The Other Side

There is truth in your intuition. That “gut” feeling that there is more, all the things you have been subjected to, the feeling you are being tested - do not dismiss these as fleeting thoughts. Look around you. The books you read, the programmes and films you watch, the music you listen to. We are not unique in the sense of being individually watched but the more you actually see and examine, the people we connect with and are drawn to, whether we deem ourselves to be “creatives” or “realists”. The way we see life and death is not as it is portrayed in the Big Good Book. Think of nonsense literature; Carroll with the Bandersnatch and the Looking Glass. Now think of Brooker with Black Mirror. An interactive episode, where we are seemingly in control of the events that happen and almost take delight in destruction. We are staring straight into the looking glass, we are just too scared to examine it closely. 

In her thesis, Plath refers to the reflection of Golyadkin’s face in the looking-glass, stepping from his “mirror prison with much the same facility experienced by Alice when she reversed the process and entered Looking-glass Land”. What exactly is this mirror prison and why are we either terrified or drawn to enter it? There is a desire to hold on to the make-believe and fantastical worlds that a child immerses themselves in; the fairy-tales are prevented from being carried through into adult life which leaves behind a disjunction – a fragmented image in the looking-glass or more applicably, the black mirror. 

I have been here before and I am here again, only this time, it is not ME that is in it - we all are. Think of all the times you have been saved, think of the times you have suffered and thought, I cannot survive this yet somehow, you have. Think of both the desire for oblivion and wilfulness to live. It is both an “aspect of man’s eternal desire to solve the enigma of his own identity” and a confrontation which ends in “insanity or death” but how do you define insanity? In hospital, I spoke to a man who had a PhD in mechanical engineering. He was deemed insane enough to lock up and forcefully medicate for six months yet when I spoke to him, lucid enough to talk about medicine, education, literature, language, religion. Where is the line drawn between insanity and genius and more importantly, who, or what determines that? We put blind faith and trust in God and doctors but miss the most important question: the mirror is described as a prison rather than a replication, assuming a separate entity that must be reconciled with in order to avoid psychological disintegration. Mirrors and dreams are dismissed as separate from reality; what if they are more than that? 

Freud’s doppelgänger motif in The Uncanny often uses dreams to reveal the latent fears and desires which the character cannot consciously acknowledge when awake. Getting past, or through the surface then, is the fundamental goal. The best way to possess The Double is to destroy it – but in the process, we must also destroy ourselves. Perhaps, that is the ultimate test. Our survival instinct, the feeling we identify as most intrinsically human, is not human at all. I am tired but not tired enough to not pursue the truth. Finite is not as finite as we are made to believe. If you are questioning, continue to question. If you are thinking you are alone in your thoughts, turn to literature and read them in other peoples words. If you are scared of looking in the mirror, reach into it.  

To overcome the survival instinct requires such a level of desperation and hatred for oneself and perceived reality, it literally transcends the intrinsically wired “human instinct” to survive. But what is the alternative? Depending on how much you drank and took last night, you wake up, not exactly with a clear mind but a sober mind. You scream, who the fuck wants sobriety? Who wants clear cognition and guilt and supposedly conscious thought? Who wants to feel sick with anxiety and regret, ruminating on anything and everything you have ever said? So you drink/use again, constant cycles/repeated coping mechanisms. And I guess that’s just it, it is coping. If it didn’t work, at least temporarily, you wouldn’t do it. 

So you repeat/repress/repeat/repress until it’s all you know. You force the drink down your throat until you reach equilibrium. You eat and deal with the guilt by purging. You wake up with self harm that you don’t remember doing. You listen to the same song on repeat until it’s more ingrained than traumatic memories. It’s reductive, repetitive, and ultimately, not in any way rewarding. So why do it? The definition of insanity; doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Only you’re not insane, that’s the problem. You are so fucking self aware; you are watching a real time projection of yourself, destroy yourself, avoiding the mirror until you allow yourself to truly SEE and break through to the other side. So this is me seeing, feeling, writing and reaching into the mirror. See you on the other side.

