Small Acts of Disappearance

I resisted, for a long time, reading any anorexia memoirs, even though I’d been reading about the condition in fiction and textbooks. Partly, I think, this is because of my time as an editor – I’d read so many badly-written pieces of ‘sick lit’, as I once heard the genre called, that I didn’t think I’d find anything there besides excoriating descriptions of self-hatred and self-harm, all laid out in excruciating detail. Partly too, we were warned against such stories in the first hospital program that I attended. One of the psychologists there had curled her lip when another patient mentioned reading Portia de Rossi’s terribly-titled Unbearable Lightness, then described it as a ‘how-to manual’. Another referred to Marya Hornbacker’s Wasted, something of a cult book within this community of illness, as ‘triggering as fuck’. (I love this term, triggering, how it makes it sound like we’re all packed tight with emotional gunpowder and coiled, ever ready to misfire.)

I resisted too because I’ve been frustrated by so many of the narratives of mental illness I’ve seen in the media, in film, in literature too, which can’t seem to hold together the complexities of recovering, of making mistakes and slipping backwards, of forgetting and relearning and forgetting again, of compromise and conditionality, or even the incredibly slow, repetitive and exhaustingly mundane nature of the process of getting better. The fall into illness, the difficulty of the illness itself, the realisation that something is wrong: these things can be accounted for, if not always easily, but everything that happens after we realise that we are ill and seek out help can’t be tied up so neatly.

But my resistance softened recently, in part because I discovered a collection of essays – called Going Hungry – by writers who were writers before they became ill, not writers who become so because they had been ill. Many of them I already admired as writers, before knowing that we had our hungers in common: the poet Louise Glück, the novelist Jennifer Egan. Many wrote of lingering symptoms, of fears that their hunger might reassert itself at any time, some wrote of becoming well enough, though far from well. The poet Priscilla Becker writes of ‘sett[ing] into a kind of working anorexia, not careening towards death, but…[still] disciplined, self-contained’; she quotes a friend of hers as saying ‘It doesn’t sound like you’ve been cured of anorexia, just that you’ve raised the bar a little.’

I recognise myself in this, still disciplined, still frugal, still tightly controlling of my meals; I still don’t like others to cook for me, am still frightened by a wide range of perfectly ordinary foods. But I also think that this is how the curing works – by raising the bar just a little, and then raising it again and again: I know that some of the things I do without thinking, now – like eating a sandwich, even if it’s the same meat-free and salad-heavy sandwich every day – were unimaginable to me once, but are terribly banal to write about.

Many wrote of continuing to work too hard or to ‘overschedule’, of continuing to be self-contained and difficult to get to know, of continuing to defer pleasure, of addictive behaviour, still, years later. One has written a book about adults who continue to live, long-term, at ‘sub-clinical’ status, well enough to evade diagnosis and the ever-tightening kind of control that my hunger once had for me, but still far from healthy; the oldest participant in her study was ninety-two years old.

I’m terribly afraid of living like this, sub-clinically, long-term. I know that I still I have to fight hard for my own health, but also that sometimes I still don’t want to. I miss the simplicity of illness sometimes. Because the more acute pain is in trying to get better – and it’s a pain that’s chronic too – and in stripping away the protection, the insulation, the certainty that my hunger gave me.

More importantly, what I realised, reading the stories in Going Hungry, is that I’ve been resisting, too, telling my own story, or rather, telling all of my own story. Because I didn’t want to be one of those women, the story that I tell, and that I’ve told myself, for years, is about how my physical condition made me into one of them. How the caprices of my body changed me into one of those women, that is, but not how I may well have been one of their number for a long time beforehand. I still think that what happened to me was the almost-inevitable consequence of a run of incredibly bad luck: that my physical illness, and the biochemical changes that starvation wrought on my body and mind as I waited for a diagnosis, combined with my drivenness and anxiousness to lead me to my hunger. But I recognise now within these other stories that my hunger was within me already, maybe even always. I’ve resisted telling this other story, I think, because I don’t want to hear it myself.

The very first time I lost weight I did it on purpose. I was fifteen, maybe sixteen; I was by no means large, but not lean either, and I was uncomfortable in my skin. I didn’t possess the easy, unselfconscious grace of my friends – the ballsy, glamorous Nina, dark-skinned and beautiful, who even at this age was buying Dior make-up and French lingerie, and wearing it with converse sneakers and Mambo singlets; the devil-may-care Anna who draped herself in black, whose hair and limbs were long and straight and glossy, who always carried a bag of lollies in her school backpack and once called me greedy when I took an extra chocolate from the bag that she was sharing around. (A teacher once told Anna that she ‘didn’t look like a lollies person’, and I asked, somewhat masochistically, if I did, and he responded, ‘You do, yes.’ It’s strange that I remember this now.)

