Jason was thrown into the deep end right at the very beginning. When we met in September 1993, I was a tiny ball full of laughter. Then, one morning five months later, out of the blue, I woke up crying.
It may have been the recklessness of mania that threw a few cocktail dresses and stiletto heels into the back of Jason’s car as we embarked on a road trip to Cape Town, but he just assumed the girl he’d fallen for didn’t eat, sleep or stop talking. The crazy high continued for a couple of months, but, inevitably, by January it had softened. In February I started gaining weight and taking a horrifying cocktail of slimming drugs in an attempt to restore my energy levels and control my weight. To no avail. The ball was already rolling. There was no stopping the cycle. The decline was inevitable. And on that March morning, when I woke crying for no reason, Jason was suddenly with a very different girl – one who constantly wept, slept like a newborn and couldn’t ingest enough starch.
I’d also started vomiting. As a child my sisters used to tease me about my ‘allergies, allergies’, because I so often had my head in the toilet. I suppose my childhood vomiting was a nervous response, but we put it down to my ‘sensitive constitution’. By my teenage years it seemed like all the girls did it on occasion. But when I started doing it regularly, it was in desperation, a manifestation of angst and terror. I was out of control.
When I was young, my father had once come home with enough bubble bath to fill the entire swimming pool. Naturally he ruined the filter, but for one glorious day our suburban pool was transformed into a giant scented bubble bath. That frothy day reminds me of mania, but the depression following a manic episode is like swimming in the pool after the filter had broken – everything is heavy and dark.
My eating patterns during those two phases were equally polarised. Mania was ‘Sly Anna’, who surreptitiously fed the dog her lunch under the table when no one was looking. Sadly, Sly Anna left along with the laughter of mania and was replaced by the weight of bulimia. If bulimia had a sound, it would be like the thud of the first spadeful of sand thrown onto a coffin in the ground. You can’t see through bulimia – it has a kind of murky finality to it. Thud, it pulls you down with the weight of the ages.
Bulimia is grim, a dirty, self-loathing sickness. I’d sit alone on the kitchen floor with Capote, my long-haired miniature dachshund. We’d start at around midnight, an epic, disgusting binge that began with the baking of fudge and chocolate brownies. After the fudge, we’d move on to every bulimic’s fallback favourite: toast. Eventually I didn’t bother to toast the bread or even defrost it properly – just swallowed hard on the frozen bits in the centre. Capote, always loyal and as greedy as me, would do a fine job of following suit, packing it in regardless of taste.
We failed to notice the healthy foods, the salads or fruit. They didn’t have a role to play on this particular journey. I was so afraid and lonely, convinced that if I just kept eating I’d never have to leave the room, never again have to sit in auditions, as I had countless times since moving to Cape Town, waiting to say, ‘Hi, I’m Rahla. I’m from Storm modelling agency. I’m 5.4 and I weigh 54 kilograms. Shoe size 5.’ Never again have to be looked up and down by boys who were just as aware as I how precarious was my pedestal. A lipstick smudged, a kilogram gained, a blemish, a new girl in town – anything could topple me.
I gazed around the rapidly emptying kitchen, all the food pretty much flattened. My eyes rested longingly on the rat poison at the bottom of the broom cupboard – aah, to sleep, perchance to dream. To be rid of the pressure, the loneliness, the sense of debt, the emptiness. To be rid of the crippling hunger.
I was so full. So sick and tired, sleepy but unable to sleep. Capote looked up at me imploringly. One more lingering look at the box of rat poison and I headed for the toilet, toothbrush in hand, resigned to bringing it all up. To purge myself of the shame, the toxins and the guilt, rid myself of the fat. Maybe even momentarily be rid of myself.
I had a slimy gremlin living inside me. No matter how much food I gave him, he was never satiated. I’d stuff myself and stuff myself in a bid to drown him, but he’d just grow. Then I’d try to throw him out. Throw him up. But he stayed, fixed as he was inside me, inside my organs.
Thank God I eventually plucked up the courage to tell Jason about this nightly ritual. By that time, I’d quit my job and had pretty much quit life. Eating and vomiting four or five times a day isn’t living. It isn’t anything remotely related to life. Not unlike anorexia, bulimia leans closer towards death than it does to life.
Most young boys of twenty-four would have been repelled. Not Jason. He tackled the issue as he tackles everything: gently, kindly, but proactively. I’m an ostrich. God knows whether it’s laziness or cowardice, but I’m not just a procrastinator, I’m a total denier. Jason is the opposite. As an idea enters his mind, he acts on it. He insisted we tell my parents. They had long suspected it. My family, as always, were compassionate.