This Works, Until It Doesn’t

‘When we have been through pain — any degree of it — we will go to insane lengths to avoid feeling pain ever again, and we live in fear of feeling at all’ — Marya Hornbacher, Waiting

I have always considered anorexia and addiction to be wholly separate identities, two petulant, screaming siblings demanding the entirety of my energy. Making time for one meant neglecting the other, guilt manifesting into a promise of extra time, attention and blind advocacy in pursuit of protection.  Occasionally, I would attempt to liaise, playing diplomat in a dialogue that could never be diffused. Comforting and soothing one whilst scolding the other, enforcing intervention only to subside to pleas and promises that would mutate and grow in demand and defiance. When one is quiet and sceptically content, the other runs riot, cackling at attempted control and chanting “you need me, you need me, you need me”. When I have finally cracked, sought silence and refuge in a quiet room, the laughing lingers, ringing through thin walls. A chorus of voices, none of them choices, only futile attempts at clawing back control. Far from separate, they merge into a deafening, high-pitched ringing, “you need me, you need me, you need me”. I try to deny, distract, debate with myself. I bury myself in work, expectation, anything to drown out the continuous, incessant drum of dialogue. I insist, I can go it alone, I Am In Control. I mould myself into a role, replace the two A’s with absolution and abstinence. I follow the programme, fill the void with food and blind faith. This works, until it doesn’t. 
 
I consider, the entities that emit from a fragmented self: shrinking me, starving and scraping a thin layer of spread on burnt toast, crying and corrupted with a mind turned against itself. Running me, in and out of traffic, red and green lights streaming and screaming, despite of and in sight of myself. Routine me, neatly organised notes but nothing of true substance; diagrams and dreams to Be More, clutching capital letters and academic achievements. Little me, lost, confused and crying to be seen, violated but unable to verbalise. Desperate me, wide eyed, disguised, dipping in and out of reality – wanting to be loved authentically but knowing I am too far away to be reached. Drunken me, shaking and seizing in pub gardens, untouchable and unflinching to touch, cannulas, and contradiction. Reckless me, bridge railings pressed against back, cars and colours blurred beneath feet, finally seeing and feeling seen. Sensible me, layers, lanyard and take-away coffee, offering advice that I do not take, hiding hands that shake. Yearning me, for something or someone I do not know, for a life I have not yet lived and fear I may never live; for the extraordinary and the ordinary, for fullness and fulfilment, for magnificence, mundanity and myself. 
 
Above all, I question the logic in the illogicality of suppression, the drive to drain any ounce of feeling and fullness. The perpetual striving for success whilst seeking a subdued space, feeling nothing, clawing at a concave existence. They do not align but annihilate the possibility of acceptance — because how do you accept What Happened? How do you come back from a pain that was not acknowledged or seen, secrets that were not yours to keep? How do you accept the attempts, the closeness of succeeding at leaving a world that has only ever shown you bitter longing for an unattainable path, to navigate, blindly, brutally, in a benign terrain? You turn to mechanisms that mask and mute the memories, substances and starvation that seek an emptiness in a expanse of emotions and excerpts that were written for you. You drink to drown out your pain, His pain, everyone’s pain. You deprive to declare an independence, a distance from feeling, starving for self-preservation, and ironically, take comfort in the clarity it provides. If you are destroying yourself through maladaptive methods, you can at least find value in the damage. 
 
Half a bottle of vodka in with a fistful of pills, attempting to fumigate what has been done, accompanied by anorexia veering it’s ugly head: the cackles continuing to circulate, “you need me, you need me, you need me”. You try to deny but realise how dependant you are on both entities: the contract you entered into unknowingly. The questions that ruminate in a silent room or a drowned out train journey on your way back from Pretending and Persevering: how do I accept my childhood in all its complications, acknowledging that I was not complicit but caught up in the chaos? Must I be a product of adversity, despite never asking for resistance? It seems the conditions that come with surviving are equally as suffocating: to bounce back from trauma, invigorated but never bitter. To learn to smile without teeth, redeemed but never voyeuristic, reserved but (god forbid) never prude. To say Me Too but not Me Again.
 
The insanity then, to avoid pain, to starve out, to carve out, to drown out feeling in all it’s magnitude, is both entirely logical and entirely insane. Both entities permeate and promise relief but the intoxication from destruction and deprivation offers a small, sheltered sanctuary that comes at a cost. The cost is your health, happiness, hope for any sense of normality. It is a transaction at best, at worst, a surrender in pursuit of suppression, smothering anxiety and actuality in exchange for annihilation. The absurdity of it all; in abstinence and abundance, in apprehending the things that seek to destroy you, while defining yourself through destruction and despair, is both ironic and indicative of the two sides that seek to dominant in all their damaged fragility. 

