My Secret Life (13 page)

At that point, however, I think I at least began to, even if only a little. You see, for every measure I lost in my own worth and purpose for even being on this planet, my reasons for purging gained profoundly. Very often, it was a form of retribution or even compensation for various facets of my life that simply could not be disciplined under my grip. A failed test, an argument in the home, a moment of mild social embarrassment; whatever the given occasion, I would convince myself of my own fault on the matter and thus, simply accept the fact that I needed to be punished and I needed to suffer.

When the body suffers, the mind flourishes
, she told me. And I clung to that creed for the longest time. The more pain I could endure, the stronger I became and surely the less guilt ridden I would feel in time. Like a blade ripping open the flesh, my purging ripped me open from the inside out. If I had the capacity to withstand instantaneous physical pain, I think I would have even considered taking a razor to my leg. Because after so long of living in that hole, I would have rather felt pain than nothing at all; I just wanted to feel something again. You reach a milestone in such illnesses when denial lifts and you realise that the things you do are truly damaging both to yourself and to others. By then, however, you learn to not care and you embrace the notion that this method of self-harming is both deserved and satisfying.

Equally, I began to use my cycles of fasting, bingeing and purging against those around me. So often it presented itself as a form of protest. If ever disgruntled or deeply upset by the actions or words of others, channelling that anxiety into those private hours spent on the bathroom floor became mentally healing for me. It was a silent protest, unknown to everyone but myself. Nevertheless, it was powerful and moving, as if the vibrations of its cause, whatever the case could be felt all over the world.

Despite my warped dedication to my illness, I did have days when I questioned what I was doing to myself. I doubt anyone who ever suffered from an eating disorder could claim that they never lingered over the thought that they should stop. Once or twice, I even went as far as to try and eat both healthily and regularly. The goal of losing weight never came into question, merely the methods to do so. But on these occasions, no matter how little or indeed healthy the choice of food, it felt too unnatural to carry on. One morning on campus, when I was about ten minutes too early for a lecture, I thought to buy myself a granola bar and bottle of water. Food can be incredibly distracting when the body has become so used to being entirely void of it. Once consumed, all attention and focus drives itself to this unthinkable act. My mind and sometimes my body reacted to food in the same way that white blood cells react to a foreign invader. My whole system seemed to have turned against it, or at least I convinced myself of this. As my mind did overtime in mapping what was happening to the food inside me, it tricked my stomach into a false sense of pain. I would become entirely convinced of sudden abdominal cramps. Apparently, they were intolerable.

Sitting in that lecture, I could feel the granola bar contaminating my body. I tried to ignore the growing anxiety but my nerves, as usual, started in their pursuit of cutting off my airways again. I stopped writing and had switched off from what was being said long ago. I just couldn’t focus. Rushing out of the lecture theatre rather abruptly and not caring if anyone noticed, I scurried for the nearest bathroom. It was empty, thank God.

‘It was just one bar, that’s all,’ I soothed myself. It didn’t take long to get it up and alas, I was greeted with the familiar bite of devout emptiness. Purging was more than just a means of expelling food and more than just a form of self-harm; in the twisted logic that ticked around the back of my head, it was cleansing for my mind and body. While food made me feel dirty, tainted and unworthy, purging made me feel clean again. A psychological rebirth took place with every episode of self-induced vomiting.

All this isn’t to say that purging is exclusively restricted to vomiting. It comes in a variety of ways. The most obvious alternative form of purging is excessive exercise, burning away the calorie intake until you eventually burn yourself away with it. This was something I did on and off but was never my vocation in purging. The main reason for this is because I just didn’t have the energy most of the time. If I wasn’t dozy eyed and barely able to lift my body upright as a result of prolonged starvation, then I was badly fatigued and in need of sleep after a purge. Very rarely did I have any energy at all, no matter which stage of my bulimic cycle I was in. Aside from my daily vomiting, purging also came in the form of laxatives. The objective, regardless of the method being utilised, was just to get every grain of food out of my system. When purging in the bathroom proved unsatisfactory for whatever reason, I fell back on the reassurance of laxatives, believing that anything left over would be flushed out at a rapid pace. At one point, I was taking between six to ten laxatives a day. If I ran out of them, I simply toddled down to the local pharmacy to buy them myself. No prescription required, I would purchase them with hairspray and make-up, simple.

