Therapy’s demand for unflinching self-scrutiny and then honest admission is at odds with the social rules in normal society. In Britain, when somebody says, ‘How are you?” you don’t answer, “I’m falling apart, here!”

My room-mate, Dylan, is the only other man in Ascot House. He’s disdainful of the gloominess patients admit to in therapy workshops. He knows we do it because we feel we ought to, and thus regards it as dishonest and attention-seeking. He doesn’t say anything, but I can sense him casting his eyes to heaven, internally. I guess friction is inevitable when we’re all cooped up together like this. Given that we are simultaneously the most sensitive and the rudest people on the planet, it’s surprising we haven’t murdered each other. Is it a testament to our tolerance or our indolence?

When asked to “Check In” Dylan always drawls, “Not too bad…Yeah, not too bad…” in languid, meditative tones, despite having been climbing the walls a few minutes before, and despite jiggling his foot so frantically, under the table, that its energy could power the whole house. He’s disassociating himself from our self-important misery.

He is also trying to support a relaxed, sociable atmosphere, by avoiding the awkwardness that would follow any intimate revelations. We’re kind of old-fashioned in our expectations, he and I, although he’s only 20, and we automatically resort to this kind of behaviour. You’re supposed to make light of things and not burden other people.

Perhaps this is still gendered. I’m torn between the desire to demonstrate that I’m genuinely ill, and the desire to make light of everything, but Dylan’s openly hostile to confession. He’s had a very traditional training by a typically macho, punchy dad. Maybe women can be emotionally open, honest and talkative, but, even nowadays, we boys imagine the look of horror and embarrassment and alienated betrayal on our friends’ faces, if we described to them what was truly going on in our heads. If we knew. If we admitted it to ourselves.

In workshops, you can rely, to a certain degree, on basic social etiquette to avoid too abrupt an encounter with your demons. We keep to the social scripts, and this stops us from degenerating into howling megalomania. No one grand-stands, or holds the floor for too long; everyone contributes and responds appropriately, takes turns beautifully, listens carefully and contributes dutifully. We’ve been horrible to our families and we want to redeem ourselves by being sweet and supportive to each other. We’d like, very much, to prove to ourselves that we’re kind people, not arseholes.

We’re not being insincere, it’s just that we’re sharing responsibility for our illness and putting it into context and perspective: we’re not the only ones in this situation, and this generates a certain distance from our problems. Our concern and respect for each other allows for restraint and decorousness. You can escape into wise but vague generalities made to murmurs of assent. You can say, “I think, people like us are often trying to process a sense of humiliating powerlessness…” without having to stand naked and raw before them and bear witness to your own ghastly failures, without having to say, “I am Xan Nichols, a feral and diseased rat, cowering in a filthy corner. I’ll savage any hand extended to me. Let me tell you what I did to those I say I love…”

Remember I told you how I watched some shrivelled hag returning and returning to the chillers, replacing one small side dish with another again and again. I watched her with kinship and with horror. She’d clearly decided to eat, but her food choice had to be exactly right or the consequences would be awful.

Each indulgent mouthful seems to equate directly to grams of gained weight and “having too much”, whatever the tiny, arbitrary calorie limit you’d set yourself, would be so existentially dreadful that eating even less, or postponing eating, becomes the safer option. I used to call it “erring on the side of caution”

Doubt appears to be a universal characteristic of anorexia. Or a consequence of it. It’s probably a symptom of brain malfunction caused by starvation. We find it impossible to make decisions. Every trivial choice is charged with far too much significance, especially when it comes to eating.

We are in two minds about everything. We live in a state of such confusion that we can maintain two entirely separate and contradictory opinions and states of mind, simultaneously, often because the rational mind is at odds with the affective.

And the id tends to win – we usually find ourselves following the option that’s most at odds with our best interests, but we do so listlessly, half-heartedly, “erring on the side of caution”. We are surprisingly risk averse, it’s just that the risk we perceive isn’t the one everyone else sees. It’s the immediate challenge of eating not the long-term threat of dropping dead.

It may seem surprising that we would destroy ourselves with so little conviction, but conviction takes energy. Addictions don’t need to engender strong urges, just persistent ones. Sooner or later you’ll lapse.

So we haven’t fully committed to self-destruction. We exist, trembling, in the tension between two points of view. Our feeble brains lack the power to resolve them, so we reluctantly let both stay in our minds, like bickering squatters: we adore food and we hate and fear it. To force yourself to eat is both a victory and a terrible defeat. We are going to follow all the advice the therapists and nutritionists give us, just without doing any of the things they want us to do. Eating a full meal wasn’t that bad, but I’m about to have hysterics. Being anorexic is an utter bitch; we don’t want to get better.