The Lion and the Leftovers

“There is a lion in my living room. I feed it raw meat

so it does not hurt me. It is a strange thing

to nourish what could kill you

in the hopes it does not kill you.

We have lived like this, it and I, for so many years.

Sometimes it feels like we have always lived like this.

Sometimes I think I have always been like this".

― Clementine von Radics, The Lion

I first stumbled across this poem in a short anthology collection a week or so before my admission to rehab. Immediately, I felt drawn to the protagonist’s casual appeasement to this wild animal that resides in her home, poses an imminent danger, and yet the marked, evident dependency each being bestows on each other. Although the lion is clearly metaphorical, the same dependency resides. The lion occupies and consumes the homebody, so much so that the protagonist has entered into an internal negotiation, with the awareness that the lion is very likely to kill her. There is hope – perhaps blind optimism – that the lion can be tamed, domesticated even. But also a stark acceptance: as long as the protagonist feeds the lion, it will always remain; prowling, cowering, but always expecting. 

Problem is: if you completely starve the lion, it will grow volatile. You have seen it before; the gentle begging, the persistent gnawing, the relentless pacing up and down. Then the attacks, the roaring that penetrates your skull, the physical weakness from fighting and hiding. So it is easier to throw scraps of leftovers, provide the bare minimum to this animal in the vague hope it will leave you alone, or at least give you time to recuperate until the next confrontation. Only leftovers make it worse – it feeds but doesn’t satisfy, if anything, it sparks greater cravings. 

Now let’s replace the lion with alcohol. Or drugs. Or an abuser. Or any damn addiction that demands so much and provides so little. What does it offer? Familiarity? Protection? Possibly. A sick sort of dependency? Maybe. A consciousness so close to destruction that you can almost taste it? Definitely. The danger excites you at first, fuels you even. The lion makes you invincible. But after a while, it also makes you insane. Totally, fucking insane. 

You are confined to your living room now because the lion comes first. Keeping him docile and sated is your only priority. Food for you becomes irrelevant, you can survive off of the leftovers. Feeding the lion is the first thing you think of when you wake up and the last thing you remember before going to sleep (not that you sleep much these days anyway). It becomes your ONLY thought.

(TW for scars)

End up in hospital from an attack from the lion? Head wounds, bruises, a seizure or two, some sliced arms? Patch it up, it's not the lion's fault. You were just being stupid, careless, and by now, you should know how to handle it better. And anyway, you need to escape so you can sneak out and buy more for the lion to keep it calm and collected after the outburst. People warn you that the lion will kill you, slowly through deprivation or quickly in a spontaneous attack. You fear, deep down, that they might be right. But you are stuck with the lion now. Existence without the animal feels empty, terrifying, unfathomable. 

So you feed the thing that will eventually kill you. You prioritise it's needs. You stop going out to look after it. You stop buying things for yourself to make sure you can provide for it. People tell you, you are mad and need help. You resist, after all, the lion is kinder now. It demands more but is more forgiving. It throws you it's leftover scraps. It comforts you with an open frame as you fall down, the world spinning. It catches you, cradles and cushions your bruised body, fastening the chains it once had around its neck around yours. There is no pressure: you have reached the bottom.

This is how I was dragged into detox; not exactly bound in chains but strongly reluctant and with a concrete plan to discharge myself as soon as my ten days were up. Other people missed their lions, in fact, they were mostly all we spoke about, sometimes with resentment but mainly with nostalgia. How often they got us into trouble, the lengths we would go to, to feed our lions when we couldn’t feed ourselves. Our destructive dependency on nourishing them and protecting their safety at all costs; even if that meant sacrificing our own.

And that was when I realised the lion had mutated, I just hadn’t noticed because it had become as familiar to me as my own drunken, shrunken reflection. It had morphed from a wild, starving cub that needed help, to a distraught animal that demanded comfort, to a resentful, restless beast that needed to be restrained – or released. And to let go of such a crippling dual reliance felt worse than severing my own limbs for the animal to feed on. 