This is just an idea of how broad the term “purging” really is and also how, many bulimics can go years without being diagnosed. What classifies someone as bulimic is too wide a context. It’s one of the reasons why I have maintained, throughout my illness and also to this day, that the category should be fragmented further, to better understand one bulimic from another. But that’s for a later discussion, I think.

Punishing myself – or purging, if you want to call it that – has always existed in my life. Whether physically or emotionally, the need to free myself of certain weighty feelings has always been there in one way or another.

***

I am 12 years old. I hate the girls in school and Mum hates them too. She says she wants to protect me and cries when she realises she can’t. No matter how hard she tries, she can’t protect me from those girls and this really upsets her. It has been happening for two years now and sometimes, I just wish I could die because it feels like it’s never going to end.

In class, they won’t sit beside me. They don’t tell me why but now I always sit with the boys, who aren’t as mean and they even talk to me. When we play Gaelic football, the girls never kick the ball to me and then Mr O’Brien wonders why I’m not playing. Before line-up in the mornings, they take my bag and hide it somewhere in the playground; I’ve been late to class a few times now and I know my teacher is getting angry with me. In the playground at lunchtime, they won’t talk to me or even stand near me. I try to go over to their circle but they all move away from me and sometimes they run, laughing loudly, so everyone can see. They don’t call me names like the children when I was little, but this feels much worse. I would rather they stay friends with me, even if it means being called names; this would be so much easier because at least nobody would know and besides, it’s not like I don’t believe what they’re saying anyway.

One of the girls has started telling lies about me to the whole year. When we first came into the senior school, all the classes just stuck to themselves and didn’t really play with each other. But now, in our final year of primary school, everyone knows each other so when the girls start telling lies, they tell all three classes of the year. They’ve told lies about me and my family too. I’ve overheard them talking about my mum and dad, saying disgusting things that I could never repeat. Other times, someone has told me what they’re saying about me; the girls often ask someone to tell me, just so I know. It’s mostly about my body being hairy underneath my clothes and that I smell of body odour all the time.

They go through phases with me. Despite whatever had happened before, when they welcome me back to the group, I’m always quick to return because I don’t want to be the only person in sixth class without friends. When I’m around them, they tease me because I have never kissed a boy. Sometimes, I’ve tried to lie and tell them I have so they’ll stop. But when I do this they call over all the girls from the playground, and they ask me who I’ve kissed and when. They ask me what it was like and say that if I really had done it, I would be able to describe it to them. Sometimes there are 12 or more girls all questioning me at once.

They recently started a rumour that I fancy a boy from a different class and now all the boys ignore me too. Sometimes even the boys come up to me in the playground and jeer me about liking various students. I deny it but that only makes it worse. Every day, I come home and am upset about something new. I cry most days now and it makes Mum really angry with those girls. I don’t want to make her angry because it will just make me more upset, so I try to hide in my room when I cry. I’m so pathetic in every way and I feel too ashamed of myself to let her see. She must hate having me as a daughter.

I try my best to be better. If I could be better then maybe I wouldn’t get picked on and then Mum wouldn’t get upset. Being better in class doesn’t count. My teacher, Mrs Behan really likes me and thinks I’m very good because I usually score high marks. But the girls jeer me even more because of it. All the popular boys are really good at sport, so I think that if I can be good at sport, everyone will like me the way everyone likes them. I’m no good at playing sports because I’m so fat, but I want to try anyway. Every year, the school holds races for all the classes and if you win, you get to compete in the local secondary school, where the fields are much bigger. I’ve never been very fast but this year I want to try at least.

