I was an anorexic boy. This is my story.
2014
2014
2014 - Whither Anorexia? (1)
Name: Alexander Dolphin
Age: 28
Sex: Male
BMI: Healthy
It can take 7-10 years, maybe more, to truly recover from an eating disorder. 15 years after being an anorexic boy, I feel a distance from it.
Although preoccupations with my body linger and my relationship with food didn’t improve overnight, the panic has petered out as I’ve faced the underlying causes.
Am I at a point where I can reflect more clearly on why I starved myself, than when I was writing in 1999, 2005 and 2008? The letters and journal entries from my past document my trajectory away from the illness. They were written without intention to publish, permitting me honesty in so far as I would allow myself at the time.
Whenever you look back, there’s always the risk of imposing an illusion of the past. How you want something to be, rather than what it is or was.
Yet that position assumes there is a clear and single truth of why it happened, which in itself is false. A fiction is usually an attempt to distill complexity into a simple reason. I’ve never been certain about what drove me; it was a multitude of factors that converged into the one - anorexia nervosa.
2014 - Whither Anorexia? (2)
There are many explanations for what causes a disorder that inverts the survival instinct, many of which are not mutually exclusive:
Biological - hormonal changes during puberty, a chemical imbalance in the brain, damage to the hypothalamus (the hypothalamus controls appetite, releasing ‘rewarding’ chemicals when you are full, being replaced by anxiety in the anorexic person), or a genetic predisposition that may or may not be triggered by environmental factors.
Psychological – depression, self-loathing that may come from the person having suffered abuse or trauma in their history, compulsive thought patterns that seek to alleviate anxiety by controlling food or attacking the body onto which your mind has projected perceived negative attributes, or transsexuality connected to a dissonance with your biological form.
Socio-cultural - glamorisation of images or symbols of the ‘ideal’ body - from an over-representation of thin celebs in the media to skinny jeans. These images are distorted by technology to create an unattainable norm. Through an association of positive words with thinness and negative language with anything other, the media creates the idea that you will be happy or valued if you’ve got the look. Contained within the image is a promise that cannot trespass its own boundaries into the material world. This norm may rupture people’s sense of self-worth when they try to internalise that body image, against which they experience a lack.
Autonomy - two permutations can arise: the pursuit of independence from infantile subordination and a desire to exert control over a world that feels stifling to your inner self, or inversely regressing to a state of dependence to reject the expectations that come with growing up.
Dysmorphia – body dysmorphic disorder is an anxiety disorder characterised by a fixation on certain perceived areas of imperfection on the body, often related to a corrupted body image – restricting food or binging and purging may be used to alleviate this anxiety, as it is believed that it will correct the perceived flaw.
Sexuality – the distribution of males suffering from eating disorders that are gay or bi-sexual (approx. 42%) is disproportionate to the percentage of gay males in the overall population (approx. 5% - although this number is unreliable as not everybody declares that they are gay). Eating disorders also affect straight men, however it is clear that there is a close link with sexuality.
Suicidal – eating disorders often have many co-morbidities - substance abuse (drugs, alcohol, laxatives) and self-harm. They have the highest mortality rate of any other mental health illness. Not only from the devastating consequences to health, but also from suicide. People become locked-in and unable to see a future beyond their immediate suffering. Self-harming or ending your life is seen as the only way to alleviate that pressure.
2014 - Whither Anorexia? (3)
My formative years followed tracks beaten down by others long before.
Webs of significance surrounding certain acts affect and condition us. I used to pray before bed, not necessarily out of belief, but because it would be considered good.
Around six or seven, I snogged a boy two years older than me in a utility cupboard. My eagerness surprised me, and probably him too as he snatched my hand from his buttocks. There was a rage of passion between us, at least that’s how it felt in my non-existent frame of reference.
Opening the door afterwards, the ethereal space that we had occupied dissipated as my eyes adjusted to a world dim from prejudice.
The view of my self blistered, pushing out all detail until I was barely recognisable. My vision stained with a shocked afterglow, vivid and pale.
Our kiss ran counter to my religious upbringing at a time when I couldn’t think beyond it. I could only conceive of homosexuality through the prism of Catholic education during Section 28 in a society where gay was suffixed with AIDS, and whatever they do behind closed doors, the dirty bastards.
Iridescent Catholic guilt weaved into my seams, capturing the homosexual act as sin. My prepubescent tryst had blotted out all innocence.
