Sure enough, more pronounced cuts soon appeared on Dylan’s upper body. This self-hatred seemed to be triggered, not caused, by continued friction with Violet. Dylan’s difficulties were much more profound than simply not getting with a girl he liked. Rather, her rejection seemed to confirm a whole malign set of assumptions that Dylan had about himself, about the world and his place in it.

He feared abandonment and felt Violet had correctly identified what a worthless little shit he was. His initial descent into anorexia had been caused by being dumped by a girl. He’d thought, “fine, if you don’t care about me, why should I care about myself?” He had so little value for himself, that any sense of self-regard had to be borrowed from another person. Without it he was nothing. Or soon would be.

Now, he said, “it would be so easy to slip back into the eating disorder”. But he and I had made a commitment to ourselves and each other, to keep eating.

Philip, my therapist, has always said that anorexia is a strategy. It appears the best of the alternatives at hand, and is employed for a reason. Denied that, Dylan found another coping strategy, a way of centring and calming himself with the simple immediacy of pain, of expressing his unhappiness and his disdain for himself: he turned against his own skin. So self-harm allowed him to continue the struggle for recovery. It was, strangely, a sign of his determination. It was, in a way, kind of heroic.

Then Dylan started self-harming. One night he took off his shirt to reveal a whole series of small, precise parallel cuts on the side of his torso, under his right pectoral muscle.

At Ascot House, we’d have periodic room searches. We’d be herded in to the lounge while the nurses strode upstairs with pugnacious aplomb, trailed by the more apologetic care assistants. They were looking for “contraband” – forbidden items that we might have stashed away: appetite-suppressing chewing gum, laxatives, food that we’d smuggled out of the dining room to avoid eating (meals were supervised.)[1] Most importantly, they were searching for “sharps” any edged or bladed objects we could use to self-harm.

I’d managed to keep hold of a set of needles, which I used for making model aircraft[2]. I reluctantly gave them up to a locked cupboard in the art room, but became more and more lax about handing them back in when I’d used them.

Dylan wanted to sew badges onto his jeans. I showed him how to do basic stitching and lent him my needles and thread, and he’d sit in the lounge quietly sewing.[3] He’d stolen one of these needles to cut himself.

Self-harm is very common among people with eating disorders[4]. It’s another way of writing our inarticulate distress on our own bodies. Dylan made no attempt to hide his wounds from me, an indication that he was anguish-signalling.

We sat in bed and discussed it. I told him I did a bit of this as a teenager: very slight scratches on my wrists with a knife. It’s not very mature behaviour, if maturity suggests the wisdom and experience to negotiate life’s problems sensibly and effectively. Maybe our differently configured brains make it more difficult to absorb life lessons, because we are still pre-occupied with sorting out more basic thought processes that others have already mastered.

Jane, Dylan’s therapist, has suggested he may be manic-depressive, and there’s a flavour of this in his self-harm. You know, an excess of frantic energy and brain activity that, finding no other outlet, turns on its own body, lacerating it.

We agreed that anorexia seems to be an inextricable part of our identities. As he became better nourished, he feared losing himself. As with his resumption of smoking, he was looking for other crutches to prop up his sense of self, ones which would communicate how troubled he was. He was saying, “although I’m now better nourished, I am still not alright”. These crutches were compulsive and addictive, like anorexia, because they brought immediate relief. Dylan was doing this when he felt particularly challenged. He’d been out for lunch with one of the care assistants, (another of our goals) and had found it difficult, choosing what to eat from a menu. He was also very concerned that he was getting a fat tummy. This was a subject that caused him so much distress that, in all the time I was at Ascot House, Dylan never once said the word “fat”. Whenever that difficult subject arose, he always spelt it out: “F.A.T.”

I was very unsure what to do about his self-harming.  I decided to do nothing: always the easiest solution. I told myself it wasn’t my concern. I didn’t want to betray him – that would destroy a vital trust and relationship between us. As we shared a room and all our time, this could even have jeopardised our recovery (god, this is so self–justifying!) I didn’t want Dylan to lose his stair-access, one of the privileges he’d gained, but was allowing him sneak off and hurt himself in secret, and I didn’t want him to resent me over it. I also didn’t want to get into trouble over having unregistered needles lying about or for hiding Dylan’s behaviour from the staff. I made him promise not to do it again, and he said “it was a one off”, but we both knew he would. And we both knew the situation would soon come to a head.