When the day of the races comes around, we are all excused from class and taken to the field at the top of the school. I walk with the rest of the girls from my class to do the start-line of the 100 metres race. We all bend down on one knee, waiting for the whistle to blow. A hundred metres away, the entire senior school looks on before us. Everyone is watching head-on. When the whistle blows, I leap forward. I don’t look around me or even think about anyone else. My gaze is fixated on the gate behind all the on lookers and my feet break against the wind before me. I’m speeding with tremendous might. Before I even realise it, I’m in 4th place. It’s not 1st or 2nd or anything else of importance, but among the 15 or so girls, I’m not last anyway. Spurred onwards, I catapult forward, flailing my arms back and forth as I do so. The closer I get to the crowd, I can hear roars and cheers. It’s for me, I think. I smile and laugh along with them, still pelting onwards in my stride.

As I start to see the finish line, however, I realise that they are not cheering me on. I see all the girls from other classes pointing and laughing at me, whispering to the boys beside them who then follow suit. The teachers have caught on to what’s being said and look both displeased and slightly pitying. The female teachers are all snapping at the pupils and pointing their fingers, but to little avail. I don’t know what is happening. I slow down, scared and unsure. In the end, I finish in 8th place, but don’t care about the race anymore. I walk by all the different groups to sit down with my class. Everyone stares at me as I pass them, pointing and laughing. Finally, one of the girls I don’t know roars out, ‘Hey flopsy! Have you ever heard of a BRA?!’ The entire congregation of students erupt into uncontrollable laughter and the girl is carted away by one of the teachers gripping her arm and shouting at her. It’s not enough to stop the outbreak of hysteria among all the girls and boys.

I had never worn a bra before; I didn’t think I needed to. But, being larger and slightly more developed than everyone else in my year, I had wobbly bits and bobs all over my body. During my ignorant sprint through the 100 metre race, all those forgotten bits had been wobbling and bouncing the whole way and sent everyone into a fit of giggles that caused the chaos now unfolding before me. Both the boys and girls are all falling around the place laughing and all the races have been brought to a temporary halt. I am the laughing stock of the entire year.

When school finally finishes, I am crying before I’ve even reached my front door. My face red and desperate and my coat wrapped tightly around my embarrassing body, I tell Mum to leave me alone and lock myself away in my room. I look in the mirror and the humiliation is still spread all over my face like dirt. I want to smash the reflection and rid myself of the person looking back. I almost black out for a moment. Everything goes still as the fury within me builds and builds. Acting of its own accord, my right hands raises itself into the air and with full force, I belt myself across the face. I’m blinded by the smack for a moment. Then I do it again,
wham!
Once more and a purple mark is appearing on my cheek. I do it again and again and again. I don’t know how many times I’ve done it, but very suddenly the fury has passed.

I look in the mirror, humiliated and now very sore. I feel slightly better after doing this. The butt of every joke and the target of every kid in school, I deserved it for being such a freak. I burst into tears once again and curl up on my bed, holding my raw and tender cheek and cradling my wounded pride. I never want to go back to school again.

Intervention

I sat in the doctor’s office alone. My mother, being the nervous wreck she always is – bless her heart – waited outside. She hadn’t said a word to me in the car but I knew her apparent coldness was simply her way of hiding all her own nerves that I’m sure were bubbling over in her brain the entire journey. When she went to accompany me into the doctor’s office, I had stretched my hand out and said, ‘It’s okay Mam, you wait out here.’ Surprised at this and looking even more terrified than she had done first walking into the waiting room, she sat back down, no doubt convinced of the worst. We both knew what she was thinking but neither of us said it for fear of bringing up a needless conversation until we had spoken to the doctor.

