The Binge
I’m unsure of my age. I look relatively older, maybe 18, but feel as small as a six-year-old. I can’t be certain. I’m alone and surrounded by tables of food, displayed beautifully and just begging to be eaten. I know I shouldn’t eat anything; if I do, I will ruin all my hard work thus far and then I will balloon in size. Instead, I just smell the food for a while. As I breathe in, I move my mouth in a chewing motion, pretending that I’m eating that delicious odour; this way, I can persuade myself into believing that I’m inhaling the food itself.
Everyone wants me to eat. My friends, my family, sometimes even those vague faces I drink with are all nitpicking at me below the surface, willing me to feed myself. I know that they can see I haven’t been eating anything and they’re all just itching to say something. My family would just love if I kept eating; I would stay they’re fat little girl for ever, exactly how they want me. And why would my friends want me to stop eating? We’re each in one big competition after all, contending with one another to look the best and to be the most attractive. They would never admit to it but I know this to be the case. I won’t lose. I’ve lost too many times before. I’m going to win, I think to myself.
Yet for all my reasoning and determination, I can’t stop looking at this beautiful food in front of me with my mouth watering up. The very air that surrounds me has been polluted with the allurement of this food, wrapping itself around my flaccid body, beguiling all my unsophisticated senses. If only there was some way of eating it and then making it disappear. Maybe I could invent a time machine that would allow me eat the food, fondly remember the sensation of doing so and later return to the moment before I put anything in my mouth and stop. Sometimes I do miss eating the way other people do. But I’m convinced now that all is not what it seems.
When I see a very thin girl mindlessly scoffing her meal at a restaurant, I think to myself, That must be the first meal she has eaten in months; because it’s just not possible for anybody to eat in this supposedly ‘normal’ fashion and still remain that skinny. If this is the case, then my contention that I am a freak is correct. Not only do I function under an evidently eccentric mentality by comparison, but even my body cannot operate as others do because unlike these bodies, mine simply can’t absorb food without erupting at the seams of my waistline.
Despite this knowledge, I start to give in to all those pressing temptations. I dive into the spread before me, hoping that if I chew loudly it will drown out the screaming voice in my head. It’s too late for her to stop me now anyway; a few bites and I’ve already ruined myself so I may as well commit fully to my sin. I’m eating only a very short while before I start to get pains in my stomach. I knew this was a bad idea and suddenly I can no longer drown out that screaming in my head; it’s all I can hear or feel now. I finally stop and realise that I’m lighted-headed, as if I’ve been pumped with hot air and the only thing holding me to the ground is this gall at the base of my torso.
I fall back into bed, where I’m almost certain I came from in the first place. Everything has gotten a bit blurry now. I’ve lost track of time and it’s dark outside so I can’t see anything properly. I wipe my mouth where a bit of drool had been trickling down and am suddenly aware that something isn’t right. Grabbing a nearby hand-mirror, I can just about make out my face in a ray of light, the source of which I do not know. As if an apocalypse has decided to take place in my head, all horrors of the world seem to crash down on top of me, igniting trepidation and hysteria. All my teeth have fallen out. I open my mouth just wide enough to see big pink gums and my tongue falling around in my mouth, no teeth to keep it fenced in.
‘Mum!’ I start screaming, but to little avail because it sounds too muffled for anyone to hear. ‘Mum! Come in here, Mum! My teeth, I need help!’
***
When I finally woke up, I was temporarily still convinced that there wasn’t a tooth left in my head. After a few moments of lingering distress, I slumped back on my pillow, reassured that it had just been a dream. But my uneasiness was always difficult to shake off and these nightmares usually left a moody and irritable residue to each new day’s premiere. They were quite common by that point in my life. Perhaps they had even become nightly occurrence but thankfully I didn’t always remember them. They were more or less the same from night to night; I would start bingeing on food in whatever the given circumstance and would somehow finish the dream with no teeth and an alarmingly realistic foreboding that would persist long after waking.
They were only dreams and given I had never read too deeply into them in the past I wasn’t about to start doing so now, regardless of the context. Besides, I had little interest in dwelling upon the subconscious when my conscious reality had begun to reach such a point of turmoil. An eating disorder comes about as a consequence of a great number of varying factors, as we have seen and continue to explore. What enables it to persevere and adopt new manifestations is often subject to the ongoing lifestyle of the given individual. As well as feeding on the person whose body it inhabits, an eating disorder feeds on the environment in which it lives. It is mutable in this way. Its ability to bend and contort as a means of fitting the necessary mould is both skilful and an absolute requirement to guarantee its further existence.
I suppose, it is this faculty that determined my eating disorder as bulimia as opposed to anything else. It took a measure of time though; I suffered an eating disorder long before I acted out any bulimic behaviours. The problem is that these words, phrases and concepts to which we attribute such mental illnesses are too ambiguous in their meaning. They are umbrella terms that have been generalised to a point of mild obscurity, if not total equivocation. Moreover, our understanding of them is usually very primitive, perhaps even completely ignorant, in comparison to the complexity of the particular disease. An acquaintance of mine, with whom intellect had not graced and who was aware that I’d struggled in this way, once highlighted my point perfectly.
‘Aren’t you, like, anorexic or something?’ he said to me. Yes, he executed his question exactly like that. Needless to say, I was unimpressed. But there seemed little point in lying; I had only recently written an article for my university newspaper in which I detailed my story, hoping to God some good may come out of it. Instead, I got this guy.
‘No. I’m bulimic’ I told him.
‘Oh right, yeah. That’s the one where you make yourself sick, isn’t it?’
‘That’s the one.’ If monotone sarcasm ever had a moment of prodigious notoriety, that would have been it. Well this is just brilliant, I thought to myself. Two years of emotional and psychological depravity and in one sentence, this guy had defined what it is to be a bulimic, convinced himself of whatever meaning he gave it and I imagine that in his own head, the matter was now completely resolved and closed for ever.