Beyond religion, homosexuality was acknowledged only in taunts, slurs and venom - gay as a pejorative, homophobia excused as culture or even truth. The vacuum of positive images in society and the media engorged these voices. The stigma locked my mind against the act completely.
I remembered his body as the vessel for the lust I feared. The form I couldn’t bear. We stopped speaking to each other, which gave me space from these thoughts for a while.
Yet fear and desire became indistinguishable. Experienced as disgust.
An afterglow seared on the male body.
My body.
2014 - Whither Anorexia? (4)
I’ve always known that I’m gay, and yet proclaimed otherwise. Not really a lie, rather a mental block smothering the truth of myself. It wasn’t the life that I was meant to have.
A shy and round boy, I was able to start dieting without challenge. Control over food, as an externality, offered an escape. An escape from the body I feared to lust.
I wanted control over desire, over my urges, over hunger.
I had absolute faith that denying myself food would change me, that I could unpick the threads until the aberration wore thin. A lie for a lie.
The sense of power I experienced at the beginning grew elusive as thought patterns subtly intervened between action, object, and result. An unbearable panic seized me when it came to meal times - being told what to do, told to listen to my needs.
Isolation in feelings of disgust made me surrender to my distorted body-image. The depletion of nutrients augmented my desperation even further.
Malnutrition can make the brain sensitive to an amino acid that causes anxiety when consumed. Brain function is reversed; starvation is bliss.
Dysmorphic logics enveloping the body marry themselves to the biology of the malnourished, becoming subconscious reality. Body and soul united to fight the quake from the centre of my being, quenched only by hunger.
There was no clarity.
Lethargic, violently temperamental, a recluse, and inherently alone, my world had folded in on itself. No energy to fight anymore.
Until.
Force-feeding was a terrifying prospect, being the ultimate deprivation of liberty. Looking back, the focus became freedom from hospital.
The tipping point.
2014 - Whither Anorexia? (5)
I still remember when I faced the undeniable reality.
For a disorder with its roots in not seeing what is before your eyes, rather how the body is refracted through the mind, the truth came from just that.
Whenever I looked in the mirror my emaciated body was shunned in the corner of my eye, out of focus, barely glimpsed. Only a fold of fat or natural curve was visible.
One area in extreme relief.
Even so, I could see how my body looked throughout the illness - pronounced ribs and elbows as harpoons. These truths were unseen. My mind was devoted to obliterating the pinched inch.
Once achieved, my attention would migrate to another spill of fat on the stomach, or the number on a scale, or the girth of my thighs, or the chubbiness of my cheeks, or the size and shape of my nipples, or how clearly I could see my hip bone, or how much my shoulder blades stuck out.
A moving target.
I would manufacture imperfections, by leaning forward to pleat my belly or tucking in my chin to coax out its reluctant double. I needed to concentrate the overwhelming sense of self-loathing on my enemy cells.
One evening I found a photograph of myself from the previous summer. From the photograph to the mirror, I looked at my outline: my cheekbone jutting out, the withered muscles creasing as I clenched my jaw.
I caught sight of myself around the edges.
You have to force yourself to blink.
2014 - Whither Anorexia? (6)
I was strangely proud in the very depths of the illness.
I went to a birthday party for somebody from school at a time when I was resigned to putting weight on again. A striptease was arranged.
There was a perverse intent to unveil my private horror, before I had to surrender to recovery. I clambered onto the table that shouldered the adolescent chippendales. I took a place beside them to boast of my achievement.
Encouraged by the stolen gasps of my classmates, I went down to my underwear (which were inevitably yanked down by someone behind me).
Pride wasn’t for my body.
That pursuit is rigged. The ideal body has no form, only a collective imaginary of perfect parts – ripped abs, pert bums, big tits, rock-hard pecs, long legs, small thighs, chiselled cheek bones – all disembodied into a divinity that shames you.
Pride was for getting myself that far.
For the determination to resist hunger. For pushing myself further and further until exhaustion. Not only did I restrict ever greater quantities of food, I followed a gruelling exercise regime, walked around the school in loops, and threw up when necessary. Endless motion when no energy could be spared.
Pride has a cost.
With no more fat left to burn off, the body cannibalises your muscle, tissue, organs, and bones. Your metabolism becomes complicit.
My mum once asked the doctor why my breath smelt of acetate. It turned out to be my body incinerating cartilage to keep going on the fumes.
Having sacrificed my flesh, I felt a perpetual chill as my organs retreated to where dim warmth cowered. This is the price for a fleeting sense of self-worth when your weight drops. And it’s never enough.
Pride calls out for more.