So here I state the paradox: hurting yourself to mend yourself is an illogical stance, yet to mend requires the most unbearable pain possible: change. Even worse is grieving for a part of yourself that others openly celebrate in its departure. So when I go back looking for the lion and beg it to come back and sit in my living room, understand this – I do not have a death wish – quite the opposite, I have a desperate wish to live but this is the only way I know how to do so. 

Girl, Postponed

Sometimes things don't go to plan. And then they go a bit awry. And then they go completely off track, headfirst into a hedge. My last year at university undoubtedly falls into the latter category but with the added addition of a global pandemic. Guess we were all kidding ourselves when we said 2020 was going to be our year. Only last week I was reading in preparation for my online exams having submitted my dissertation several weeks earlier. Now I am, legally, deemed unwell enough to warrant being detained against my will in a place with very unwell people.

I'm not deluded enough (contrary to some doctor's belief) to think this came out of nowhere. Ultimately, mental health professionals will do whatever it takes to keep you safe and to stop you harming yourself, even if that means resorting to sectioning. And whilst I am angry and frustrated and resolute in having capacity, I also understand their predicament and primary objective. Mental illness is scary. Even when you have lived with it, fought with it, cried over it, and become familiar with it over the past decade. Even with all the knowledge and insight in the world, nothing quite prepares you for life on an acute psych ward.

My experience in hospital was based off of an eating disorder unit – a place which, despite the trauma of having to face the very thing you feared most three (or sometimes five) times a day, seems like Disneyland in comparison. The limited positives: tea and coffee are in abundance, you aren't screamed at by staff for pacing the corridors, and mercifully, the bathrooms are unlocked. There is even the luxury of sweetener and chewing gum (little things but considered gold dust in an EDU).

On the slightly less luxurious side, there are no comfy beds or door handles. In fact, consider handles of any kind to be off-limits. Add to that sharps, lighters, umbrellas (not really needed when you are, er, locked up), and sadly, my Glossier concealer has been banished due to the glass container. In contrast, life on an EDU was like being surrounded by a niche, somewhat frowned upon club where everything was So Normal if you just discounted the whole-food-bit. Generally, most people were coherent enough to hold a conversation, and whilst there were many tears and arguments (mostly at meal times), life went on, as it does.

On this ward, life does very much not go on. Time doesn't really have a meaning – if you miss meals you aren't given the very generous alternative between Fortisip or NG. If you want to stay in bed all day, that is acceptable. Equally, if you want to stand in the communal area and scream for hours on end, that also seems to be acceptable. Being surrounded by such unwell people is terrifying and also, terribly sad. You can throw normality out of the window (well you can't because they don't open), along with dignity, integrity, and any strand of sanity you thought you had before being admitted.

It seems painfully ironic that last week I was reading Girl, Interrupted as part of my American Fiction exam, and now my life has quite literally been interrupted – or more fittingly, postponed. Exams, summatives, freedom, decent coffee. Susanna's experiences in McLean Hospital, despite it being fifty-odd years ago, really aren't that far from my current reality. There are no trips to the ice-cream shop and sadly, orderlies don't sing Downtown with you in the early hours of the morning. But there is shouting, screaming, singing, crying. There is also fear, knowing that you have essentially been stripped of your autonomy and the only way out, is to actively prove that you are Well Enough to be back in the real world, graduating as a fully-fledged member of society. It is the only graduation I will be partaking in this year due to ceremonies being postponed until 2021 (thanks Covid).

Insanity is a fine line, and a rocky one. Step too close to the edge and you could find yourself trapped there forever, open to truth but shrouded from the world. But by standing there in suspension, hovering in limbo, you find that time passes, quickly. So, what is better? To stand and deliberate for an eternity, or to jump? Coming from someone deemed suicidal, it's probably best I don't answer this one. (Joking. Kinda).

"People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can’t answer the real question. All I can tell them is, it’s easy. And it is easy to slip into a parallel universe. Most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening?"