I’ve used the image, before, of two grotesque and bloated lizards stuck in an urn, struggling for space.

In this tangled mess, Anorexia can be open and openly irrational. Sometimes gleefully so. If somebody said to me, “You look bloody awful” I would say “Bam!”, indicating my triumph with a downward flick of the wrist.

The nurses told me that last winter they’d been briefly snowed in, and when the patients were told that the food delivery couldn’t get through, they’d all cheered. These were all people trying desperately to get better, but starvation is our thing. If you were disappointed because you were looking forward to being forced to eat your yummy bangers and mash, you’d have to keep very quiet about that, or risk being exposed as an attention-seeking faker. Once one person cheered, you’d all have to cheer.

I think this is why we often get worse after being diagnosed. In the middle an absolute tempest of befuddlement, we have been given an explanation and an identity. Suddenly, it all makes sense. Anorexia gives us purpose and structure and importance. We know how we’re meant to behave and where we’re going with it. We do so with relish and a will. The more committed we are to fucking ourselves up, the more secure our identity becomes. This is what we do. Like Romeo and Juliet, we might be hapless idiots, but nobody can doubt our sincerity: We’re willing to die for it. We are fucked up. Love us for it.

Elizabeth, the oldest and most emaciated patient here, was having exactly the worry I talked about in my last post: that she didn’t deserve to be here because she wasn’t really ill, just being childishly difficult about nothing. Surprised, I asked her which of us she thought was most in need of care. She thought for a moment and then said, “I think probably Cath.”

Cath is undoubtedly very unwell, but is less cadaverous than Elizabeth herself, so this response is intriguing. I don’t think anorexia inclines us towards imagining things that aren’t there at all. Instead, we exaggerate (consequences of over-eating) or diminish (portion sizes) to the point of delusion.

I think, though, Anorexia is better represented by our conscious acts of nonsensical self-sabotage. We tend to know the truth, but, driven by contrary emotions, deliberately act against that knowledge. It’s not just counter-intuitive, it’s counter-sensical and counter-logical.

I’m not saying Elizabeth was being disingenuous, but she must know, somewhere inside her head, that she’s more ill than Cath. The purpose of language is not the statement of factual truth, it is expression of thoughts, and manipulation of the world around you. For example, Body dysmorphia is a famous characteristic of anorexia. It would be reassuring to demonstrate this symptom. You can justify your placement here by convincing yourself that you don’t need to be. Ironic and confusing, but effective.

In addition, we all feel terribly guilty. Having floundered around our own lives like bulls in china shops, destroying everybody’s happiness and peace of mind, we’re desperate to compensate by being lovely to other people. (I am absolutely charming to old ladies in supermarkets.) Cath is deeply troubled, with a difficult home life. Identifying her as in need of support and nurturing reassures us that we’re kind people. Elizabeth is also formidably intelligent, so this sort of overthinking will be easy for her.

Perhaps I’m just horribly cynical and nasty because I’m attributing my own self-doubt to everybody else. God! I’m giving myself a headache! Overthinking is hard work if you’re dumb.

At Ascot House, you’ll remember, workshops always begin with a “Check In” at the beginning and a “Check Out” at the end, where we each say how we’re feeling today. In contrast to the outside world, the standard response, here, is to hang your head and mumble “like shit” and “still like shit”, respectively. This is because we feel like charlatans and have to justify all the fuss we’re causing.

We’re indulging in behaviours that, perversely, take a great effort to maintain, so we ought to be able to snap out of them. It’s just a case of eating a little more. That’s easily achieved, surely? Instead, we persist, causing terrible trouble and suffering to all sorts of people, and costing the overstretched, underfunded NHS a hell of a lot of money. It’s nonsensical, and self-indulgent. The demand for places in Eating Disorders units is enormous. The media is littered with stories of people who weren’t deemed ill enough to deserve treatment, yet here we are, pampered, allowed to spend our days wallowing in self-absorbed misery.

To say you felt fine, then, would be a terrible and exposing admission. Why have we put everyone through all this, if it’s all a nothing that could suddenly evaporate? Why take up a precious place?

We are always whimpering, “But I shouldn’t be here. My bed could be given to somebody who really needs it!” We want reassurance that we are genuinely mad and in crisis. We spend a lot of time saying soothingly to each other, “Don’t worry, you really are a fucking nutter. Seriously. There’s no mistaking it.”

There was a Berger and Wyse cartoon in the Guardian, recently, that depicted a doctor striding into a room saying, “I’m afraid it’s rather serious.” The delighted patient is replying, “Thank God! I worried I was just wasting everybody’s time.”