We were at the doctor’s office for the same concerns, but each had our own fears about what we were about to hear. I hadn’t menstruated in months. My mother, too polite and accommodating for her own good to say it, thought I was pregnant; her questions about the disappearance of my period had been growing in the last number of weeks. It had finally reached a point where she was now asking me on a daily basis, ‘Have you gotten your period yet?’ I considered lying to her several times just to put her mind at ease but as I became more and more concerned over the matter myself, I knew I would need her to take me to a doctor at some point. So while she fretted over the possibility that her youngest daughter – only 19 years of age and still in her first year of university – could be pregnant, my thoughts ran in a completely opposite direction. It did cross my mind that being pregnant wasn’t out of the question. But I just knew that this wasn’t it. Call it instinct or just common sense, but I was sure that there was no way my body could be carrying a child in its current state.

It had been just over a year since all the trouble started; a year since those days spent torturing myself in the gym and almost a year since the outbreak of the dieting, the fasting, the bingeing and the purging. My body, I think, had come to a stand still. Whatever was wrong with me, it wasn’t hidden anymore. Both my family and friends had confirmed this over the last number of months. But we’ll look into all that momentarily.

For the time being, I sat shifting my weight from one side of the doctor’s chair to the other. Barely even taking in my surroundings, all I could bring myself to do was study her as she fiddled through my files. She had greeted me in a most cheery manner, having not seen me for a very long time by that stage and apparently totally oblivious to the quiet riot that was taking place behind my eyes.

‘So why are you here today?’ she had asked, ever the professional but still with a welcoming tone of assurance.

‘I haven’t had my period in a while.’ I murmured back at her, assuming she would jump to the same conclusion my mother had before. Whether or not she did, I had no idea. But it wasn’t long before she confirmed that I wasn’t pregnant. You would think this would have made me feel a surging sense of relief. It didn’t. I knew that a girl of my age, who had experienced regular menstruation for years didn’t just suddenly stop in her biological patterns for no apparent reason. Something must be really wrong with me and this is what scared me the most. The silence in the room now was too threatening for me to sit still. I stared hard at her, as if willing her to acknowledge my being in the room.
Surely she can feel the tension radiating off me
, I thought. As if she had been struck by lightning, she would suddenly realise the urgency of the proceedings at hand and put me out of my misery. Eventually, she looked up very slowly, apparently not alarmed by anything jotted down in my private medical documents.

‘You’ve lost quite a bit of weight since the last time you were weighed here.’ she finally said, indicating a recording of a little under 12 stone. I shuddered at the very sight of the figure.

‘Yeah, I went on a diet,’ I informed her light-heartedly.

‘What was the diet?’

I gave her all the necessary details about the milkshake diet I had been on and midway through, she cut me off saying that she’d heard about it, with an air of disapproval in her voice.

‘You have to be above a certain BMI and body weight for that. Did you gain a lot of weight since the last time you were weighed?’

‘Err, yes,’ I lied, ‘the stress of my final year and all that; I gained a lot of weight.’ If only she knew how I had, by contrast, been dieting and losing weight since before I even turned 18. I was suddenly uncomfortable. It was as if I was expecting something horrific to happen. This office was surely going to be the scene of a most devastating occurrence that would later be reported on the news, with a rather fat picture of me that would make me sick to look at.

Focus
, I heard that voice in my head whisper.
Pay attention and keep it together. We’ve got this
. I believed in what she was saying fully but at the same time, was unsure about how much a person should lie to their doctor, if at all. I would take it one question at a time, I told myself. But, as it turned out I wasn’t given much of a chance to do this.

‘And what’s your eating like now?’ the doctor asked, with direct eye contact and absolutely no hesitation in her voice. Invisible chaos descended over the room and seeped into my pores, rummaging its way around the underneath of my skin. There it was. It was the question I’d been trying to answer in my own head for months, since my family and friends had started watching me with shrewd eyes. My eating was strange, yes; that was an absolutely undeniable truth. And I’d even gone as far as to call myself bulimic on many different occasions in diary entries and on my beloved pro-ED websites.

