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.