Workshops are the easiest form of therapy to participate in. As long as they don’t demand personal revelation, they’re like training days at work. Without the mini Danishes, obviously. (That would be an error!) I switch to my “Terribly-Helpful-Making-It-Happen” setting, hoping to keep the conversation going on sage, but vague, generalities.

It’s entirely selfish. I want to be a valued part of the discussion, but I’m far more concerned to perform well than to speak the truth. It’s a way of getting the attention I crave without actually having to reveal myself, without being pinned down and exposed. In other circumstances, I might use clowning, humour, ignorant-yet-opinionated political ranting, anything that might gain an effect, provoke a reaction, entertain or interest, but I wouldn’t use the revelation of personal truth. Because that would be tiresome. Or appalling. Or both.

I try to ration my comments. I want to limit myself to supportive nodding and judicious interjections that encourage others to contribute, but the desire to be recognised and valued for not needing to be recognised and valued is self-defeating, or it pulls you in two directions at once, anyway. Inevitably, I break my own rules, performance spills over into compulsive over-contribution, and this makes me feel weak and spineless, impulsive, lacking in restraint. Often I add my tedious tuppence-worth in agreement to something that has already been said by others and fully worked through, (as if they needed my endorsement!) just to hear my own voice.

I contribute with assertiveness and confidence. That’s the manner I’ve developed to compensate for the hollow ignorance of everything I say. I’m blagging, and you don’t want to do that tentatively, but I disdain my own opinions. I should shut the fuck up and give others the time to contribute and develop their ideas. I’m over-sharing and being unfairly over-bearing, forcing my profitless voice, words and opinions on everyone else. Presumably they are barely tolerating me as a prolix, self-important arsehole.

I use the words “attention seeking” a lot. It’s a mumbled mantra in my brain any time I’m speaking: Attention-seeking-Attention-seeking-Attention-seeking. Like all mantras, the repetition leaches the sounds of their meaning. Am I just criminalising sociability? Everybody needs to be acknowledged, right? It feels like an epithet I’ve brought with me out of my childhood.

A better description would be “fraudulent”.

I’m massively over-think something very simple, aren’t I? My desire to be useful and recognised is at war with my general sense of shame, vulnerability and exposure when I’m with other people.

But, in Ascot House, looking around the anguished faces of my fellow patients, their nervous tics and hand-wringing, their tendency to apologise profusely after every utterance, I suspected I wasn’t the only one.

Meanwhile, other patients, exhausted by starvation and insomniac hysteria, would be nodding off…

This brings me back to the gates of Ascot House. (I’ve got so far behind in recounting my experiences there that I was discharged quite a while ago, now, and am back home, so these blogs have become reminiscences.)

This was the first time I had encountered other anorexics or experienced group therapy. Both were daunting prospects. As I’ve said before, we’re horribly antisocial and irritable. We’re fools who don’t suffer fools gladly (including ourselves), so crowding us all together into one building might seem explosively reckless. In reality, though, we hold our grudges weakly. It’s almost impossible to act on them when you are being ambushed by paralysing anxiety caused by small portions of risotto, or seeking refuge from your own thoughts by napping all afternoon.

I was also resistant to group therapy. I grew up thinking that the “self-help movement” was a form of charlatanism that encouraged a pathetic self-absorption, self-indulgence and self-pity. In retrospect, this attitude seems rooted in fear of what might be revealed, or at least what you might be betrayed into fabricating. The controversy over invented memories was a gift to people with my mind-set. I’m repeating myself.

Faced with having to participate in group therapy, I could muster the threshold motivation that got me into the room; I could state that I thought therapy was necessary and that I owed it to the people I loved, but then I froze. There didn’t seem to be anything useful to say. There didn’t seem to be any benefit to being there. How can discussion alter the structures of your brain, anyway? The brain is a physical organ, for fuck’s sake! You can’t alter the structure of your liver by talking about it, can you?

But the NHS was paying huge amounts of money for me to be here. Highly trained professionals believed it could work. I owed it to them at least to try. After all, I wanted to be helpful, to be useful, to be liked. I’d promised Jo and the children and Abi, who was recommending me for treatment, that I’d embrace the programme. I had to persevere.

How ironic, incidentally, that a condition that probably demonstrates lack of self-worth and a desire not to be a burden, should end up costing everybody so much time, effort and money. Doh!

Anyway, Anorexia is a solitary vice – You suffer alone. Lying awake in the dark while everyone else is asleep; rising before dawn to stumble through the empty streets; haunting the darkened kitchen in the early morning; struggling with, obsessing over, enormous trivialities that nobody else understands; struck down by terrors that nobody else can see; dozing through everyone else’s much more significant dramas: this is, conceptually, hoarding the self. Perhaps I’m still seeing myself in individual terms and thus tugging against the pull of the collective identity.