If I worked under the terms that this person set down for bulimia, for example, then what was I before I began purging? I don’t think it is so simple that I could say I was anorexic for some months and then later turned bulimic. Perhaps it would make all this much easier for us to comprehend if we opted to believe the above. But in doing so, we would disregard the accuracy with which we are attempting to analyse an eating disorder. Sometimes I wonder if it’s possible to be bulimic without displaying bulimic behaviours such as purging. But then I realise that nobody would understand this, not without understanding her and how she conducts herself. The fasting process I underwent prior to my bulimia was, you see, part of it. It was key in the cyclical behaviours that are governed by a repetitive mentality. One doesn’t merely resolve to never again let a meal rest in their body. Something has to provoke the thought and more than this, something has to make you really believe it.
In this way, my months of fasting didn’t merely provide me with the determination to just lose weight; they instilled that raw and pure belief in what I was doing. Though others may argue that the overall purpose was to lose weight, in reality, purpose had very little to do with it. Belief is a staggeringly powerful weapon and once it existed in its truest form, I abandoned logic because I knew that it could be championed by blind faith anyway. This was how I ought to live and I believed that, for the sake of believing something.
I’ve been told I have an addictive personality. It’s a fair assertion and not something I would deny with too much haste. I’m susceptible to becoming addicted to most things; lifestyles, people, moods, activities, you name it. It’s this aspect to my character that often sanctions and fuels my perfectionism in life. But through all my time spent thinking over those two years, I have wondered so much whether I simply allowed myself to become addicted to that bulimic mentality. Or better still, perhaps I just became addicted to the concept of belief, no matter where it fell. It’s natural for everyone to want to believe in something. I’ve never been an exception; my belief in God, for example, has been unyielding and pure in substance. I’ve had blind faith in Him since an extremely young age, probably since I was old enough to even grasp the notion. I never remember a time in my life when God was not in it.
***
I am seven years old. I attend family Mass every Sunday with Mum and Natalie. Dad and Peter don’t go to mass anymore so I pray extra hard for them. I always link Mum’s arm and Natalie does the same on the other side of her; we get uncomfortable on the wooden benches and fight with one another so Mum separates us by putting herself between us. But today Natalie and I can’t fight because it’s my First Holy Communion and everyone has to be on their best behaviour. Father Peter hasn’t even started speaking yet but I’m already tired.
Last night, Mum put the rags in my hair to prepare me for today. While I was practising singing This Little Light of Mine, she shredded a towel into strips, curled each around a chunk of my hair and knotted it on my head. I hate the rags and usually cry because they hurt my head. My hair is full with ringlets of hair now and my scalp is still sizzling from when they were taken out this morning. I don’t know why we spent so much time on my hair because it’s covered with a veil now anyway. I’m wearing Natalie’s Communion dress, which has been altered to fit me and also to look slightly different so nobody will know it’s the same dress. It resembles a white wedding cake, with frills falling like snow atop its silk threading and a pink bow at every turn. But it still feels too tight because Natalie is smaller than me and I’m too fat for it. I move around awkwardly, my dress making a noise similar to paper scraping on the floor with every gesture.
I’ve been looking forward to today for a really long time. My teacher had everyone in the class make their own poster with a stained-glass candle. They’re made out of coloured crepe paper, all stuck together on one sheet. Looking around, the church walls are dotted with those paper candles. Blues, reds, yellows and greens illuminate the building when hit by the rays of sunlight beating in. I’ve heard of the Northern Lights and how you can only see them in certain parts of the world. Spinning my head around all the colours of the church, I think this is like the crepe paper version of the Northern Lights. All the preparation we did was worth it because amidst the rainbow-spotted walls, I can see my stained-glass candle. It looks just as important as everyone else’s and I feel part of something really big. My candle belongs on that wall the way I belong to Jesus and to God.
After the first hymn, Father Peter starts speaking up on the altar. He’s my favourite priest in St. Fergal’s Parish because he hasn’t got grey hair yet, sings along with the choir and always talks to everyone after Mass. I’ve also never taken confession with him; I don’t like seeing the priests after I’ve taken confession because then they know all the lies I’ve told, how often I fight with my sister and how sometimes I don’t say my prayers. For now, Father Peter knows none of these things and I’m glad. When everyone is listening to the readings, I’m looking at the wooden crucifix that hangs at the top of the church. It’s huge and always looks like it’s about to fall down but after so long of seeing it, I never notice it anymore. It should scare me but it doesn’t because there is at least one crucifix in every house I’ve been inside; I’m used to them. But for now, I’m lost in that crucifix at the top of the church, thinking about Jesus and whether he made a lot of money on his Communion day. Everyone says that relatives, like all your aunts and uncles, have to give you money when you make your Communion; some kids make hundreds.
But I don’t want to make loads of money because it means that I have to spend the day visiting neighbours and relatives to collect it. I hate doing that because everyone will ask me stupid questions that they don’t want to ask and that I don’t want to answer. I’d prefer not to go visiting and just forget about the money. Besides, Ms Dilleen says that we’re not supposed to hope for money or presents and that today is special because it is the first time we will receive the Holy Eucharist. If we wish for anything else, we shouldn’t receive the Body of Christ because nothing is more important than that. I don’t want to accept the Body for the wrong reasons because I want Jesus to trust me.
‘You’re lying.’ Gerald said to me in class last week. ‘Everybody wants money on their Communion. Stop lying.’
‘I’m not lying.’ I told him.
‘Yes you are. You don’t actually think God is real, do you?’
‘He is real.’
‘I bet you believe in Santa too.’ Gerald laughed at me all day after that and told everybody that I believed in Santa Claus. I wanted to tell everyone that Gerald didn’t believe in God because I know everybody does and that they would think he was really bold for not believing in Him. But I was afraid of getting in trouble with the teacher, so did nothing instead.
It doesn’t matter what Gerald said anyway because it’s a sin to not believe in God. I’ve been looking forward to my Communion for weeks and even though I know Gerald is probably really bored somewhere in the church, I’m too happy today to care. But when I finally receive the Holy Communion, the moment passes before I know it has happened. I thought when I first took the Body that it would be a moment of pure magic and that I would feel God’s touch, like a spell had been cast on me. I barely realise it has even occurred until the wafer-thin bread gets stuck to the roof of my mouth as I walk back to my seat. I don’t mind any of this because I know that God doesn’t have to prove anything to me and that this is the whole point of belief and why they call it ‘blind faith’. We were told this in school and so I believe it.