The Butterfly Effect

Depression. A term thrown around like confetti and yet, an illness still so misunderstood. There is a tendency to compare mental illness to physical illness, with the vague hope it might help people understand if stated in layman's terms. The problem is, depression is not, and never will be, the same as a broken leg. You can’t wrap yourself in plaster and wait six weeks for your body to knit itself together again. Instead of your nearest and dearest rushing to brand their signature on your limb with a pink sharpie, people turn away; scared, shocked, out of their depth. You aren’t given crutches, there is no physio arranged for when you are better. Once ill and deemed ‘treatment-resistant,’ you are put in the chronic box.

Despite supposedly being ‘high risk,’ you are left in the dark, ignored until you bring yourself to the surface again. Only then do people shake their heads, silently tutting at the mild inconvenience you are causing by taking up a hospital bed. Only then do the crisis team raise their heads, ask a few obligatory questions before deeming you sane enough to carry on suffering or unstable enough to require their input. This input being a phone call every now and again, perhaps a home visit if you are lucky.

There are no flowers or Get Well Soon cards. Everyone is tired of hearing it by now. How long has it been? Why aren’t you better yet? Your life isn’t that bad, what have you got to be depressed about? People like to search for reasons, find an answer to unanswerable questions. And then, when you finally go through with it: a ripple of shock. A tragedy, a waste. Nobody wants to hear it when you are alive, yet suddenly everyone has something to say when you are gone.

Depression is all-consuming: it drags you to the lowest place you ever thought imaginable and then tries to haul you even lower. It convinces you that you are damaged, alone, unworthy. It makes you elevate death because living seems unfathomable. It tells you that everyone would be better off without you. It brands you a burden, a disappointment, a waste of space. It severs everything you were once interested in, isolates you until loneliness is your only familiarity. It tells you to hurt yourself because nothing can be worse than the mental torment you currently feel. It makes a blade feel like comfort, pills feel like safety.

Imagine waking up on the darkest of days. You haven’t slept properly in weeks. You have fallen behind with trivial tasks: an overflowing inbox, letters that need posting, a house that needs cleaning. But you have also fallen behind on more important things: bills that need paying, a fridge that needs filling, family that need contacting. You know these things need doing, and yet you can’t bring yourself to do any of them. You ask yourself, what’s the point? What’s the point in any of it? What use is a tidy inbox and a full fridge when you don’t plan on being around long enough to utilise it? When every day is dark, when every thought is occupied by the sheer insignificance of daily functions, it becomes easy to fall. And to fall hard.

So what is the answer? A fuck load of physiotherapy and a bouquet of sunflowers? If only it was that easy. The truth: there is no magic cure. Medication can be hugely beneficial for some and completely ineffective for others. Therapy, if accessible, can be that light bulb moment and facilitate a slow but significant recovery. It can also churn over a lot of previous trauma and make things worse before they get better. Talking is pivotal, patience is vital.

Being told that killing yourself would be selfish, that people have it worse than you, only seeks to validate your complete lack of self-worth. It only enforces that you are a horrible/unworthy/evil person that is making a mountain of a molehill, and you should just get on with living because people are out there dying/grieving/suffering/all of the above. Even worse, if you are exasperating your situation with self-destructive behaviours, then you must be, of course, to blame. Drinking with depression? Starving yourself with a history of disordered eating? Overdosing but not taking enough pills to kill you? A cry for help or merely attention-seeking?

Perhaps there is another answer. How about the consideration of drinking to drown out impulsive urges? Skipping meals because you have no motivation to cook for yourself? Overdosing because, in that moment, you want to kill your thoughts momentarily. You want out, you want oblivion. But you are also highly aware of the repercussions. The effect your actions would have on people if you were to succeed. Far from selfish, those who are suicidal often consider their actions the most. Churning over and over how life would be for those left behind. Churning over and over how life would be if you were to continue living.

There is no easy answer. There is no six-week cure. There are only brighter days, moments of Better. To hold on to the hope that things have not been like this forever. One of my favourite quotes is by Matt Haig, a reminder that this state of feeling is temporary. A reminder that you are More:

“Depression is also smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky but - if that is the metaphor - you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can't exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.”