I adored both girls with that teenage intensity of friendship that’s ferocious, almost obsessive, crush-like, and never matched again in later life. My friends seemed brilliant, carelessly eccentric, and completely certain of themselves and their own minds. I was awkward and over-eager, always trying to keep up; I wore double-D bras and brightlycoloured chenille shirts. I made tie-dyed pants in textiles class and pinned novelty buttons shaped like sunflowers and Volkswagons in my unruly hair. I know I wanted to dress differently and unusually, because I felt that I was different and unusual; perhaps all teenagers, to some extent feel this way. I cultivated brashness, a deliberately unfeminine brazenness that I never quite believed in, but that I still catch myself falling back into today. But these too, I know now, are common traits in the kinds of people who develop anorexia, complex and competing desires to stand out and to fit in, to be unique but be accepted, to push away the people who we don’t think will quite accept us, yet to long for them to take us to their hearts.

When I was fifteen, maybe sixteen, I borrowed my mother’s instructional pamphlets from the weight-loss program she attended every week in the hall of my old primary school; each food, and every ten minutes of exercise was accorded a number of points, to be credited and debited across the day. There was a booklet that listed an exhaustive set of foods by type and brand and flavour, a card with a movable wheel for calculating the value of anything not listed, according to its energy and fat content. I remember doing this, and yet I say, still, that I’ve never counted calories. I started walking of an afternoon, around the looping streets and bushland fire trails of my suburb, or caught a different bus that only stopped a good twenty-minute march away from home. I lost weight, and I liked it, and another friend referred to me as ‘new and improved’. I remember packing my own lunchbox, minimally, and yet I say, still, that I never had restrictive tendencies until I became unwell.

In my second or third year of outpatient treatment, when I was twenty-six or twenty-seven, I was waiting in the corridor of the hospital clinic, with its pastel walls and its over-excited heating system always cranked right up to keep our underinsulated bodies warm, when a woman walked up to the counter from the doorway, her waist cinched in a wide elastic belt, black and ribby over her striped dress. I recognised her from my high school, she’d been a prefect in my year, one of those whip-smart and unshakable girls, always groomed and composed, stately behind the assembly lectern. I assumed she was at work – our school was an academically selective girls’ school, we’d been told since we arrived there that we were the crème de la crème, the doctors, scientists, leaders of tomorrow – it made sense that she’d studied medicine and was there to confer with a colleague. When I greeted her she said she had come in to see someone, and I thought then that she meant a friend. She later told me she’d assumed the same of me, both of us unable to imagine that the other brilliant teenager we’d known had ended up as a patient within those walls.

When I told this story to my sister, who hadn’t felt at home within our high school and had always held a healthy teenage disdain towards its rhetoric of guaranteed success and limitless achievement, she was nonplussed. ‘I don’t think that’s a coincidence,’ she said.

I’ve always said that I thrived in my high school, largely because it was a small community, and a place where intelligence was admired, and eccentricity supported. I easily became notorious as someone who had both in spades. The school was, by the senior years, hotly competitive: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the girl who was my fiercest rival in English, the subject where we both sought to stake our claim, how she never ate at school but always maintained that she had a big afternoon tea when she got home, and how I dropped only three marks across the entire year’s assessments but was devastated when I did so. (In her poem ‘Dedication to Hunger’, Louise Glück writes about her fifteen-year-old, anorexic self ‘I felt/ what I feel now, aligning these words –/ it is the same need to be perfect/ of which death is the mere byproduct.’) We had another friend, Nina’s best friend, who for a time seemed to live off jellybeans and green apples.

In my senior years, my school allowed me to enrol in an extra unit of German, even though no other student wanted to do the course – I was allocated three lessons per week, one-on-one with a language teacher who already had a full teaching load, such was the school’s faith in my abilities. I was disciplined, I worked hard, and my achievement was always tangible and immediate: we were ranked against our classmates every time we were assessed. Lisa Halliday writes about the drive for ‘objective standards’, for the measurement and assessment of her self, as being critical to the development of her disease; because I never used the bathroom scales to set these standards, like most others with my illness, I never realised that this too was part of me, even then.