After what feels like an exceptionally long Mass, all my extended family and I make our way to the Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel in Killiney to enjoy a meal. But by the time we’ve gotten there, I feel like crying and want to go home. Mum and Dad are seated on either side of me in one of the big gardens; they want to have some photographs taken to remember the day, but I won’t smile.
‘Leanne, what’s wrong?’ Mum asks me. I refuse to answer and everyone is getting fed up with me.
What I don’t want to tell her is that I’m not pretty enough for today and that I’m not sure Jesus wants to be my friend. I don’t want to be here anymore. I want to take off my sister’s dress, tear off my white veil and pretend I’m not here. But I can’t tell her any of that because then I’d have to tell her about what happened after Mass. I’d have to tell her how Gerald stood beside me and told me, ‘You shouldn’t be here.’
‘Why not?’ I asked him
‘Because nobody likes you and Jesus didn’t have any ugly friends like you anyway. All his friends were pretty.’
‘No, they weren’t.’ I told him uncertainly.
‘Yes they were. So you shouldn’t be here.’ When Father Peter walked over, Gerald didn’t say anything and neither did I.
Mum and Dad are getting really angry with me now because I don’t want to be in any of the photographs. Eventually, they give up and we go back to the hotel for the big dinner. I’m not hungry anymore. I feel like I don’t deserve to be Jesus’ friend, but I hope that maybe he won’t mind if I pray to him anyway.
***
There is a naivety among adults when it comes to children that they understand little and therefore, are perhaps limited in their ability to cause harm. I disagree. The capacity that children have to understand – albeit not fully – the things they do and various actions they take, is shockingly potent. Though I was never deterred from my faith by the cruel words of one boy, the dynamics of my relationship with God changed and, in truth, I don’t know if I have ever felt worthy of His love. Moreover, I have been sure for years that He has never cared for, nor required my faith. Subject to my own character, however, I have been nevertheless dedicated and completely addicted to that belief in Him.
More than weekly Mass attendance and conventional bedtime prayers, my faith in Him is an internal flame that simply refuses to burn out. The institution of the Catholic Church, which I have followed my entire life, remains only the facility I utilize in guiding that flame. And if ever my confidence in the institution finds fault or wavers, I am at liberty to turn inwards and seek peace in that most inviolable and faithful niche within. This is the power of belief and once instilled in a person’s definitive make-up, it lives with them in a most private manner.
Much like my devoted belief in God, the faith I had in my own illness was something I seemed addicted to. Understand me well when I say that I make absolutely no comparison between God and bulimia; but for a time in my life, both retained almost equal power over me and sometimes I wonder if I gave up on God in favour of my disease. The very thought upsets me and it’s usually something I try not to think about. If I were to completely admit the unvarnished truth, I would probably say that for that time in my life, I felt like God wasn’t enough and that my faith in Him simply couldn’t make me as happy as my relationship with bulimia. Or else, I just didn’t need Him as much as I thought I needed her. The sacrifices I made for her were, apparently, boundless.
While my reliance on her hit an all-time high and my devotion to God started stumbling, I found that my reclusive behaviour had become impossible. It had begun to draw too much attention among friends and family. Furthermore, from time to time, I would miss the life I used to enjoy. I had convinced myself that I had a greater purpose than others around me. While they luxuriated in social drinking, recreational activities and other simplistic fancies, I had surrendered to the darkness inside me. It had been, I thought, a necessary part of this greater purpose. But my pledge could only last so long. That’s the problem with this stage of bulimia nervosa; it’s usually only temporary because sooner or later, you just have to eat. I never considered that this lifestyle of fasting could last forever and for this reason, I have never believed myself to be anorexic. When you’re anorexic I assume that this is the natural way of living and thinking, much the same way as bingeing and purging is to bulimia. But it was never my natural way, merely a temporary stepping-stone to the next place.
We have briefly touched upon the issue of bingeing, though not fully appreciated the significance of its place within bulimia. You see, a binge is almost always inevitable when one goes without eating for such a long period of time. It doesn’t just satisfy the physical hunger that becomes you; it nourishes the psychological need to escape from your own controlling mind. In this way, the binge presents itself as the ultimate loss of control. It is the undesired pinnacle of a bulimic cycle and formed the collective moments of failure and shame that plagued me during that period. Bingeing was as common an occurrence as purging, given that if I hadn’t binged I would have nothing to vomit up anyway. But before we address the idiosyncratic measures involved in bingeing, I feel it necessary to explain how I came to define eating from bingeing.
After months without proper food, I would say my body was near ready to give up completely. My muscles had deteriorated, my energy levels were run into the ground and most of the time I was in tremendous discomfort, if not exhausting pain. I had forgotten what it was to eat when it took my fancy and because it was no longer a regular daily routine, it was as if I had fallen out of practise. I didn’t know how to eat anymore, not the way others did. It was too monumental an act now to just ‘eat’. Here is where the distinction between eating and bingeing began to form and also where my aforementioned lack of moderation would prove to be most destructive. I suppose it developed largely due to the concept of proportion. When we’re hungry, we eat in proportion to that hunger and pacify it adequately. But when you haven’t eaten for so long, it’s impossible to know how much food is required to fill that void which had taken up permanent residence in your stomach. And so, I didn’t merely eat, as the very thought seemed outrageous under these circumstances. Instead, I binged. It was an entirely different act, as we will explore at a later stage.
Much the same way that I fasted for months, I underwent a period of time in which I binged in more ways than one. Looking back, I’d say it lasted for only about a handful of weeks. It felt like longer at the time. You would think that one would feel a sense of liberation but that wasn’t the case. I had been so disciplined and perfectly controlled that sometimes I wonder if my subconscious was rebelling against the conscious mentally I lived under. Although that’s probably impossible because my subconscious was usually the problem in these things and that more than anything else, I felt ashamed of how out of control I was for those weeks. It was more than just letting my weight go; I let go of that tight grip which held me for so long. It was like all the straps that fastened themselves round the cusps of my character suddenly buckled. The seams of who I was trying to be burst and I lost all sense of definition. Without that definition, so went moderation. I retained little purpose anymore and therefore allowed my once-rigorous direction to go askew.