Footnotes:

[1] Apparently, horrible festering mounds have sometimes been found at the back of wardrobes.

[2] WHAT?! Don’t sneer at me! It’s calming!

[3] You’ll remember, one of the care-assistants asked, in astonishment, “Where did you learn to sew!?”

Dylan said, “Xan taught me.”

“But where did he learn to sew?”

“I taught him.”

[4] Especially bulimics, apparently, see Carrie Arnold, 2013, Decoding Anorexia, Hove: Routledge

Dylan’s fear of solitude extended to trips out. At first, patients at Ascot House were confined to the building, where their eating behaviours could always be monitored. Even stepping into the garden was an earned privilege. Lock-down has taught everyone a little of what this feels like, but I assume you don’t have your trips to the loo monitored and logged. We yearned for release.

Other rewards were, progressively, “stair access”; accompanied trips to the nearby Tesco Express[1] or to the park; unaccompanied trips to the same places; trips into town in the company of a care worker, and, finally, unaccompanied, trips into town.[2] These helped to give us a sense of progress and achievement. Without them we’d have despaired, lost the doldrums of our repetitive days.

Dylan, however, was reluctant to exercise these privileges. He’d say he was going to the shops, but just wouldn’t get around to it, which is bizarre, given that we had nothing else to do. It wasn’t that he’d become institutionalised, exactly. It was that he didn’t like to be on his own. He went into town once and returned looking frazzled. He’d felt overwhelmed by people, yet profoundly lonely. This was to be my experience, in my turn, but, while I hated the first of these two sensations, I loved the second, in a self-pitying sort of way.

What Dylan needed was a companion, but, like all anorexics, he’d lost contact with his friends. For me, friends and friendships are incredibly important and I remain ardently loyal to their memories. But these memories are the relics of a lost golden age, worn smooth and indistinct by years of constant handling. I know that everyone has moved on and changed, has new concerns, experiences, friends. They are not who they were. I know I’m too caught up with the past, that these friendships are too important to me. If we meet, I’m the oddball, the overly intense little scrap of a creature from their past: overly familiar, tedious. They tolerate me out of the goodness of their hearts, because they are lovely, but they’re embarrassed, relieved when I leave.

I know this, so meeting or talking to them fills me with confusion, anxiety, humiliation, inferiority, guilt[3]. I flee from the idea with alarm, so I betray and neglect them, ironically[4], never getting around to contacting them, never having the nerve to arrange to meet. Presumably they think I’m a neglectful, uncaring little sod and this makes me sad, but is easier to deal with than the truth, which is that I love them too much to ever talk to them again.

Perhaps from this has grown a feeling of intense mortification whenever I access any long-term memory at all. I try to avoid remembering things; I try to keep moving forward through a fleeting series of impressionist presents, shaking off and abandoning each successive past as it develops, with a shiver of revulsion. I am told that emotional content makes something memorable. We remember events which contain heightened emotions, so perhaps it is this quality of the past that I am over-sensitive to. My brain is malfunctioning in its perception and processing of emotion.

But the past remains precious to me, so the anguish I feel when confronted with it seems to becomes almost like the homage paid to it, and this confused ambivalence bleeds into the general carnival of distress that makes up my anorexic identity. I don’t want to relinquish it.

Carrie Arnold devotes a section in Decoding Anorexia (2013, Hove: Routledge) to “reward contamination” the idea that the brain can confuse reward and punishment signals, because both are processed by the same dopamine-rich part of the brain, using “the same neural mechanisms” (p124). Ms. Arnold is talking about punishing exercise regimes, but I feel this could explain why abject mortification and distress should almost be something worth seeking; how it seems worthwhile, valuable, dramatic, significant.

Anyway, perhaps Dylan shared this attitude to friendship. And all this fuss in the head that we both seem to experience: could it be ADHD?

Or perhaps not. I know, it’s deeply presumptuous of me. It’s a form of Cognitive Imperialism to try and colonise another person’s head with my thoughts. I’m sorry.

• Footnotes:

[1] We’d wander around the aisles with interest but never buy anything, obviously: it was mainly food.

[2] We also had the ominous “Snack out”, first accompanied and then, finally, unaccompanied, but this was never a privilege. Not to a bunch of anorexics…

[3] This feels very similar to a Pavlovian sense of mortification, I developed any time I had a hangover, as a student, because I’d always made a fool of myself the night before. When I’d calmed down a little, in my mid-twenties, I still felt incredibly embarrassed any time I had a headache.