More than this, what flashed through my mind when presented with this question was not my eating or lack thereof; it was the things I did after almost every meal now and the patterns that dominated every single day from the moment I woke up. I saw the handful of days spent without food here and there, the over the counter laxatives hidden in a box atop my wardrobe, the varying colours of my vomit painted across the toilet bowl and the weighing scales I would pull from under my bed at least 30 times a day. I felt the piercing cold that still blistered in my toes and all around my body, the build-up of plaque and grit that coated the back of my teeth, the scaly peel that laced certain areas of my skin and the throbbing aches that now riddled every joint and bone in my body. I could hear the sound of my mother’s voice crying,
This isn’t
you
, Leanne!
, the girls’ words of
Leanne, you’re sick
breaking through stifled tones and above all else, I could hear that familiar voice now screaming at me,
Lie! Lie to her! Lie!

‘Y-yeah’ I hesitated, now evidently flustered. ‘It’s alright.’

She said nothing, which sent my head spinning with pressure. How much was too much to tell her? My thoughts drifted onto the issue of doctor-patient confidentiality but then dismissed the thought before returning to it again several times and each time ultimately deciding against it. Nonetheless, words started falling from my mouth like verbal diarrhoea. I wasn’t sure if I was talking for the sake of telling her something or just for the sake of filling the silence that encroached like a cocoon around she and I. Whatever the reason, the words lunged from my throat faster than any purge ever had.

‘Well actually, I mean, it’s not perfect’ I elaborated. ‘I’ve been under a lot of pressure recently with starting college and that, so I haven’t really had time to think about my eating. I am eating okay, I guess; it’s just a little touch and go at the moment.’

She didn’t look satisfied.

‘Okay, well, my friends have all jumped to conclusions and think it’s worse than it really is. But they’re just being overly concerned, that’s all.’ I continued on like this for what felt like the bones of about ten minutes or so, digging a hole for myself and then frantically trying to pull myself back out again. Eventually, the worst had happened and I’d managed to let slip the term ‘eating disorder.’

‘So you’re friends think you have an eating disorder?’ she asked, calm as she had been when I first walked in.

‘They think so, yeah.’ I sighed.

‘Do you think you have an eating disorder?’

I shook my head. ‘No. I mean, no I don’t think so.’

I thought she almost let slip a sigh.
This woman thinks I’m crazy
, I thought to myself. At the time, I think I was teetering around the ten stone mark and in that moment was fully convinced that a person of my weight could not possibly have an eating disorder, not really. One surely had to be perfectly skeletal before anyone could accuse you of having an eating disorder. Yet there I was, bound in curves and creases as I had always been, now having suggested to a doctor that I was anorexic, or whatever the term was. Within the second I had first said it, I was instantly mortified with myself.

Our conversation proved less strenuous than initially envisaged. On the contrary, despite the many doubts that tested my ability to fully indulge in our discussion, I felt a certain ease by then. It was as if saying the term, whether it was true or not, removed a level of responsibility from me. What’s more, I trusted this woman; she had a matter-of-fact way about her that shockingly did not compromise her compassion. Eventually, however, the ease of our consultation lifted and in that small office, I entered a new phase of my disease.

‘Leanne,’ she said, concern in her voice, ‘your ovaries are giving you a clear sign that you’re not getting proper nutrition. If you keep damaging your body like this, you’ll find you’re kidneys will be the next thing.’

‘I’m not infertile or anything though, right?’ I asked, panicked.

‘You keep going the way you are and it’s not impossible.’

I had never been a maternal person. While my girlfriends always cooed and sighed at the sight of a baby, I just never felt that internal draw that so often causes women to obsess over the idea of motherhood. I always put it down to my age. This theory came into contention when, at the premature age of 17, most of the girls around me began to show an interest in any toddler that so much as passed us with their mother.

‘Oh!’ they’d gasp. ‘I can’t wait to be a mum!’