I ate whatever I wanted and ignored the alarm bells that chimed over and over in my head. My previously burning mind iced over and I now worked neither for my body nor my mind. I was a loose cannon, exploding amidst the chaos of uncontrollable urges. During this period, my sense of taste burst open. It was reawakened in a most crude fashion and stronger than any drug addiction, once revived, I could not see past the hunger or the cravings any longer. I ate until my stomach throbbed several times on a daily basis. It seemed to please others around me and so I began to associate food with the concept of being watched. It was a show as well as everything else. I performed a daily matinee of meals and snacks in a manner more grotesque than I’m ready to admit to just yet. I would wait out the stomach pains, which often seemed worse than any hunger cramps I had known before. Eventually, I would slip under the overpowering thump of anguish and retire into what I came to call ‘food comas’. Food, in the excessive way I consumed it, was paralysing and usually left me in so much discomfort that I was unable to function properly and would have to simply sleep it off.
Drinking also featured in my life in a way it never had before. Alcohol was apparently more unavoidable than food and I remember many nights when, during my feeble attempts to regain control of myself, I would drink on an empty stomach. I would endure an entire day’s worth without any food, telling myself that I was back on track, but would binge drink later in the night. Aside from the many health risks this lifestyle involved, I was usually conducting myself under one of two states. The first was total oblivion; I was either wiped out from the endless intake of food or else was smothered with the overwhelming inebriation of alcohol. The second was my own exhausted attempts at recovery from one or both of the above; I spent this time either sleeping through the food coma or the crippling hangover from the night before. This was my life for weeks and it seemed to please everyone just fine. As long as my family saw me eating and my friends saw me drinking socially, they were satisfied, unaware that my bingeing was just as dangerous and volatile as my fasting had been before it.
I recall a friend’s birthday spent in our local pub. Ami was turning 19 and we celebrated first with a surprise birthday party, to which I played host, and later with drinks. It was a most horrific night, in which a major turning point came for me in my illness. The day had been another ‘get back on the horse’ kind and I had avoided food all day, promising myself that I wouldn’t allow temptation to defeat me. One day at a time, I told myself, and I wouldn’t permit my silly cravings or peer-pressure to interrupt the mighty pursuit at hand. Yet when the moment finally arrived, I disintegrated. All my discipline and all my promises came to nothing that night.
It started with a glass of white wine, which couldn’t be avoided during a toast. ‘It’s just one glass,’ I whispered to myself. But in truth, it’s never just one glass or just one anything for that matter. That’s the problem with myself and others of my age; we sacrifice well thought-out moderation for the extremities of experience, hoping that we may reap the fruits of our endeavours in one way or another. I’ve seen it with alcohol more than anything else. What we of my generation do to our bodies on a weekly basis through the consumption of alcohol is nothing short of mass destruction. Yet it is met with an air of acceptance, which enables our actions, if not condones them entirely. And so we are often limitless in how far we will push those boundaries. Natural of our age I suppose but still little justification. I made this mentality applicable to most facets of my life during what I now call my ‘big binge’ (big because it was the first and it incorporated so much over such a long period of time). Everything I did was carried out under that rather haphazardly extreme fashion and any potential consequences bore little relevance in making my decisions.
So when a second drink was passed into my hand the night of Ami’s 19th birthday, I accepted effortlessly, having already failed my day and possessing little concern for any repercussions. Once I had failed, even moderately, then I would abandon redemption, simply committing to the bad deed I had already started. That is exactly what I did on this particular occasion. Binge drinking seems perfectly acceptable in contemporary culture. So when I declared, ‘You know what? I think I’m just going to get wasted tonight,’ it was met with a warm reception. I think I drank a bottle of white and devoured an unnerving amount of party food, including Brie and crackers, birthday cake, sandwiches and nuts. All mixed in my stomach not long before we were due to leave for the nightclub, I felt like I was on the verge of passing out with all the chemicals now hibernating in my system.
I felt extraordinarily exposed in that state, like my body wasn’t my own. It didn’t belong to me or my illness and instead tossed itself amidst the air of no man’s land, a purgatory in which there lived no purpose or even hope. The safety I had found in fasting had all but disappeared and I was falling fast, nothing to grab on to, nobody to save me and no place to retreat to and call home. With it came those nerves that had haunted me since early childhood. It was as if I was unprotected, like eating and drinking ensured something horrific would transpire in this now strange place. I had no harbour in which I could find asylum and rode on a current too powerful to control. Getting into the taxi that night, I tried to shake those forgotten feelings but to little avail. They resurrected inside me at an alarming pace.
***
I am 11 years old. The trouble with the girls in school started a while ago but Mum doesn’t know and now I can’t sleep anymore. I remember having problems sleeping when I was very little. Just before bedtime, I would become so anxious that I would feel sick to my stomach and I often cried for fear of being away from my parents, even though they were just down the hallway. I have no idea why it started but being away from Mum became a matter of urgency and it’s still an issue now. Since the girls at my school started being nasty to me, it’s gotten a lot worse and when I lie in bed upstairs, I feel like I can’t breathe because it’s too warm. My mouth dries up with the growing temperature and sometimes I have to gasp for air. I know most kids don’t like going to bed but this is different because I shake with terror when I have to go. I get so nervous when I’m alone up there. Mum tried leaving my bedroom door open and the landing light switched on, but it hasn’t made a difference. I still feel that panic setting in, as I watch the sitting-room clock tick it’s way to 9.00 pm, waiting for the drama to start unfolding.
Please stop, please stop, please stop, I pray in my head, wishing I could just stay up a little longer. I have become a nuisance to everyone in the house because bedtime is now a really horrible part of the day. I know everybody wants me to just go to bed and fall asleep like a normal kid but I just can’t and now I get scared that I won’t sleep, which keeps me awake even longer.