[4] “Ironically” is a word I’m using a lot when discussing anorexia. I guess it fits with the confusion and double-vision that the condition causes, all the double standards, hypocrisy, self-defeating behaviours, self-contradiction, holding, and acknowledging, two contrary positons simultaneously;  truly believing that a behaviour is bad for us and genuinely desiring not to do it, but then doing it anyway…

Inevitably, the dalliance with Violet went nowhere, and Dylan was more aggrieved and wounded than seemed appropriate for such a slight, brief friendship. Violet appeared oblivious to Dylan’s sadness, which made him feel even more abandoned.

Our reason for being in Ascot House was to gain weight and to be supervised while we did it because we couldn’t be trusted to do it on our own. This was supposed to restore to us the energy and the mental resources to tackle our eating disorders[1]. We spent our days in the lounge, in a frowsty stupor, wrestling with our internal demons. The management insisted that the television was always on, presumably to distract us and to stifle the nasty, though listless, cabin-feverish feuds that would break out from time to time. I couldn’t concentrate in there, so I’d seek refuge in the cooler, quieter Art Room where I could write my diary and early drafts of this blog.

Dylan would join me in there. He feared solitude. He said, “when I’m on my own, there’s nothing to stop the bad thoughts.” He was an excellent companion. He’d sit quietly scrolling through his phone, shuddering the table with his constantly jiggling foot but otherwise allowing me to work. But I’d become such an anti-social little scum-bag that I found his presence increasingly stifling. I needed to be alone. Solitude and singularity were the terms in which I defined myself. Spending time with people, interacting with them, seemed to erode my sense of self.

This frustration would build and build inside me. I’d become more and more sensitive to his presence, until I thought I might leap up and burst out, “Go Away, Dylan!!” I’d fiercely suppress the urge, locking it inside myself. I’d consciously embrace his company, and, suddenly, the sensation would evaporate, the way you can sometimes swallow a sneeze, or the urgent sensation that you’re about to be sick. I’d think, “no, actually, Dylan’s a good kid. I value his friendship and his company.”  Then the frustration would start to build again.

I don’t think Dylan had any idea of the drama and turmoil occurring, in cycles, in his companion’s breast. If he did, he’d have had no time for it. Quite rightly.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how Dylan unwittingly helped to rehabilitate me.

• Footnotes:

[1] See Carrie Arnold’s Decoding Anorexia, 2013, Hove: Routledge, pp87-89, for a good discussion of starvation’s effect on the brain.

It was Dylan’s behaviour, not his looks, that changed markedly, as he got better. This gives weight[1] to his ADHD diagnosis.

One of the first signs of recovery was the return of his libido. He cheerfully admitted this, to my discomfort, and started to show a particular interest in one of the other patients, Violet.

Violet was an, attractive self-possessed girl, with a troubled background[2]. She was waiting to be discharged, and was pre-occupied with where life would lead her next. In the meantime, she formed a little clique with Dylan and another girl, Lorrie. They had been given “stair access”[3], because they were further along the “recovery process” than the rest of us: they were allowed upstairs unsupervised, an earned privilege. The three of them would cluster on the sofa there, talking quietly and going silent if anyone approached. They made little attempt to hide the exasperation and disdain recovering anorexics feel towards those still in the full grip of nonsensical behaviours and delusions[4]. They glanced at anyone passing and then caught each other’s eyes, laughing derisively.

This upset the other patients, but was relatively harmless for Dylan, I think. However, when Lorrie was discharged, Dylan was able to engineer time alone with Violet, initially in the smoking hut outside the lounge. All you’d see would be two glowing spots, floating in the darkness. Later, though, they’d disappear up to the vegetable patch at the end of the garden and smoke there. This caused much alarm among the nurses and care assistants. They’d pop their heads into the lounge and say, “Where are Dylan and Violet?!”, take fright on being told, and hurry off to make sure they weren’t engendering little Diolets and Vylans among the leaves of the winter cabbage.

They needn’t have worried. As Dylan told me, morosely, in our bedtime catch-ups: he and Violet never got beyond linking fingertips.

I thought this was sweet, but he was deeply frustrated by not getting any further. He wanted SEX. I said, “Well, she’s not going to be in the right place for that, is she? She needs to be free of us all.” But Dylan became more and more emotionally involved with this half-formed relationship, more dejected by the knock-backs, more elated by any moments of connection. It was all getting too intense; it was becoming an ingredient in Dylan’s head-buzz.