Jo recognises this, and, I think, resents it as a rejection. The desire to be solitary is disloyal and ungrateful. I’m incredibly lucky and honoured that I’ve been welcomed into such a loving and supportive unit. It is so sustaining to be allowed to involve myself in the busy lives of these three people. I should just allow myself to be the absorbed into the group. There is no advantage to my miserable singularity, no greater reward, and absolutely no greater virtue, yet an irrational part of me seems to resist the warm embrace, feebly, nonsensically.

Being sent to Ascot House was a necessary part of my treatment, but it allowed me to indulge this errant individualism. In fact, it demanded it. Suddenly, I was living alone among total strangers, thrown back on my own resources. We were actively encouraged to navel-gaze, to analyse our own drives and ideas, to enter the secret chamber and do battle with the demon: a silent, internal struggle.

There was also the difficulty of sharing, and how you needed to withdraw into a sort of hastily constructed panic room, deep inside yourself, to avoid being completely smothered.

At home, I’d been subsiding into a sort of complacent anorexic dotage. Admittedly, it was swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight, during the day, but in the evening, when I allowed myself to eat properly, I’d doze in comfortable satiety watching Master-chef or Bake Off, sitting beside Jo, all cosy. This is what I’d been aiming for all day and I felt very close to her.

However, when I phoned Jo on the evening of my first day in Ascot House, she revealed the unhappiness and distress she’d been supressing throughout this time, how alarming and upsetting it had been to witness my obsessive, volatile and irascible fears, and the emotional impact it was having on Meggie and Daniel.

Having delivered me into the safekeeping of Ascot House, Jo felt relieved of responsibility and could finally speak openly. And bitterly. She cried. She told me that she wasn’t sure our relationship would survive. She told me that she’d made an explicit decision not to care, because that was the only way she could cope, and she needed to stay strong for the children. She told me that her friends had been advising her to leave me, to protect the children.

I hadn’t expected this, because I hadn’t been thinking about the situation from that point of view. I think anorexics tend to under-estimate their impact on other people. It seemed a bit of an over-reaction to take me that seriously. Who would be upset by little me, muttering petulantly, in the corner? What did she care? She should just ignore me.

We anorexics also lack the energy to experience emotion with any intensity, other than anxiety, (which is more of a way of experiencing than the experience itself) so it’s difficult for us to attribute these feelings to other people. I could imagine being literally in Jo’s chair, looking back at me, but lacked the imagination to invest that image with any emotion.

But I wasn’t surprised, either. You don’t have the mental capacity to form fully realised expectations when you’re starving. Things just happen to you and you accept them. I thought, “this is no more than I deserve”, and I almost felt glad of it: being punished felt right. It felt just.

That’s another of anorexia’s benefits: it really does boost your resilience. The blows land, but they don’t appear to do any further damage beyond what you’ve already done to yourself. If someone says, “You’re a useless little shit, who’s ruining everybody’s life, with your antics”, you’ll just nod sadly and say, “Amen to that. Don’t I know it. Why do you think I’m punishing myself like this?” It’s grist to your self-hatred mill. The energy of every angry comment is absorbed by, and used to fuel, your own self-hatred. You are invincible.

The phone reception at Ascot House was dreadful and kept cutting out, so our conversations became brief 5 minute collages of fragments before we’d both give up. Jo’s job is always very intense, so, on Saturdays, she’d drop the children off at their drama club, then burn up the motorway to Ascot House, which took her over an hour. Then she’d only be able to spend around 45 minutes with me, before having to head for home to pick up the kids and work all afternoon.

This all left me feeling even more isolated. My society had shrunk to myself, alone. So toxic had I become, that the only people whose company I could tolerate without distress and excruciating shame, needed, for their own self-preservation, to cut me out. I was left teetering, reliant on my own meagre emotional resources, like a living sculpture on a very narrow plinth.

Ah, Well! Never mind. When I was at university, I’d experienced a strange, depressive episode when I appeared to lose the power to understand speech, but I just hunkered down until it was over. Ever since then I’ve prided myself on my capacity for endurance. When things like this occur, I simply survive, knowing they will, eventually, end. I pull my head and limbs into my shell, like a threatened tortoise, and I wait. That’s what I did now. It’s kind of an appropriate image, because my scrawny old neck stuck out of my shirt collars rather like a tortoise’s.

I started this blog to explore my anorexia, a psychological condition I knew little about. I didn’t understand how I’d come to develop it.