When I lie in bed, worrying that I will be awake forever, I think about bad things. I think about having to go to school tomorrow and suddenly I’m really upset. I can see myself getting up in the morning, putting on my school uniform, getting into the car and then being dropped off at the school gates. This sends shock waves through my body and I’m pumped with adrenaline, unable to focus on anything else but the thought of leaving this house tomorrow. Other times it’s even worse and I think about my Aunt Susie’s house. One Christmas, her house caught fire with Susie, her husband and their two children still inside it. It was Christmas Eve and their television, which was left plugged into the socket, sparked and caused the fire. The sitting room went up in flames and they lost everything but their lives. At this dead hour of the night, I can see those flames and eventually, I can see them in this house, growing bigger and taller like a plant in the earth. Night after night, I have mapped out how it would happen and what I could do when it does. It’s as if it is inevitable. I know that this house will catch fire one day and I can’t sleep because knowing that nobody will be awake when it happens makes my chest feel like it’s about to burst open. My family don’t realise the danger they could be in; they’re all I have and I couldn’t live if they didn’t.
Once I couldn’t stop thinking about the roof and how it was about to fall on top of me. Or if not that, then the floor underneath me was about to crumble and I would surely land atop my parents and brother beneath me, killing them. Then it would be my fault. On that particular occasion, I lay so still that my body ached. I was even afraid to cry too hard in case it shook the house at all. When I finally did fall asleep – after two trips downstairs – I was told that I had started talking in my sleep. My slumber was never peaceful and was always full of disturbances including talking, walking and sometimes screaming or shouting. The next thing I remembered after dozing off was my sister shaking me and telling me to shut up, that she couldn’t sleep because I had been so noisy. As she stormed away again to her room, her feet pounded on the floors and I stopped breathing, knowing that now the house had no chance of standing for very long. I don’t think I slept at all that night. I knew that if I fell asleep, I would never wake up again.
It’s around this time of scanning through all the bad things in my head that I start to cry. So I get out of bed and hover at the top of the stairs for a while, listening carefully and hoping someone is still awake downstairs. Mum and Dad sleep down there and some nights I see the television light from their bedroom shining on the walls. That’s very rare because everybody gets up really early in the mornings. It’s pitch black at the bottom of the stairs and I feel guilty because I know I’ll have woken Mum before I even knock on her door. She has gotten used to me doing this and listens for the creaks on the stairs that tell her I’m coming down to her. When I get to her room, I hold my breath so she can’t hear me crying and say, ‘I can’t sleep.’ I’ve been saying that every night for years.
In the darkness, a sigh flutters around the room which I know means Mum is trying to enjoy the next few moments in her warm bed before she has to step out into the cold. Dad is awake as well. He’s probably has a 12 hour shift starting at 8.00 am tomorrow, but won’t give out to me because he knows I’m upset. I wait at the door, my toes icy on the wooden floors and my back sore and stiff as I try not move in the noisy hallway. For a moment, I wish I’d never come down. I tell myself that I could have just stayed upstairs and not been so selfish. However, I have sometimes gotten to my mother’s door, turned around and gone back up to my room for this very reason. It never works out well and usually means I disturb my parents at a much later time and give myself more trips.
I can see movement in the darkness and Mum puts on her red dressing gown and walks me back to the landing. Though I feel better now because she’s in the room with me, I can’t shake my nerves fully because I know this is only temporary and that eventually, she will have to leave again. I can’t let her do that. I beg and plead with her not to leave me alone, that I won’t sleep and I’ll be all alone.
‘Leanne, what do you want me to do?’ she says, wrapping me in her red dressing gown. It smells just like her and sometimes she’ll let me have it for the night if I’m very upset. ‘I can’t stay up here all night.’
‘Can I stay down with you and Dad?’
‘Babe, I don’t know. You need to stay in your own bed.’
‘Please, Mum, please,’ I whimper. She gives in and I go back to their room with her, wedging myself into the bed between my parents. This starts to happen more and more and soon, my Dad has started sleeping in a different room. I don’t even go upstairs anymore. Instead, I go straight to Mum’s bed where the two of us argue until she finally just lets me stay with her. That moment when she says ‘Alright then’, is the happiest of my day. All my worries since waking have come down to just that and now, the worst has not happened for another night.
This place, this room is one of containment. I never want to leave it again. I want to board up the windows and the door and keep my mother here with me for ever. If I can do this, I will breathe easy again. I cling to this place for dear life because it’s mine to keep. It will never cave in or catch fire while I’m in it. I will protect this place with my mother and it will protect me from the bullies at school and all the other bad things that happen outside of it. I don’t want Mum to leave either in case something happens to her. I can’t lose her so I don’t let her go. I ask God to keep us here for ever.
***
We’re much too early in our story to start discussing the concept of control in detail. But for the moment, we can ascertain that I had issues with control since childhood. I never did develop much of a healthy sleeping pattern and still bounce from four to six hours of sleep a night, give or take. Of course, it doesn’t matter much anymore and I’ve grown to relish those dark hours of solitude. During these sleepless childhood nights, however, my apparent inability to rest easy was horrific. It is something I often forget about and it’s only now, as I reflect on those lost snapshot flashes from my past that I recollect how horrible they were. No child should have anxieties so desperately violent that they cannot sleep for fear of losing control. But I think this was the case with me, even if I wasn’t aware of it then. So knotted up about everything I could not control, my body seemed to switch a chord, following the trend and like everything else, I’d lost my authority over it even then. I swear, it often seems as if my bulimia was destined to happen, like she knew it long before I did. Looking back now I can see scattered traces of her among my dishevelled memories. It would be this lack of control that she would ultimately live off and seek to conquer.
The feeling was very familiar by the age of 18. Despite my already intoxicated state on the evening of Ami’s birthday, my friends and I proceeded to the bar nonetheless for tequila shots, vodka and every other toxic-sounding spirit. Anxiety was starting to set in. I could feel that food from earlier turning over the workings of my body and making me sick. I thought if I drank more, the feelings would drown in the haze but it didn’t work and I found my nerves slipping degenerately as the night progressed.