Middle Ground

So, I am dusting off the cobwebs and getting back in the blogging game. It’s strange being able to write freely again after an intense, caffeine fuelled term of revision breakdowns and exams. I now have time in abundance which is liberating but also terrifying when you're a stickler for routine and thrive off structure. Although I resented the 8am starts in Starbucks, followed by repetitive afternoon revision sessions in Café Nero, the monotony was strangely reassuring. Now the sun rises at 4am and I’m left with the entire day to do whatever I want: great in prospect but daunting in reality. I’m back home after having finally completed my first year at University, finishing with a first which was very unexpected but relieving – perhaps providing the reassurance that I’m not entirely useless at my degree. The fact I’ve completed first year is an achievement in itself: having to take medical leave last year, I seriously considered leaving altogether. I felt out-of-place in a city bursting with social events and societies, wanting to retreat into my safe-but-entirely-limiting-shell and of course, sucumbing to anorexia was the easiest choice.  I was given the ultimatum: leave completely and probably end up back in hospital, or sort my shit out and repeat the year. Unsurprisingly, I chose the latter, unwilling to give up something I had worked so hard for. Yet as October approached, I felt sick at the thought of returning to Durham. The same routine, the same unhealthy associations with a place that was meant to be my fresh start. My friends were in second year whilst I was in the same lecture theatre but surrounded by new faces. Everything was the same but different. I was different: I had gained weight, deemed healthy enough to continue with higher education yet my old-disordered-uni-life was lying dormant, ready to welcome me back like an old friend. I walked and controlled and told myself that Things Were Better Now So I Must Be Better. 

I had to make the decision to actively feed myself, something which is agonisingly difficult when intuitive eating feels like an alien concept. There were no reminders from hospital staff or family, no consequences from skipping a meal. You can function, prosper even, academically and socially, if you just convince yourself that That Is Enough. Nobody has time for breakfast anyway, lunch is an awkward time and it would be better to work through that pesky 12-1 window. You go to dinner invitations because you wouldn’t want to miss out on fun, but you plaster on a smile and eat your carefully measured plate of food, satisfied that you are Living The Dream. Functioning anorexia seems a hell of a lot easier than full-blown restriction so you settle, happy that you are In Such A Better Place Now.

It’s only when you step out of this bubble, watch your friends enjoy food and alcohol, scoff down a packet of Oreos simply because they fancied them or grab chips after a night out whilst you eat the bag of chickpeas you have allowed yourself to soak up that vodka diet coke, do you realise how far from ‘normal’ it all is. Unlike first year where I actively welcomed back the gruelling starvation routine, I had fallen back into the safety of anorexia without even realising it.  I envied them, craving spontaneity but terrified of the repercussions. Spontaneity meant straying from my neat regime of timetables and measured portions of porridge. It meant discarding the rule book of Not Eating After Six, drinking the shots bought for me rather than palming them off on my already drunk friends, going out for a meal, and not automatically picking the Supergrain salad.  It meant rewiring my entire brain, finding normality in a world that seemed completely abnormal. The hardest part was people assuming I was Over This By Now. It is tiresome for others, but most of all yourself. You go down the same godforsaken road time and time again, despite knowing the outcome but utterly blinded by the fabricated familiarity. Better to be stuck than suspended. The assumption that people can recover out of frustration is inaccurate – it is this exact repetition that is most grounding. When everything else has changed, anorexia remains steadfast, unforgiving but ultimate. 

This is why recovery cannot and will never be linear. My therapist once asked me what ‘recovered’ meant to me. “Better,” I replied. “Living a normal life without ever restricting.” I craved finality, the whole putting-the-past-behind-me – of course thinking in extremes like always. Now eight years in, I'm aware this is unrealistic. Drawing a line and declaring a truce with anorexia is the ideal scenario but deep down, I know that truce will never be adhered to. One of us, most likely me, will crawl closer and closer to the line, hovering on the cusp of my Old Self – the self I associate with Control and Achievement. Even if not actively reaching for it, anorexia would somehow find a way to sneak over the line, taking my hand and dragging me back down the familiar path of shrinking safety. The inevitable rekindling is something I tried so hard to deny in my Ideal View Of Recovery. Ideal Recovery was Health and Happiness, Smiles and Spontaneity. There was no room for relapse in this vision, that simply defeated the point. Just as recovery was rebuked in Relapse Mode, skulking back to old routines when reaching the Perfect Point meant failure. And failure, of course, was not an option. It’s only now I realise how similar the two worlds are. Both require finality and achievement. I have to achieve at either shrinking or growing. I can’t afford a single slip up or that will throw the whole process off-kilter. That’s a lot of pressure. It also means that by achieving one, I fail at the other. Essentially, there is no winning.