And that brings us back to our starting point, doesn’t it? Because that sort of obsessive, buzzy behaviour sounds very much like…? Yup – ADHD…

• Footnotes:

[1] Ha ha.

[2] Very common among my fellow patients.

[3] Ascot House had a whole set of its own jargon

[4] It’s transferred frustration, I think, because by that point you are really, really ready to get out of there.

As Dylan returned to health and gained weight, his figure remained reassuringly slim, just slightly more well-defined and muscly. This was very encouraging for me. I’d never look as good, but perhaps I could gain weight without rolls of fat bulging over my belt.

I’d no idea how, though. The human metabolism is a confusing thing that seems to operate by magic. It isn’t just an arena where a simple mathematics of weight gain and loss is resolved. It is a dynamic, highly responsive, self-regulating, living system of hormones and enzymes and gut-bacteria and neural signals and metabolic responses and cognitive de-sensitivities, and habit-formation and formative experiences and leptin and ghrelin and insulin and dopamine and serotonin and DNA that’s triggered or not, and environment and growth hormones and LOVE  and the empty calories in alcohol and DANCING and exam stress and catholic guilt…

This makes it difficult to control. Weight and energy levels and body shape are very wayward. They change in fits and starts and swoops and spikes and troughs. You’ll eat something dreadful and feel dreadful, but your weight will stay stubbornly the same; you’ll diet for ages and lose virtually nothing. This continues until you tame your body, break it to your will by driving your weight right down and holding it there. When your body is at the limits of what it can sustain, it all becomes reassuringly predictable. You eat: you gain weight. You restrict and over-exercise: instantly your weight plummets.

And who cares what you look like?

My room-mate at Ascot House was a 20-year-old ex-barman called Dylan. He was the only other male patient and became my comrade, confidant and mentor. This was my most important relationship while I was being treated, but our friendship is a good example of my difficulties with, and alienation from, other people. I saw exactly those characteristics in him, too. But was I projecting my mind-set onto other people (again)?

When I’d first arrived, he’d been a quiet, solitary figure, sunk in a motionless exhaustion. He was very kind, and solicitous of my well-being, which, being an anti-social anorexic, I found threatening and intrusive. In fact, he was reaching out to me because we had to share a room. He knew neither of us wanted to do that, but it was imperative that we got on.

Dylan had a different therapist to me, but she also suggested that he might have symptoms of ADHD. Was this co-incidental? Is there a correlation between Attention Deficit Disorder and anorexia in men? Had she and Jamie (my therapist) read the same scientific paper? Passed it around the office? Maybe they had co-authored it.

Dylan seemed to embrace the suggestion with even more enthusiasm and relief than I did. But then he had more right to claim it.[1] As he recovered, Dylan’s character seemed to alter. For a start there was the jiggling.

I was a terrible foot-jiggler at school. It was possibly a reaction to sitting in classrooms all day, because it dwindled in later life. Any trace was finally expunged by the eating disorder. That compelled me to take exercise until I had absolutely no energy at all. Any rest I allowed myself, or was forced on me, became a warm, blessed space of complete stillness.

At Ascot house, an environment as restrictive as a school, my weight was restored, but this left my tenseness and discontent untreated, and foot-jiggling made a return. It was disapproved of by the staff. They didn’t trust us. They knew we might use any tiny movement as an attempt to burn off just a few more calories. Any physical tic might be sought out and cultivated into a compulsion, repeated ad exhaustiam, could serve as a last stronghold for the retreating disease, from which to launch a counter-attack. To combat this, the poor, determined, care-worn staff were told to pursue our anorexia into even these tiny corners of our behaviour. They had to get used to conflict.

The problem was, sometimes it was simply innocent foot-jiggling caused by an inherent sense of tension and anxiety, and the frustration of being forced to sit still all day.  You’d hear many conversations such as this:

“You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Jiggling your foot.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“We both know you’re trying to burn off calories.”

“I am not! I always jiggle my foot, it’s my Anxiety Disorder[2]! Jesus, you guys are such fascists!”

But we stopped, anyway. We were keen to please.

That is how controlled life is, in an Eating Disorders Unit. I guess it has to be, but it’s galling and we resist it. Our eating disorders whisper, “This is tyranny. They’re just pathologising anything they find irritating.”