After my third round of shots – possibly more but I don’t fully remember – we graduated to the dance floor. That’s when the trouble started. The floor was packed full with people shuffling awkwardly. Sweat ran down my back and my mouth dried up with the intense heat. Pushing my head up for air from the sea of people, I was blinded by a bur of flashing lights overhead. Red, greens and yellows erupted in front of my eyes and I couldn’t distinguish the faces of my friends anymore. The music pumped in the walls around us and I could feel a thunderous beat pulsing from my feet up to my hands. Pins and needles traced my fingertips and I was certain that my head would soon eject itself from my body and float to the roof. All the while, my stomach anchored me on the earth beneath my feet. The sting of toxins, the dead weight of food and the stain of cigarettes suddenly clamped down on me and I knew my body was about to forfeit the battle.
A wave of urgency flooded over me and I darted with such speed that I doubt my friends had even caught my rapid exit. With no care for who or what I bombed through in my path, the lavatory door finally shut behind me. I crashed to my knees and drew my head up over the toilet bowl, not looking down. It was vomiting and that was all. Not purging, vomiting. But the satisfaction and relief that ensued were feelings I would come to associate with that familiar position, hunched over the toilet bowl for a long time thereafter. I slumped back on my legs, exhausted and struggling a little for air.
‘Leanne, you okay?’ I heard Ami’s voice come from behind the door.
‘I’m fine, don’t worry.’ I called out to her. ‘Go on back outside, I’ll be out in a minute.’
Once I was sure she had left, my breathing steadied and my body finally seemed to unite itself under just the one state of being. Aside from my knees feeling mildly weak, I was almost instantaneously relieved of the horrible sensations that had wrenched me moments before. I glanced back in the bowl, disgusted at the sight and waited for the adrenaline to leave my veins and bloodstream entirely. Sitting on that cubicle floor, my stomach now empty of the poisons that had previously inhabited it, it was as if my body was my own again. The emergency that reigned over me seemed to have dissolved so quickly since stepping into that cubicle and now here I was, feeling fine and completely in control of myself again. Yet when the time came for me to stand up and presume fixing my tousled make-up and clothes, I lingered on that floor. I still felt a little woozy from the drink and thought to myself that if vomiting had eased all that discomfort, perhaps just once more would make me feel completely sober.
It was debated for a few seconds in the back of my mind. I had already gotten sick, what difference would it make now? Leaning back over the toilet and nearly holding my breath due to the revolting stench, I strained my stomach and wretched at the air again and again. Nothing happened. So, committing to the thought of consequential relief, I dropped my bag to the floor and proceeded to slide my index finger down my throat. At first, my body was too tired for another round but with a little repetition and persuasion, the remainder of the contents in my stomach was emptied out in a matter of minutes. I was finished and now in a position to resume my night with ease.
Fixing my face in the mirror, it looked as if nothing had transpired. And I suppose, nothing had really; not beyond the usual evening a nightclub sees, whereby a teenager drinks too much and vomits in the nearest toilet. But what I remembered more than anything else that night was the vast difference of the feelings experienced before and after doing just that. My recklessness in the hours prior to dropping my head over that toilet left me strung out and wayward, while the feelings that seemed to render thereafter bounced between relief and a powerful sense of self-governance. Despite that, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t see that familiar monster flashing its devilish eyes at me from the reflection. Unable to behold the entirety of its ugliness, I hastened to rejoin my friends and continue in the birthday festivities.
Having reasonable command over ourselves is something most of us require, if not crave on a surface level. The methods we take in attaining that dominion status naturally vary from one individual to the next and the form in which said authority presents itself can be almost anything in the world. None of this occurred to me as I tidied myself in front of that mirror. But I knew that night that I had to regain control over myself. If I didn’t, she would slip away and I may lose her forever. Continuously fasting was no way to live a life, certainly not for me and I always knew this to be true. Together, she and I had to find a way of maintaining our life together in such a way that it could last the test of time and still enable us to keep our devout secret. From that point on, our was to attain sustainability.
In hindsight, I think our endurance came in the form of bingeing itself. Binge eating was what commissioned our relationship. A key factor to the secrecy of how we lived, it ensured that we would never be accused of skipping meals. People, especially loved ones, can be extraordinarily easy to manipulate and I was getting better at it anyway. Eating in front of them and everyone else for that matter, had started to make me extremely uncomfortable; there was and remains nothing worse than someone actually witnessing me devour food, and as I imagine – or at least have convinced myself – that surely there is no worse a sight. Nevertheless, when I chose to binge, it would be timed around others. I concluded that if I were going to destroy my progress, I may as well feed into my own propaganda surrounding my eating habits at the same time. The precision with which she and I carried it out was usually impeccable.
To draw our attention back to the matter of what a binge really is, we must delve into the technicalities of the act itself. It’s difficult to define where decision starts and disease finishes, as binges for me tended to transpire under a rather messy haze of confusion. Episodes like this could range from anything between 20 minutes to several hours and were fuelled by raw anxiety and panic. It wasn’t just the hunger that sent me into this kind of feeding frenzy; cravings and the penetrating desire for the mere taste of food was enough in itself. Combined, the temptations of taste and the sharp wounds of hunger sent me spinning. I stopped living as a human then and reverted to some form of animal. The predator who dwelled within me burst out in great extravagance and gorged like nothing I had ever seen before. Nobody can eat like a bulimic can and I was like a wolf on the brink of perishing.
Speed was everything. I seemed to think that if I forced it all into my system fast enough, it wouldn’t have time to morph its way into my bodily cells. The task was required to be skillfully crafted. While the rate at which I consumed this poison had to be of shocking dispatch, the contents had to be well ground-down; if not for the sake of an easier purge later, then even for my own peace of mind that masses of filth weren’t infesting my body in huge chunks. Therefore, washing everything down with liquid between swallows was an irrevocable necessity. If for no other reason, it meant that there was a degree of lubrication both to my throat and the food itself when the time came for it to surrender its place in my body. Apparently I couldn’t chew fast enough and I recall with great accuracy at a later stage in my illness, always contending with an aching jaw both during the binge and long after the purge.
When people think of bulimia, I assume they jump straight to the image of the purge itself, not realising that what leads to it is almost certainly just as grotesque a deed. For the purpose of our own understanding, perhaps we best draw on example in this case. Somewhere in that vast abyss of my disease, I have plucked a picture from my mind that has solidified itself in the deepest parts of my memory.