The doctor gave a ‘guarded prognosis’. In layman’s terms, he wasn’t prepared to guarantee that I’d live through it. My oesophagus had collapsed from the abuse, and I had the look of a bullfrog or a blowfish because of the swollen glands around my throat. My hands were calloused and I vomited blood. Later in life I’d lose a lot of my teeth, as the acids produced by the stomach during excessive vomiting cause tooth decay. My hair had thinned and my skin was chalky. I felt cumbersome in my body and cumbersome in the world. When I moved at all, I kind of lugged about.
I thought that in acknowledging the problem I’d done my share of the hard work. Now the professionals would step in and make it better. But acknowledging it is only step one. Then you must begin to live and work with the professionals and the illness.
Bulimia is like being in a crowded shopping mall, with a heavy-metal band playing full blast and everything speeded up. I don’t believe that the sufferer can go it alone. Stuck in the trenches, soldiers don’t usually stand up, rip off their uniforms, throw cake at one another and make white flags out of their underpants as the English and the Germans miraculously did in December 1914. No, they shit themselves. They say ten Hail Marys and shoot. Bulimia is fighting on the battlefield. It’s a daily battle. Every day the victim empowers new enemies, and then has to fight them off in order to survive.
Often, in misguided attempts to make me feel better, people would say things like, ‘You alone have the power to make yourself better.’ That frightened me more than anything else. I had been waging war in solitude for months. If I could have done it alone, I sure as hell would have kept the battle to myself.
Eating disorders, drug addiction and alcoholism – maybe they’re all different responses to the same stuff, that which disempowers a person. When people cry for help, they need help. Only later, when their health is improved and the wolf is at bay, can they get in touch with their inner strength.
I don’t believe any of us should ever have to get better from anything on our own. As a species, we support one another. That’s part of the joy of humanity. Ultimately, yes, I know all that stuff about coming into this world alone and going out of this world alone and you go to bed alone at night and blah, blah, blah. But sometimes people come and tuck you in, and that’s cool.
Two years before my confession to Jason, the sky had embraced my light body as the ground elevated me. I’d been Icarus in free flight. It had started with a diet. Dieting was effortless. In fact, it wasn’t long before eating seemed like rather a silly thing to do, a waste of precious time. The ingestion of food became disgusting, stupid.
As food went out the door, so, too, did sleep. I’d be up all night baking – ironically – dancing in the kitchen, listening to Radio Metro, the late, late show. I was wired to the moon. I felt immortal, unencumbered by mundane needs like nutrition or rest. I was divine. I felt more like me than I’d ever felt. It seemed that my body had been inhabited by another girl my whole life.
My pants were falling off my delicate frame. I secured them with a piece of rope, like a sailor. I loved the feeling of being thin. My brain was like a sharpened blade; I could cut through to the core of things. Things that other people couldn’t fathom were clear and simple to me. I was concise, with millions of ideas whooshing constantly through my fertile mind. I didn’t filter any of them. I just spewed them out in a crazy dance of frenetic chaos. No one could tie me down. I flew. I was so close to the sun that its rays energised me, making me more exuberantly alive.
But of course all was not really well. One night, I collapsed from malnourishment. The following day I landed up with Dr X, a psychiatrist. It was a Monday afternoon. The air smelt of a Highveld storm and rain marbled the view of the doctor’s garden I could see through the window. I was safe, warm and dry. It had been so long since I had eaten that my mouth was parched.
Soothing classical music was playing. Fresh jasmine tumbled out of a terracotta vase onto the table. I soon blotted out its lingering scent with the foul smell of cigarettes. I could taste my putrid breath. Bad breath from smoking and not eating.
The doctor listened to my stories. He was kind and accessible, appeared not to judge. He said I had anorexia. That was cool. I had friends who’d had it. I thought it was a sign of a strong will; rather admirable, really. I was happy and satisfied with what I considered a glamorous diagnosis. I think I thought I couldn’t also be fat if I had anorexia.
So it wasn’t haphazard, this starvation. It had a name: anorexia. Everyone else had suspected anorexia for some time. The doctor was gentle, as though I may find the news shocking.
Now, two years on, after all my bingeing and purging, my dirty midnight secret, my crashing and confessing to Jason, I was back at another doctor. Another diagnosis. There were no photos, no ornaments and certainly no flowers here. Dr Y was kind. They were always kind. We talked and talked, or at least I talked and he nodded vigorously in agreement. He explained me to me. Youngest of five children, a lifetime of dancing, the odd stint in front of a camera – eating disorders, it seemed, were almost inevitable. I didn’t care; I just wanted to feel the unbearable lightness of being, I wanted to go back to being manic, even though I didn’t yet know what ‘mania’ was or of the dangers it held.