Dylan became the worst foot-jiggler of all. He’d sit at the table in the art/ therapy room, where I liked to write, in a relaxed attitude, one ankle on the other knee, texting. After a few minutes, you’d realise the whole table was ceaselessly shuddering from the bouncing of his foot on the floor-boards.

Then there was his drumming. Some djembe drums were kept in the art room, for music therapy. Dylan would wander in, pick up a drum, idly, and begin wildly drumming. Luckily he had a wonderful sense of rhythm, but it still filled my head with noise.

I’d tolerate these things with saintly forbearance for as long as I could, then I’d ask, politely, “could you stop doing that? Just for a minute? Only I’m finding it difficult to concentrate.”

Without looking up, or ceasing, Dylan would growl, “Yeah, fuck of, Xan, you cunt”[3], which I richly deserved and was good for me. Where did I get off, telling anyone what to do? Hell may be other people, for anorexics, but we need to re-learn how to live with them. The lack of privacy was terrible. It was also therapy.

• Footnotes:

[1] I know this is the typical envy anorexics feel towards each other. We don’t feel competitive, exactly, because we all assume we’ll lose any contest.

[2] Anorexics have every disorder going.

[3] I found this simultaneously exasperating and amusing (I love swearing).

Anorexia experts think neither the ego-centrism nor the isolation are very good for us, so we’re always being told (a little sharply, sometimes) that we’re not the only ones.

In fact, I tend to assume the opposite, that my experience, or way of thinking is universally held. I’m nothing special, intellectually, so insights I’ve come by are presumably easily acquired and thus available to all.

This can make me even more rigid. I just can’t understand why people could hold such nonsensical positions. It seems perverse. I have to take myself step by step through their thought processes, if I’m to make sense of them, the way Temple Grandin[1] has to rationally deduce other people’s emotions. So, I might think about believers in aroma-therapy, “I haven’t experienced most science first hand. I simply accept the statements of confident authority figures, whose words seem to chime with my general philosophy of life and assume that the mechanisms, themselves, marry up somewhere beyond my understanding. That’s the same for them…”[2] But who has the time for this, day to day?

This attitude can be most damaging to my relationships when I project my sense of inner fraudulence[3] onto other people. I’m afflicted by a strange inner unreality. I feel there’s an insincerity about everything I say. Hence my tendency to say, “apparently I’ve got “anorexia”!”

In the language of the day, I’m “not in touch with my feelings”. I’m the typical bewildered male at the funeral wondering why he’s not crying. I‘m forced to act out my own emotions; I am my own puppet and puppet-master, my own mask with nothing behind it: a walking identity crisis.

This can leave me horribly cynical towards other people. Whenever anyone claims any condition or mental state, the nasty internal goblin-version of me whispers, “Really?” with cynically raised goblin-eyebrows. I hate this about myself. I try to stifle it; I wrestle with it all the time and never admit to it. I explain to myself why they deserve to be believed; point out to myself that I have no grounds to disbelieve them, that trust is an act of grace and courage. Always, I am sympathetic and supportive and hide this alienation from them, which I know comes from a profound alienation from myself.

• Footnotes:

[1] Dr Mary Temple Grandin, an expert in Animal Behaviour, is also a spokesperson for people with autism and is famed for her ability to communicate the experience of living (and thinking) with that condition.

[2] It’s even more difficult with Trump supporters.

[3] No, not “flatulence”. You misread that.

If only we had direct access to the consciousness of others! Then you could compare your interior state to that of someone who is clearly manifesting one of these conditions.

When I was admitted to Ascot House, I looked around at all these wasted cadavers and immediately felt like an attention-seeking fraud. They really knew how to starve themselves! I had to hurriedly adopt some strange eating rituals to justify taking up a place.

While I was being treated, a succession of miserable little figures checked in: emaciated, yellow-skinned and creased, like baby monkeys. They were so hungry they were barely conscious. Yet, after a couple of days of nourishment, they were all confessing to feeling fraudulent, telling me they should give up their bed to somebody who truly needed it. You’d reassure them that they looked dreadful and they’d say, “oh, thank you! But I know you’re only saying that to be nice.”

I’m sure I never looked anywhere near as bad as they did, but could that be body dysmorphia? I don’t think I ever had that, but it’s impossible to be certain. How can you know how your interior experience compares to that of others? That’s the curse of singular consciousness: We are all hermetically sealed into our own heads.