I was surely 19 on this particular occasion. Things were going well if I recall correctly and this, among other things, is usually detrimental to my fasting abilities. I have found that it’s when I’m at my happiest that I am most likely to eat. When the world seems a complacent environment and I truly start to believe in the given false sense of security, I eat as ‘normally’ as I possibly can. I assume that this was one of those rare times. Or perhaps I was just famished past the point of planning ahead. Whatever the reason, it was 2.00 am when I sat up in front of the television, twitching with the hunger and dwelling on how the house had bedded down long ago and would certainly be asleep by now.
Don’t ruin yourself, she hissed inside me, knowing my thoughts and desires. I knew she was right. Once momentarily unleashed, I knew I would let myself unravel completely. But I swear it had been like an abduction in which I was taken hostage by my body. I had no control from that point and sure enough, about an hour and a half after the thought first entered my brain, I sat exposed in front of an open fridge. By that stage, I had eaten three packets of crisps, a left-over steak dinner, two yoghurts, a bag of salted cashew nuts, a few chocolate bars and about a half litre of milk. It had only been 40 minutes. Still, I was not full. Too stuffed to so much as bend over for an extended amount of time, instead I plonked myself on the floor, rummaging around the cold shelves and feasting on a slice of lemon cheesecake in the process. With little to find, I settled on two bowls of chocolate cereal and one more packet of crisps.
My stomach had physically expanded like an inflated balloon and I was almost instantly light-headed from the rush of what I had done. I had eaten myself into a mental eclipse and would have cried, if my tear ducts had not been so incapacitated by the fat which smothered every inch of me. I felt like I had just poured liquid fat over myself like hot wax and was simply waiting for it to set. Collapsing back onto the couch, I was sweating profusely and thought my spine was about to snap as it attempted to uphold my weight.
The relief from my own starvation was temporary and short-lived. Those previous hunger pains had stopped long ago and so by the time I was through with my binge, I had already forgotten why I began it in the first place. Heavy shame set in. If anyone had seen me in those morning hours, they would probably never look at me the same way again, as I have never done so. The times spent bingeing, quite simply, remain some of the filthiest moments I have in recollection; they are the snapshots in time that are so violently maimed by my actions, I hate to think of them and indeed, my repulsive state within them. Bulimia nervosa is a disgusting illness in many ways for an alarming number of reasons, but this would be one of the most primitive of those reasons. Looking back even still, all I see is a mildly obese teen; breathless and panting, sweat rolling down her back, bits of every kind of food wedging itself between her teeth, tongue flailing, jaw throbbing, stuffing garbage down her throat and nearly taking her fingertips off in the process.
The humiliation attached to this picture is festered deep inside and even now, I am ashamed of it. I’m ashamed of who I was and what I did. But nothing I have felt since comes close to the swelling degradation in which I drowned then. That voice in my head stopped screaming and the silence was penetrating and life-altering. I had disgraced both of us to a point whereby I don’t think she even knew what to say. In the wake of her apparent absence – life, disease, purpose – everything stopped. The haunting nothingness of her eerie silence broke my heart. I thought the world had stopped turning and that time stood still. I was all alone then and more than ever before, that was when I truly hated myself.
I would rather die, I thought to myself. If this was who I really was, I would rather die than live as this. She would never forgive me, living as the monster I knew myself to be. Surely even God could not forgive me. And I was certain I would never forgive myself. I thought about waking the next morning and how the damage I had done tonight would be seen like scales on my skin. That notion, and the now encroaching feeling that life without her had no purpose, made me want to pull the plug on my own existence. Yes, I would have rather died. I dwelled so long upon the thought, that I sometimes wonder why or how I’m even still here today. It became more and more likely every time I felt that shame hang on me like a damp cloth. The potential reality of my own suicide is still something I often hate myself for whenever I think of how close I came to it.
I suppose this is why I saw purging as such a positive facet to my life. If I hadn’t purged, God knows what actions I would have taken instead. It is for this reason that I believed purging, and bulimia herself, to be somewhat of a saviour to me. If she had not provided me with the mental tools to do the things I did, I shudder to think what I would have done instead. But alas, we’re racing ahead and should restrain ourselves for the time being from launching into the purging process.
After the night of Ami’s 19th birthday, something had to be done. I had seen the monster again and was terrified to think what would happen if I let it out. I had been out of control for too long, had packed on all those lost pounds and had watched as my life started to unfold all over again. There exists a very fine line between dieting and eating disorders, and after years of teetering around that border, I had finally crossed it months ago. I think I knew this somewhere inside of me and where I usually typed ‘diet’ into the internet search engine, I know typed the words ‘anorexia’, ‘bulimia’ and ‘emaciated’ again and again. The words, as well as the facts and images that followed them, became an obsession. This was my pastime and soon I would make sure it was my entire life too.
The abundance of pro-ED sites on the internet would probably shock people who have never lived this way. For those who are unfamiliar with these websites, a pro-ED website is a place where eating disorders are endorsed, glorified and warmly condoned. They go so far as to affectionately name the most popular and well known diseases such as Ana (anorexia), Mia (bulimia) and ED (eating disorders in general). I feel obligated to verbally bash and condemn such places but even from my post-recovery point of view, I still can’t bring myself to do so. Though we could never undermine the dangers of these online communities and the toxic environments they breed, there simply isn’t any malice in their creation. What we are discussing here is sick people talking to other sick people, seeking refuge and understanding. To judge would only prove to accelerate our own ignorance. Moreover, I simply can’t lie to you dear reader and therefore must admit that in these underground worlds, I felt I was finally home. The sentiment I once had for these hidden places and silenced people is, to this day, tender to the touch.
It was more than a hot-spot for ‘thinspo’; this haven and these people provided the company I had beseeched for so long. Their words, struggles and even personalities leapt from the screen and straight into the most empathetic part of me. I knew these people as I know myself because we shared our darkest demons in that place. Free of persecution and the constant feeling of abnormality, in that safe space, I could step out from the shadows even if only briefly. I was myself for the first time in a long time. I was the self that she, my Mia, had created and I wasn’t embarrassed about who I was or what she had made of me. If anything, I heard the affecting stories of others and even begged of her to take me in as she had done so with these people. This was her mercy and she was my own personal heroine. Mia, Ana, ED – whoever she was, I now wanted to be hers entirely. No friend and no boyfriend could ever have what I gave to her because as I wasn’t worthy of them, so they were not worthy of her. Unable to take back all the self-worth I had given away of myself before, instead it had been merely shifted from one place to another. That worth fell into her hands; the hands with which she caressed me from time to time if I was good.