I don’t believe I have ever stated once in my young life that I even really wanted to be a mother, let alone not being able to wait for the day. I suppose, other things just seemed more important than motherhood, so it never crossed my mind to any great degree. But when my doctor confirmed the risks I ran with my behaviours surrounding eating, something buried deep inside cried out for help. It then occurred to me that this wasn’t like any measly few pounds that I could gain and lose again in a matter of days; if I could push my body to the point of losing my period altogether, there was nothing to indicate I would ever get it back. The repercussions of this tolled in my head like a bell.

I was always a little on the dramatic side. I noticed this most with matters of the heart. No matter what the circumstance or whomever the boy, if romantic intentions were put forward to me to any extent, I would automatically start weighing out every possible consequence, both positive and negative. You’re probably thinking that I must scare them away almost instantly. I hardly inform such suitors of these thoughts but yes, I do have that tendency to send them running all the same. At either end of the spectrum, I would take my premonitions to every absolute extremity or possibility. As a result of this, I believe I underwent a phase of stubborn self-righteousness, as no matter what the outcome, I was always reassured that I ‘just knew that was going to happen.’ Furthermore, I think I always had a tendency to lean more toward the pessimistic side and usually went about my daily business convinced of the worst.

In the case of the matter at hand, the only prospect that materialised in front of me was that one day, perhaps a long time from now, I could wake up and discover that I am incapable of having children. This potential outcome, though wildly morbid and probably unlikely given that my doctor was not overly concerned about it, cast a spell over my mind for the days that followed that office exchange. For someone who had never even understood the widespread fixation with babies and the idea of having your own children, the fear of being unable to do so shook me to my core. It brought out in me, even if only temporarily, that most feminine spirit of all women. Greater than the jobs we worked, the clothes we strung on our backs and indeed, how thin our bodies could be, having a child was surely what defined us under the name. And if I was biologically ineligible in any way of naturally conceiving and carrying a child, I halted at the thought of there being nothing to fuel that desperately sought-after sense of definition, both as an individual and now, a woman. All at once, my friends’ chatter of babies and motherhood seemed a little less silly.

Despite the very unhealthy thoughts and feelings of panic that ensued after my visit to the doctor, the effects were only short-lived. Within about four days, I was fasting again, the initial smack of fear having passed quickly. The doctor was referring me to a clinic psychologist, but I didn’t have very much time to dwell on this most momentous ordeal. My weight at the time was up and down. This was something I found extremely upsetting. My disease did not guarantee weight loss and certainly it never guaranteed the physique I so obsessively coveted. Rather, it warranted an ongoing and sleepless battle of loss and gain.

There was no maintenance, you see. Even if I had attempted to maintain a particular weight, it would never have worked. If I hit my given goal weight, it was impossible to simply stay there, as I mostly saw such a pursuit as a way of giving up. More importantly, she would never allow this. She would call me weak, a quitter and a waste of clear potential. Similarly, maintaining always presented the threat of gaining. It was, in a way, just the stepping stone to the latter term. If I wasn’t losing weight, I was gaining at a shocking rate. Bulimia does not take a break. It does not rest or catch up on lost sleep as you ‘maintain.’ I constantly went extremely one way or extremely the other. Moderation was no longer in my vocabulary, not while I shared a life with her. What this resulted in was a bombardment of various ‘Leannes.’ It wasn’t always easy for others, I have since discovered, to tell whether I had lost or gained weight. Of course to me, if I gained as much as two pounds, it carried the weight of the world. But I marked my weight fluctuations from good to bad; eight and a half stone to ten stone and I knew people had seen the difference – mostly due to superficial compliments received from casual acquaintances and people whom I saw very little of. Ten and a half stone or above and I would refuse to leave the house. I couldn’t let people see me that way. That Leanne would be locked away until she could fix herself to the point of being Miss Nine-and-a-Half Stone Leanne once more.