Dr Y was keen on eating disorders. He was knowledgeable about dysfunctions surrounding women and food. When he diagnosed me as bulimic, Princess Di had it too, so bulimia was kind of all the rage. Society seems to go through ‘it’ psychiatric phases. I’m not sure if it’s because pharmaceutical companies come up with new drugs or because celebrities ‘come out’ with their crazies. What I do know is that until I was correctly diagnosed as bipolar, I was a serial psychiatric patient.
Medicating me was simple. The ‘it’ diagnosis of bulimia came with the ‘it’ drug. Princess Di had come out in favour of Prozac. In high doses it helped to curb binge-eating. Later, much later, I was to find out that in high doses it also tripped the light fantastic into mania. Whoopie.
Dr Y referred me to a dietician. I arrived forty minutes late, but felt soothed by the music, the cool breeze, the fresh roses. She was pretty and she spoke gently.
‘When you have an eating disorder, it’s all darkness, and people say that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but for you it’s only darkness. There are flashlights, little torches you can hold, people who will guide you through the tunnel, giving you enough light to put one foot in front of the other. That’s all you can do. Put one foot in front of the other, take one step at a time, one day at a time.’ For the first time in months I felt a sense of hope, of safety and of an imminent journey.
Zhan, the dietician, came into my life like an angel. She taught me how to eat, one mouthful at a time. She reminded me how to chew and swallow. It was terrifying. From anorexia to bulimia, my relationship with food was turbulent both physically and emotionally. I couldn’t remember when last I’d felt genuine hunger and responded by eating. I approached food as a child reacts to an abusive parent.
Zhan’s slow pace was appropriate for me. She worked instinctively, healing and teaching, healing and teaching. She drew charts and pictures. She treated me like a child. On many levels, that’s what eating disorders do. They reduce you to the helplessness of a child.
I started to make my environment calmer. One day I saw an advertisement in the paper for a nursery school teacher in a small town called Rustenburg. I phoned the headmistress. She liked my CV, so I caught a bus to Rustenburg and fell in love. The school had an aviary at its entrance. The children were all barefoot. They had grubby clothes and clean, shiny faces.
The logistics didn’t enter my mind. I didn’t know how to drive. I didn’t know where I would live. I was by no means cured. Jason and I had been together for about one-and-a-half years. He and his family supported me. My family were nervous. But I went and it was the best thing I could have done.
My two years in Rustenburg were of the happiest in my life. I felt sheltered and loved. My class was called the Rabbits. My classroom was decorated in pink and green. Jason’s stepmother lovingly made curtains and cushions with fabric depicting bunnies playing in a field of pink flowers. Just as my relationship with Jason provided a safe environment, so did the school, the teachers, the parents and the children. The children were unspoilt, unsophisticated and very loving. Jason wrote school plays and I directed them. Living in a small town worked well for me.
During my years in Rustenburg, I finally learnt to drive. My eating normalised. My confidence was boosted. I wrote cars off with alarming regularity, but I managed not to injure anyone. I saved (for the first time in my life) enough money to put down a deposit and buy myself a new car. I wrote it off after a week. But the act of buying it was swell.
Life wasn’t all light and breezy. There were periods of loneliness and despair. But generally my life was toned down; so quiet that it accommodated my feelings and successfully kept most emotional turbulence at bay.
Towards the end of the second year, I was ready to approach reality again, and we moved back to Johannesburg. Jason and I found a little house with roses in the garden. We went on holiday to the Seychelles. I panicked that Jason would never marry me. He panicked that he would. In May, I gave him an ultimatum. In June, he gave me a ring. We moved into a fancier, bigger house with all sorts of flowers in the rambling, frolicking garden.
Then my mood wobbled. I went into denial. I discovered Ayurveda. I did extensive rebirthing and breathing work. I was told that because I was always convinced I’d been an unplanned baby, I’d never felt welcome in the world and, as a result, I was breeched at birth. I had to be hypnotised to relive the trauma of being born. I relived it all in my bathtub. My mood went into free fall, down, down, down, but not to where the iguanas play. I remained in denial. I was studying to become an Ayurvedic practitioner, but this didn’t protect me. Nothing, it seemed, could protect me. My mood crashed to the solitude of the bottom.