There in that terrain, the one which rests behind closed doors, tucked under baggy clothes and sizzling beneath burnt-out eyes, I had found my soul mates. They knew what it was to hate yourself. They understood how important it was to step on a scale every 45 minutes. They underwent the burden of sacrificing old friends and former loved ones for her benevolence. They felt the loneliness that plagued you during late hours awake in bed and the stabbing knife of hunger during daylight. Whomever the girl, she was the me of Jacksonville and Seattle; the me of Brisbane and Sydney; the me of Sheffield and Manchester; whoever she was, we were the same person because despite the different lives we lead, we stood united in our underworld of misery and depravity. Suddenly, I wasn’t so alone.
Aside from the camaraderie between the people who frequented such sites, I found a degree of freedom in having such a place in which to retire. I traipsed endlessly from page to page, soaking it up and breathing it in. I accepted the normality in which this world was being executed. It was as if this lifestyle and this state of being were so obviously natural to us all. I teetered my way through tips and advice, ways in which to properly conduct the progression of my disease. I discovered how best to suppress the hunger that was now a permanent part of me and more importantly, how to conceal everything with an almost professional air of efficiency. Moved and softened, I read the painful accounts of others and watched as they poured themselves into their words, seeking reconciliation and acceptance. The empathy and longing for their well-being remains as strong today as it was then.
Fasting competitions and gospels about the glory of eating disorders left little doubt that I was living as I was intended to. This, surely, was my destiny in life and the path God had set out for me. He had meant for me to share my life with my bulimia, I was convinced of it. There was a false sense of completion to who I was and my place in the world. I belonged here and thus, belonging anywhere else didn’t matter to me all that much anymore. Furthermore, these websites helped me justify my new lifestyle.
This isn’t a problem, I started hearing her whisper. This is a blessing in disguise and our gift to the world. Together, we are worth the air we breathe. United we stand and alone, neither of us may even dream to exist. I had discovered the Holy Grail and it was there, amidst those black feelings and lost memories. I was home.
***
My obsession, which had been born in the tiniest embryo of my mind, turned outwards and visuals worked in sync with feeling. What I saw corresponded greatly to what I felt thereafter. The problem was that even my ability to interpret such imagery was, in itself, contorted and insufficient for lack of a better word. Online ‘thinspo’ of celebrities and model-like figures wasn’t enough anymore because it could not attack my senses in the way reality did. Only through reality could my sharp thoughts and swelling feelings take life and walk the streets in front of me. Through the reality of my disease, those thoughts and emotions soon appeared everywhere. They were the kick in my morning coffee, the smoke from my cigarettes and every interaction I had with people. The epidemic had spread at a feverous speed and no longer existed only in my mind; finally, the world seemed to live in its reflection.
The pro-ED websites did not create my bulimia, but they crafted her. She was shaped through their existence, among many other things, as we continue to explore. Reality was found when I saw women exposing themselves on those sites. They weren’t models, or actors or a-list faces who walked red carpets for a living. They were genuine people living secret lives and were everything I could ever dream to be. I started to believe that there was an authenticity to their eating disorders and not to my own. What determined this credibility and degree of success in my bulimia would take various shapes and forms, which we will discuss at a later point.
But for the time being, I think I can safely make the note that it was these websites that classified my own eating disorder as bulimia nervosa. I say this because I learned – similarly to how a student in a classroom learns – the differences between what it meant to be Ana and what it meant to be Mia. Equally, I sought to define myself within the given conditions of the disorders I was learning about. I think once the disease was comfortably instilled in the workings of my mind, choices like these were easy because I wasn’t the person making them anymore. So, perhaps I didn’t choose to have an eating disorder. It chose me. Yet, once in full swing, I suppose I chose to classify my eating disorder to bulimia; I felt empowered by the very decision itself.
I knew I could never live the life of an anorexic. Though I had developed an adversity to food and a general discomfort with eating, I still never envisioned myself sacrificing it completely. Bulimia seemed an obvious answer to all my problems. It would be mine to keep forever and sometimes I wonder if it was as simple as “picking” it. I mean, nobody forced me to put my finger down my throat the first time I purged. I think sometimes though that by that stage I just chose to accept the lifestyle which already existed in my mind. It wasn’t a process of “picking”; it was one of submission.
Ultimately, what seems to define bulimia in the minds of others is the purge. The reality is that purging does not occur without a binge and sometimes a fast before it. My bulimia was defined by all three and as a result, was well underway in its manifestations long before I ever regurgitated my first meal.
But that crucial point was always going to come. It arrived sooner than I could have ever anticipated. That’s the thing with an eating disorder; for something that takes years to develop, when it finally shows itself, it snowballs. I was riding a free-fall and for some of the time, I rather enjoyed it. Granted, it went on to become the most dangerous and devastating chapter in my young life. But it wasn’t all bad, not at the beginning anyway. One doesn’t persist in this kind of existence unless one truly feels that something is to be gained from it. God help me, I really believed in it.
The various facets of my illness aside, I look back on the decisions I made during that time in my life with utter embarrassment. I’ve had so many moments of wishing I could return to that place, go back to that girl and shake her. I would tell her that it’s never going to be worth it; that if she continues this way, she will damage her family, her friendships, her education and future. But most importantly, I would tell her that she will damage her mental health almost beyond repair. Perhaps it’s a good thing I can’t do that because if I did, who knows what kind of person would be writing this, or if indeed such an account would even exist.
Both the fast and the binge have, until this point, been the blurriest stages in my disorder. Denial reigned through them and thus, distorted my recollection a great deal. It would be a very long time before I would ever admit openly what I had finally admitted to myself, as my denial to others outlasted my self denial by a large stretch. But in my own mind, there was no doubt anymore about what I had become. I knew it before I had even purged. Finally answering the screams of that person who lived in my mind, I thought to myself, Yes. I am bulimic.