2014 - Whither Anorexia? (7)
Recovery was only accepted through subterfuge. I gave them an admission of the illness and claimed victory over half of the battle. All the while I was plotting to restrict food again, as soon as the heat died down.
Treatment focussed on the symptom – getting my weight up with high-fat, high-calorie drinks, alongside a decommissioning order on the exercise bike. I abided by the new rules, whilst attempting to assert control by boiling the drinks until the fat formed a skin for removal.
With nutrients lifting my mood, doctors wanted to know why it happened.
My family was present during therapy, which stifled my ability to talk truthfully. Even if I was alone and assured of confidentiality, I suspected the therapist’s sincerity. The room with the large mirror highlighted the subject to all present. I saw myself and they watched me. The people concealed in my reflection, what do they want me to say?
I felt the need to assuage my family’s sense of guilt for somehow causing me to be anorexic. I watched in dismay as they pointed the finger at each other. I said whatever would make them stop.
Bullying, I claimed. At least it was partly true.
Yet I could not reveal the way in which the heckles that rang through the school resonated with torments in my head.
The causes of my eating disorder were taken away and pinned to those around me. I allowed the distance from my inner self to engulf me. The insatiable need to allocate blame often betrays the purpose of therapy.
Recovery was partly driven by the need to run from a truth that had almost been unearthed. The plan I had formulated at the start - to relapse after treatment - was too risky.
Better man up, so you’re told. What is proposed as the exit strategy, and all that it signifies, carries the same expectations that led you into conflict in the first place.
Therapy slid away as my weight climbed - the symptom remained the primary target and litmus test for recovery. With many issues left to percolate over the years, I plunged into schoolwork and repressed anorexia as a non-event.
In the spines of textbooks, I could fold away my past. On the pages, I could indulge in words that separated me from my immediate reality. From the grades, I could redeem my worth.
Perfectionism was redistributed into a venture detached from my body, and affirmed by society as being of value, without ever resolving the contempt I felt for myself.
2014 - Whither Anorexia? (8)
With my queer-self in hiding throughout my teenage years, my sexuality existed as a shameful drug consumed in strict privacy.
Hunched close to the whispering screen of late night indie films on FilmFour, I implored it to offer something tantalisingly gay.
Paranoid eyes transfixed on photos of cock trickling pixel by pixel onto the computer from a squalling dial-up connection. My finger posed to delete the internet history if I heard a mere creak from upstairs.
Joining gay sex chat rooms to indulge the fantasy of getting on my knees and taking down their pants, before turning it into a joke – oh, nothing’s there.
Cruelty to your own to hide yourself.
It would seem impossible for me to be gay for such a long time, with desire mistaken for disgust.
I came out in 2007, after having a homosexual experience during a year abroad.
An unexpected night with a straight guy that collapsed into a drunken fumble. It meant more to me than it did to him. Even so, it redeemed me from the fear I was christened with during those formative years.
Living in France with people I had never known before dislodged me from all spectral pre-conceptions that bounded my self. I could be whatever I wanted.
In that space and in that time I could unfurl.
2014 - Whither Anorexia? (9)
Coming out has allowed me progressively to let go of many of the lingering behaviours associated with an eating disorder - the disgust I feel for myself has dwindled.
Within a month of telling my parents, or them finding out to be more accurate, my Dad suffered a severe aneurysm. I could never be sure whether he remembered the truth of me over those five years before his death.
There was no time to come to understand what had happened. My sexuality passed into being as adulthood was flung upon me. Forever with a sense of detachment and disbelief.
The love and acceptance that my Dad showed during that month has carried me through the boundless pain. For all the love and acceptance my parents gave me. I miss him.
It has taken a long time to feel relatively at ease in my skin. I have changed over the years, with different strands of my life ricocheting away and eventually knotting with the past, healing in the process.
I recognise that anorexia is not a weakness as I saw it in 2005, merely fallibility. The scar tissue fades.
I have had significant relationships with a woman and a man since 2005. Both knew about my anorexia and it didn’t contaminate them. The fears that I had about being with another person were abstract torments created by myself, which is hardly surprising.
Nevertheless, I still find it hard to understand why anybody would want me, as a friend or lover. It holds me back, thinking that they’d be better off without my baggage, that they won’t want to hear from me, or simply closing my mind to all that is potential.
I can put a check on these thoughts by understanding them within the context of the skewed perception of myself, but it doesn’t always work.
I cannot see myself properly; the dysmorphic logics still blinker my vision.
A pale and vivid afterglow.