I don’t want an A for anorexia

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/18/anorexia-eating-disorder-psychiatric-hospital

Version 0 of 1.

“You haven’t scooped all the butter out. Finish it all.” The nurse’s stare invaded from across the table, and her words continued the assault. She had finished supervising my breakfast, but was hell-bent on discovering any trace of leftovers, any hint of my illness now showing its mark in the almost empty flora pat beside my sticky fingers. They were sticky because – bowl of full-fat milk-soaked cereal, cup of tea, glass of water, glass of orange juice, two pieces of toast with butter and jam down – I had not been allowed to wipe my hands. Or my face for that matter, which was now sopping wet with tears. “You’ll just try to secrete your food in the napkin. You can clean yourself later.” Good bloody morning to you too, Nurse Ratched II.

As far as life ambitions go, this wasn’t one I had ever had in mind. Achieve highly at school, get that much-toiled-for degree from Cambridge. Add to that the all-important master’s in journalism, which with luck led to a job as a reporter at a local newspaper. In that world – my world – where grades, words and bylines meant absolutely everything, things were going swell. But delve between the lines, and under the increasingly baggy clothes I chose to hide my shrinking frame, times were getting tougher. Edith (as I came to call my illness), was growing inside me as I lessened in her presence. And before I could hear the alarm bells myself, I heard instead my friends, family and colleagues screaming in fear. I was pulled away from my path, and, before I knew it, had been pushed down the rabbit hole of recovery. First stop? The eating disorder wing of a psychiatric hospital in central London.

Admittedly, the warning signs had been there for a long time. The subtle marks of sickness that tied knots in my stomach, in place of hunger, and stopped me from eating. The discomfort I felt, like the itch of a well-worn woollen jumper, when a friend would choose a restaurant, dreading an inscrutable menu. The panic I felt not in heart or head, but deep-set in my gut, whenever I felt stressed, angry, upset, or scared. In truth, any emotion whatsoever had no chance to be processed, but would quickly spread from the mental to the physical, stunting my appetite in its tracks.

It was only recently that the visual symptoms of illness caught up with underlying obsessions and compulsions. It showed in my sunken face, in my baggy clothes, and in the small bird etched on the right hand side of my lower back. The tattoo had been done two years before, designed smack bang on the fleshiest part of my 23-year-old body and proclaiming independence. Where once it flew freely, it now hung low beneath a shadowy crook. Twisting my brittle body at an angle, I struggled to see its wings, hidden as they had become below jutting bones and wan skin. Freedom? Hardly. It spoke of tormented imprisonment. Caged and bound, it was held captive by a brittle frame outlining inner angst. Just like my mind had become enslaved to my body. And my body, in turn, was restricted by my mind.

The days in the hospital were Groundhog-esque, discernible only by the rotating menu of potato-based dishes – served with sides of full fat cream, cheese and more potato. Five days out of seven, mornings began with said breakfast. The other two were reserved for weighing days when, woken by an imperious nurse at 5.30am, we were told to “evacuate” ourselves with the bathroom door open, before dressing in strait jacket-like hospital robes, underwear free. Then we were herded one by one on to the chair scale. Sitting on the wheelchair contraption, half asleep but fully awake to my situation, I felt helpless. Days continued their ebb of supply and demand – the hospital supplying the food, and demanding every morsel be finished. If a milligram of food was left uneaten, its calorific value was compensated with expertly measured units of meal replacement milkshake.

I focus on the food because we became mere receptacles for it. Vessels that, once emptied and forsaken, now had to be filled to the brim. I saw girls crumble at the sight of a cookie and cry over un-spilled milk. But to the establishment, any unease was proof that only anorexia raged – no other trauma, no other inner battle – and needed quashing at all costs, and with all quantities. They say don’t bite the hand that feeds you, but what happens when the feed is forced?

And yet here we are, a few more months down the line of recovery – a word that, by now, has lost all trace of meaning. Is recovery a process? A destination? A return to the before or a re-establishment of the new? Will my eating disorder, my Edith, leave me forever an anorexic in recovery, or will those harsh, scratchy consonants – themselves so hard to swallow – soon decamp from my epithet? “Classic A-type,” they’ll still all say. “A for achievement. A for argumentative. But maybe, one day, not A for anorexia?

I have no idea, and the past few months of rigorous therapy – including CBT, art workshops, sex and relationship groups, process and psychoanalysis sessions – have only raised more questions. Why, for example, when there are so many people suffering with eating disorders today in the UK – roughly 1.6 million cases (and those are only the diagnosed) – is there still such taboo and misinformation around the topic? For most people, anorexia is a purely physical disease – one that is snuffed out as soon as the sufferer returns to healthy weight and “just eats” again, like their family have begged them to so many times before. But they don’t know it is a plague of the mind. They don’t know the sickness is a coping tool – one that is used to deal with OCD, personality disorders and childhood traumas. And they don’t know how difficult self-care can sometimes be.

Edith is forever getting quieter – today an echo of ripples through the body, rather than her previous sea swell of devastation. The bird, meanwhile, is in its ascent and now flies free across a healthy, fleshy curve. I veer between the two, but I know now more than ever that the only way is up. The alternative is something I am no longer willing to stomach.

• Comments on this article will be premoderated.