When I was fifteen, I remember being set an assignment in the subject that I liked least of all, Personal Development and Health; we had to write a poem called ‘About Me’ (it must have been an exercise for self-esteem) and I stalled and avoided the task for months beyond its due date, until I was told that I would fail the subject unless I handed something in. I couldn’t say, at the time, why I wouldn’t do the task; one of the reasons I remember this so clearly is that I’d never not handed in work before. Louise Glück writes that in her school years, her anorexia served to ‘construct, in the only possible way when the means [were] so limited, a plausible self;’ she adds ‘I had great resources of will and no self’. More and more now this makes sense to me, I was modelling myself off the friends around me (perhaps all teenagers are like this) but I always thought that they’d eventually spot my fraudulence and catch me out.

I wrote my first poems at school, as a major work for my final exams. I read these again recently, and was horrified to realise that one of the last poems in the sequence is about a teenage girl who isn’t eating, who is over-exercising to the point of dizziness, who wants to be empty and glossy and untouchable. A girl who ‘watches her stomach’s juices/ turn to/ attack her own body’ and who ‘knows she’s a martyr/ a hero/ a warrior/ and her will is stronger/ than theirs.’ A girl who is obviously circumstantially similar to how I was then – she lives near an athletics oval, catches the train to school, refuses to shave her legs. I know the poem wasn’t auto-biographical, that I was imagining myself into a character, the way all writers do, but it’s the insight in the poem that chills me now – the anger in the girl’s running, the distance she feels from others, the almost fetishistic listing of foods she won’t allow herself, the way she feels the grease from what she does eat on her lips. I didn’t know what lay ahead, but I seem to have been already writing myself into an anorectic body, preparing myself for an injury that I hadn’t suffered yet and the scale of which I never could have foreseen.

I was seventeen when I wrote that poem. It was barely eighteen months later, that my physical illness developed.

In the interim, I started university, something I had been looking forward to with an almost itchy anticipation. I had been told that I would have the best years of my life there, that I’d flourish, but instead, I just felt lost. I was studying media, because I only knew that I liked writing and had high marks – too high, my school careers advisor had once said, to ‘throw away’ on a plain arts degree. It seemed like I was one of only about a dozen students in the hundredstrong cohort in my course who hadn’t gone to a private school, learnt debating and a woodwind instrument, and paid their university fees upfront. They were mainly young women, and a kind and class of women I’d had no contact with before – just as they had had no contact with people like me. They asked each other where they’d gone to school, and placed each other accordingly and simply. They carried their notebooks and textbooks in those shiny cardboard bags with rope handles that designer clothes shops use, and wore, as I wrote at the time, ‘sunglasses wider than their arses’. Perhaps the differences between us felt embodied, even then.

In the last hospital program I attended, another patient, a chatty, blonde-bobbed woman, spoke about her first year at university. She had been one of these private-school girls, but had chosen to study in a regional university, and had not known how to place herself within its student body because none of the students she spoke to cared where they or she had gone to school. Our experiences, I laughed, were inversions of each other, but it wasn’t until months later that I realised that inversions are more similar than they are opposite.

When I started university, most of my friends from high school – those women whom I’d unconsciously shaped myself off for years – got swept up in their new lives and new friendships and fell suddenly and completely out of my orbit. I felt Nina’s loss most keenly. I remember calling her on my brand-new and first-ever mobile phone one day when we were supposed to meet for lunch in Chinatown; she didn’t answer and I rang again, and again, not yet knowing how uncool this was, too eager, too graceless again.

Where I did start to make friends was through a dazzling, chatty strawberry-blonde from my German class, a woman with the same brazen insouciance as Nina and the same casual ease in her slender body. Charlie’s friends were mostly scholarship students, they were involved in theatre, in bands, in student politics and even national-level competitive Scrabble; they were witty and devastatingly ironic. When I talk about them now, I call them protohipsters; but at the time, I just felt gauche and painfully ordinary beside them, beneath them. At university, too, those objective standards that I’d previously met so well, those marks and rankings, fell away, and I couldn’t figure out how to measure myself without them.

Sarah Haight, whose illness began in her first year of university, writes that she found herself, like me, like my blonde-bobbed fellow patient, no longer ‘a local celebrity, or even one of the smartest girls in the class’. She writes that, when she found herself without the ‘constant external affirmation’ of achievement that she’d experienced, like me, at school, she was anchorless, bereft. It’s so simple a step for hunger to come to inhabit this void, for denial to become a new kind of achievement, a shrinking body to clearly delineate a self that feels amorphous. Anorexia has rituals, rules and structure; I know that part of what confused me in my first year at university was the complete absence of these things.

