seemingly illogical addiction, the feeling that you and it are rejected because you and it are hopelessly misunderstood) makes it into the most secret of secrets.

  The only way to really start to explain my experience was to step out of my memories. I had to take a look at my story from the outside. I looked down and I floated above it. I had this bird’s eye view of myself, which resembled one of those pictures of a small house in a long street in a big town taken from the air. It was like getting a view of myself from the sky. If I couldn’t be my own subject then I would be an object, one which I could pull apart and deconstruct and piece back together again from afar. To be honest, at first it was easier to do it like that, because then I didn’t have to admit myself to it. The object of me could be many shapes and sizes and it could be all the things that I did not want to represent. I could escape my own involvement. Only when I had really thought about where I had come from, instead of trying to deny my very origins, could I then step back into my story. Instead of thinking that wiping out my experiences would be the way to go forward, instead of shamefully disguising my subject under some kind of fiction, I had to admit the joins in me. I had to admit that I am one long continuation and not a thousand ‘selves’.