That then means finding the allusive ‘middle ground.’ Despite initially thinking this was a bit of a cop-out, it’s also a welcomed relief to not constantly be darting between black and white. Middle Ground means a happy medium, a begrudged but dormant ceasefire between Relapse and Recovered. It allows me to be ‘in recovery’ but have bad days, go to the gym but rest on my days off. It’s a continuous, ongoing process – one that is slightly less impressive than waving the recovered flag but equally, a hell of a lot more preferable than remaining a revolving door patient. It’s realising that nothing changes if nothing changes but allowing the changes to happen naturally rather than forcing them. It’s being ok with stillness and silence. It’s accepting imperfection and inadequacy. It’s laughing and crying. It’s recovering and living. 

A Letter To My Eating Disorder

Dear Anorexia,

It feels strange to address you in such formal terms - after all, we are old friends. You have been there for me when nobody else has, made me strive for perfection and filled me with a sense of purpose. Because of you; I was able to cope when the turmoil became too much, numbing emotion and rejection with your watchful guidance. Only - you didn't stop there. Your grasp tightened, my view narrowed. You became my dictator rather than a friend, dominating every single aspect of my life. For seven years, I have been rooted in this stagnant cycle of lies - a bony, bereft existence, caught in your gnarled grasp and brainwashed into your warped way of thinking. You made me lie to the people I love, isolate myself until friends drifted away, leaving me with only you to turn to for comfort. You stripped me of all self worth, confidence, ambition, prospect. Turned my dreams into wild fantasies and ruined endless opportunities.

I can count on one hand: sobbing soliloquies written in hospital journals, medical reports filed in dog-eared folders, mundane moments spaced between bone caged crumbs. Stuck in a child's body with deteriorating osteoporosis, denied of womanhood and the chance of ever starting my own family. You made me think I was special. Uttering convincing words, encouraging notions of restraint and sophistication - but there is nothing superior about self starvation. The agonising pain of hunger that tears through you at night, the hollow eye sockets and throbbing head - all prototypes of the same sick game. You left me blinded, desensitised, weak. Even death didn't fill me with fear, I saw it as a strange sense of accomplishment. No, I didn't want to die, but you made me not want to live. 

Seven empty years. Insipid days that dripped into each other, robbed of an adolescence. I missed out on drunken parties, next morning regrets, messy girl's holidays, breakup dramas. None of that even registered as important when the only thing that mattered was watching the number drip lower and lower whilst fooling everyone around me. Instead, I smoked cigarettes as appetite suppressants, drank mugs of black coffee and sat alone in clinic waiting rooms whilst the world went by. You landed me in hospital, made me spend the supposedly best summer of my life crying in hallways and downing bottles of sickly supplement in a frantic attempt to escape. I met other tortured ghosts who scuttled through the days with adverted gaze, yearning for the same sunken skulls and porcelain clean skin. You made me lie my way out, fooled me into thinking I wasn't sick enough, not deserved enough to get help.

But now I see the blunt reality, the truth that you sheltered me from for so long. There is no end goal, no golden promise. You will never make me happy. While I am still stuck in your twisted clutches, I can't live the life I so desperately want to live. I refuse to let you take any more of my years. I will no longer let you dictate where I go, who I see, what I do and what I eat. I won't let you ruin university just as you tarnished the rest of my education. I am MORE than you. I'm also a girl who drinks her cappuccino froth with a spoon. I write poetry in hardback journals. I love to bake. I adore everything Parisian. I'm passionate about veganism and animal rights. I like to read about wildflowers. I'm fascinated by history. I'm a feminist. I'm a daughter.

I want to live in the grey area. After years of darting between white and black; starvation and depression, extreme highs and excruciating lows, I want to settle in the hazy middle ground. I want to cry and laugh in the same breath, to eat fruit and chips in the same day, to go to bed at 4am but still get up early and eat breakfast. I want a life WITHOUT you in it. So anorexia, you can take your twisted rules, your pathetic demands, your skewed lies - you are no longer welcome. It's time to try something different. It's time to find myself again.