I know too that I dieted in that first year, because I had been diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome, a relatively benign endocrine disorder that something like a quarter of all women have; the doctor had warned me that the condition can increase the risk of diabetes and so it was important to avoid becoming overweight. I had gained some weight that year, going out for lunch with classmates during long breaks between lectures in the nearby café-cultured suburbs so unlike where I’d grown up, and having late-afternoon drinks on the balcony of the university bar (I drank luridcoloured pre-mix then). They called this ‘fresher spread’ at the university I attended, the phenomenon common enough to earn a colloquial name. I remember eagerly mentioning my diet to Charlie at a Thai restaurant one night, thinking somehow it would earn me some kind of praise; instead she crinkled up her nose and turned away. (Charlie also asked me, the next year, after my physical condition had developed, why I was eating my lunch at all given that it was making me throw up.)

In the story that I tell, and that I’ve told myself for years, this diet – barely a year before I first fell ill – never features. I had almost forgotten that it happened at all. Because what happened next – the months of unexplained and unconscious vomiting, the rounds of frustrating and often condescending consultations with doctors and gastroenterologists, the rapid weight loss that soon left me and those around me terrified – all of this is so much more dramatic and easily narrated, as well as so much more unusual, that the diet seemed unimportant in comparison.

So too this: in the year that I first become ill, when I ran into women who I’d been to school with, they never failed to tell me that I looked wonderful, that I looked different. When I went out for meals in groups I now had to be catered for, given special menus or different dishes, I was no longer just another part of the crowd. When I was hungry, I felt alert and intense and alive along every inch of my skin, and I felt unassailable in a way that I hadn’t felt for years. Jennifer Egan writes ‘I felt as if I were finally coming into focus, hard and sharp and light, released from the bulky packaging of my sadness.’ Louise Glück writes of sacrificing her ‘interfering flesh’ until her ‘limbs were free/ of blossom and subterfuge’, I shared this sense of paring back to something that feels bare and bold and true.

My illness, that is, began to give me the structure that I felt anchorless without, came to give me the distinction that I couldn’t find anymore in the huge and ever-mobile population of university. It felt definite when I was anything but. And pushing through hunger, past the physical weakness and tiredness that it imposes on the body was a new kind of achievement, and one that no one else around me came close to being able to attain. My illness made me different from the people I already felt alien to. They needed, I didn’t, and I didn’t feel anything as keenly any more, my body and mind both numbed by malnutrition. I had found a way to possess myself, my own kind of grace.

This too, I know, is only a part of the whole story. My illness, and the long months that it took to find a diagnosis, affected my cognition and emotions and behaviour just as prolonged hunger affected those young men in Minnesota. I know that my fear of throwing up couldn’t help but make me nervous around food. (I’ve experienced this again recently, watching my boyfriend react to my unexpected bouts of vomiting, listening on as he tries to find a reason or a pattern or a way to prevent it from happening next time; anyone, I realised, would become wary of food in my position.) I know now that many people first experience disordered eating as a result of physical illness; and that the intense pitch of my emotions makes me vulnerable to mental illness. All of these things are still true; it’s just that I recognise I’ve always been more comfortable with these parts of the narrative, no doubt because – like all anorexics, ironically enough – I can’t stand the idea of being common, of being a cliché, even and especially in my illness.

I don’t know, though, where acknowledging all of this leaves me. I maintained, for years that it didn’t matter exactly how my disorder developed or took control, simply that it did, and the important thing was learning how I was going to pull myself clear. I wonder now if these elisions in the narrative have kept their dark power, somehow, for remaining in the shadows of the story that I’ve told myself in the meantime. I know that my hunger, my illness allowed me to fashion a new self. I have been struggling now for several years, to find a way to be without my hunger, and that in the process, I so often feel gauche and graceless, uncomfortably thin-skinned, just like all those years before. (I often joke that recovering is like a second adolescence, made all the more acute by the reignition of my hormones – I’ve lived for so long without both ragged lust and raging mood swings that they always catch me by surprise.)

On a recent weekend, I found myself walking through the grounds of my old university – I now live just streets away, and was crossing through it as a scenic shortcut to a bus stop I needed to use. I walked past the residential colleges, past the bar used by the arts students, the grandiose main sandstone building where my first media lectures had been held. The carillon bells were playing, so I stopped in the shadow of the building, on the clipped, plush lawns, to listen, and was overtaken, suddenly, by a swift, deep sadness of place. For the girl that I was, I suppose, lost and desperate and confused within those walls, and so terribly alone. For the girl who had this hunger already within her, and for the woman who I’ve been, who I’ve become. The bells stopped and I stood back up. I brushed the dirt from my jeans and kept walking.