A reflection on how a recurrent eating disorder may affect a writer, when the price of addiction to controlling the body can be counted out in lost words.
Content Warning: eating disorders; anorexia; mental illness
There is a gentle fleshy line where the top of my tights meets my belly. Tights are elastic, reason tells me. Without that, they’d fall down. It’s not a bulge, not a bursting forth of excess fat. It is just the nature of the body.
But it disgusts me. When I sense the level of my belly against the fabric, even without looking at it, nausea wracks me. I’ll suck my stomach in, but the sickness makes it hard. Sometimes I’ll shut my eyes when I pass a mirror or take off my clothes. At other times I’ll stand and stare at my reflection, taking the fat between my fingers, grossing myself out, indulging in self-loathing. No matter how I rationalize it, something in my head tells me my body is repulsive.
I have a photograph, seven or more months old now, taken just before I hit my lowest weight. I look at it sometimes, dreaming of being that woman again. To me, now, she is a beautiful memory. Yet at the time, it wasn’t enough. I just wanted every bone to jut out even more, my stomach to flatten into the concave, my clavicles to slice from my body like knives. Months into recovery, I would give anything to be her, that thin girl posing for a rare shot where you can see more than a little of her face.
Anything? Almost anything.
That body I covet spent its days in bed, scouring Instagram for food posts and watching hundreds of episodes of cooking shows. I had no strength to do more. Reading had become impossible, and I could scarcely follow audiobooks. Beside me my dog lay sadly, even he – the world’s greatest sleeper – unable to understand why I couldn’t play with him. He remained unwalked: I was no longer able to go further than the end of the road. Ill-designed for stairs, he has to be carried down them, but I limited even that, knowing how much my arm would ache, my legs tremble.
From time of waking, ill-rested from a night of insomnia at worst, crazed nightmares at best, I would allow myself only coffee until I could bear it no longer. I would applaud myself for staving off hunger until two, three, four o’clock. Often it wasn’t hunger that drove me to eat – I could barely remember what hunger felt like – but rather the fact that I could no longer move without violent trembling, and my thoughts swam in an incoherent swamp.
Sometimes I tried to eat more, told myself that I could do it for my family, if not for me. On Christmas day I ate what I thought I was meant to, forcing myself to enjoy eating, for just that special twenty-four hours. For days afterwards I could barely stand, suffering such a violent response that I should have gone to hospital. Ironically, a starved body cannot cope with sudden food. On other occasions, just eating half a normal person’s calories would trigger the same, wiping me out for days at a time.
When I’d first sought help, as the incline of my weight-loss steepened and I’d fixed my daily calories firmly at a limit of five hundred, it was because I could no longer construct sentences in front of a class. After more than ten years of standing to address lecture halls or classrooms, I suddenly found words appearing at the tip of my pen that were not meant to be on the whiteboard, while others disappeared from my head as I tried to speak them. I began to remain seated throughout whole lessons, knowing that if I stood up, I would faint. When that fear became overwhelming – black and white spots obliterating whole classes before my eyes as I staggered and had to hold myself up – I finally referred myself. But I didn’t start eating, I merely stopped working.
Words are my life. They form the content of my teaching, across more than one language and many styles of literature. They give me pleasure in reading fiction and poetry. They flow out in the academic book and papers I’ve written, and in the novels and stories that are now my principal creative concern. Yet for a long time I accepted that I would pay in loss of words for the thin body my mind told me mattered more.
But there is an irony in all this. Because my recurrent anorexia has never been about body image first and foremost. It plays its part, an inadequacy in myself fully on view both to my own eyes and others’. I have put my sense of self-worth into kilograms on the scales and calories carefully measured and recorded on a diet app. When my life feels like it is sliding out of my control, caught up in a whirlwind of doing and being that blocks out the pain of denying who I am or refusing to face my own experiences, I look to my body to tell me that I still have power. That the power strips me of everything – walking, working, and even words – becomes incomprehensible to a mind plagued by this addiction to starvation.
Almost a year has passed. And a year on from accepting that I was seriously ill once again, I still hate myself. Sometimes, though well into recovery, I hate myself more than ever. I hate myself for the food I put into my mouth, for not working out every day, for the softness of my flesh, or the narrowing of the gap between my thighs.
But at least now, when I search for words, the words come. My body is still weak, but it walks, it works, some nights it even sleeps through. My mind is mine again. My words are mine. I call them and they come. And though I may have sacrificed the control I long for, the control that would rid me of this little line of repugnant flesh where tights meet skin, I remind myself daily that the price is – must be – worth paying.
Thank you for reading. If you have been affected by this essay, as a sufferer of anorexia, a carer, or an ally, help is available. Charities such as BEAT do amazing work and your GP will help, too. I am now doing well in recovery, through medication, therapy, and the support of amazing friends and family. It may be hard, but it is possible to recover and thrive in spite of an eating disorder.
Bodily autonomy is a crucial theme for my writing. If you would like to learn more, you can read the stories on this site, listen to my podcast, download a free book, or buy Camilla, out now.