What’s worse, starvation forces you to power down the parts of the brain that aren’t essential for survival, to save energy. This includes the capacity for imaginative empathy. I wasn’t aware that we could automatically perceive the depth, the self-hood, in others until I lost and then (partially) recovered it. It was like recovering a dimension, a depth perception, or a colour, a richness in your sight. I found this the single most rewarding part of getting better and the most powerful motive to pursue recovery once I got a hint of what I was missing[1]. It’s almost worth getting ill again just so you can experience recovering this ability. (I’m joking! I’m Joking! Jeez – lighten up!)

When you are ill you withdraw into yourself and other people also seem to recede. Thick coverings of skin deny you access to them. You can batter at them with your words but you are numb to theirs. You are forced to deduce their experiences from their behaviours and their rationales, but it is all theoretical, not felt: you understand that their thoughts and their points of view are humanly plausible, but you don’t share them.

This creeping numbness burrows down into your soul, like the growth of mould. Food is your overwhelming concern and this is a relief. It simplifies things. It protects you from the wounding, complicated agony of interacting with other people. Anorexia makes you incredibly thin-skinned, both metaphorically and literally: it eats your subcutaneous fat and makes you neurotic[2]. We are so sensitive that the slightest interaction can be mortifying. But it also protects you from humiliation. You muffle it with hunger.

But the hunger muffles all emotions. Eventually, if the most important people in your life dropped dead at your feet, you’d just feel a little nonplussed.

And we extend this heartlessness to ourselves.

• Footnotes:

[1] And we have to search for those reasons, because, as we all know, Anorexia feels good. You don’t want to abandon it.

[2] Discussing the famous Minnesota Starvation Project, Carrie Arnold defines Neuroticism as “the persistent experience of negative emotional states like depression and anxiety.” She also notes that “Violent  mood swings became common among the starving men, as did anxiety, hostility and isolation.” (Decoding Anorexia, 2013, Hove: Routledge, p86) I used to have persistent intrusive memories of humiliating events from my past. As I became thinner, this sense of humiliation extended to all memories, whether negative or positive. I couldn’t bear to remember anything. Any memory, especially a happy one provoking a sense of nostalgia, tormented me unbearably. And memories of the past are largely emotional…

Psychopathologies are difficult to isolate and pin down. They are like dissolving shreds of mist. They aren’t experienced in solid blocks; they’re tangled up in knots with other mental activities which are also insubstantial, shifting and dissolving.

Mental disorders start as normal behaviours. Anorexia often begins as an attempt to be healthy, eat well and take exercise. It is empowering and aspirational and shows your determination to live a better and more successful life. It is also an effective coping strategy, so it doesn’t start as a minor problem that becomes worse. It starts as a beneficial and admired set of behaviours.

These conditions only become problematic when they reach an ill-defined level of intensity or frequency and somebody notices that, on aggregate, they are now more harmful than helpful[1].

Yet everything is so approximate and conditional. You are habituated to living like this and there is a legacy of normality in these activities: you’ve been living like this for ages and it’s been no problem. In fact, it’s been a good thing. So, claiming to be anorexic doesn’t feel like a courageous admission, it feels like a lie. You feel like an attention-seeking fraud[2]. That’s part of the reason why anorexics are always checking themselves back out of anorexia clinics, once they’ve met the other patients, claiming not to be ill enough.

For months, I couldn’t admit to myself that I had an eating disorder, although I knew I was getting unhealthily thin and couldn’t stop it. I spent that time being shuttled backwards and forwards between overworked healthcare professionals, collecting inconclusive and speculative half-diagnoses of OCD and anxiety, and so on. At each consultation, I’d tell the bemused clinician, “I’m pretty certain I’m not anorexic; I don’t fit the profile…”[3]

It took a clear-sighted Eating Disorders specialist, Abi, who sat in on a session I was having with a psycho-analyst, to finally say, “Yeah, yeah. Cut the self-effacing bullshit, kid. This is text-book anorexia.”

Ironically, once you’ve been diagnosed, your symptoms intensify. You think, “Oh! Ok. Anorexic: that’s what I am. Now, how should anorexics behave…?”

• Footnotes:

[1] I’ve used the image, before, of a pervasive weed colonising an overgrown garden and nobody notices until it has completely taken over and has a strangle-hold on all the other plants.

[2] This thought isn’t assuaged by the fact that there is an element of signalling in anorexia. You’re displaying your inner turmoil.

[3] Male, middle-aged, father of two…