It turns out there are many advantages to having an eating disorder, but it’s still not exactly a happy thing. The parts of my life that I describe aren’t the contented or serene bits. Those get edited out, so this blog is a distillation of misery, which is unfair on my family, who should be celebrated as a source of joy.

I feel uncomfortable about broadcasting my version of events and people to all viewers. I curate not only the exhibition of my own story and image, but also that of anybody else I encounter. I decide what to include and what to leave out. I present my version of other people’s behaviour. I, alone, get to interpret events, words and actions, attributing thoughts and motivations that derive entirely from my own imagination. It’s tyrannous!

In fact, an episode of Aleks Krotoski’s The Digital Human, on Radio 4, recently dealt with this issue. Depressingly, it confirmed my qualms. On it, Dr Anna Derrig, who runs Goldsmith’s life writing courses, claimed, “Our life stories are our most precious possessions. If we write about somebody else, however tangentially in our stories, we are, to some extent, stealing their story.”

Yet, as Aleks Krotoski countered, “Speaking our truth is one of our most fundamental drivers, and in posting, you say ‘I am here. This is me and this is what I think. I exist.’”

How else can I depict myself and my experience of the world? We don’t live in isolation. Another of Ms. Krotoski’s experts, Professor Sonia Livingstone, put it this way: “Identity is always relational: I can’t tell my story without telling the story of those around me, those connected to me and my story is tied up with other people’s stories…”

The most interesting parts of my experience at home or in Ascot House are the oddities and the antics of my strange companions, but I feel squeamish about describing them. It’s not just that they might be identifiable, it’s more that I don’t feel I have the right to take them over, in this way: to make them my creatures.

“You’re so thinly drawn. I find it infuriating,” said one Twitter-victim on the same programme. “You were being, against your will, turned into a supporting character in somebody else’s narrative.”

Although writing a blog was Jo’s idea, she is hostile to appearing in it. She dislikes the lack of control of her own image or the depiction of our family. Understandably. The children could also object to the way they are portrayed. It seems pretty lame to say, “but I gave you all pseudonyms!” That isn’t the point. We are too easily traceable, and, even if we weren’t, there’s a principle at stake, of human autonomy and dignity.

“[it] is fantastically difficult to negotiate where the rights of one individual start or stop, and the rights of the other individual come into play…because it’s recorded, because it’s retained, because we don’t have control over the way in which our digital selves are further distributed.” (Sonia Livingstone, again)

So what to do? My subjects are necessarily introspective, so I’ve tried to minimise the depiction of other people in this blog. That, of course, makes it seem even more solipsistic and boring…

My treatment certainly inconvenienced my eating disorder, and I regained a healthy weight, but it was never fully exorcised or rooted out, as if not all the cancerous tissue had been removed during an operation. It grew back, with a greater emphasis on exercise, to compensate for a slightly increased calorie intake. I ate quite a lot for tea in the evening, but I exercised more.

So the second episode of anorexia was simply a continuation of the first. I think I knew I wasn’t cured, but hoped my anorexia was so weakened that I would be able to manage it. In fact, I probably felt it could be harnessed and used as an engine that drove me to stay slim: a textbook example of Hubris.

I think I always wanted in-patient treatment. I think I knew that supervision at home wouldn’t work and wasn’t working. I was too dishonest, too lacking in self-awareness and commitment. But I also felt it was wrong to want to be an in-patient, partly, no doubt, because it wasn’t offered. I guess I wasn’t considered ill enough. And I’m constantly aware of how stretched the NHS is.

In Ascot House, I could embrace the fact that this is what I needed all along. I felt an enormous sense of relief when Abi suggested it. What I needed was for somebody else to make decisions for me.

But what does this say about me shirking responsibility? Is it sensible to indulge one of my worst vices? Low self-esteem leads to indecisiveness. If I’m rubbish, then my decisions will be rubbish and will always be the wrong ones. Surely I needed to keep practicing decision making, or I’d completely lose the ability?

Anorexia makes this indecisiveness much worse. Everything is so uncertain; you’re so distrustful of yourself, yet all decisions are momentous and threaten calamity, especially those relating to food. I’ve watched, with that hostile sense of identifying one of my own, some tiny, shrivelled woman returning and returning to the chiller cabinet, replacing one snack item with another, then going back to her original choice, over and over again…

Anorexia has colonised this hollow, solitary interior. Since diagnosis, I’ve tried to perform the role of recovering anorexic, working hard to get better for the sake of his family. I always try to fulfil the roles demanded of me, for the reward of attention and approval.

When I began meeting Abi, the eating disorders specialist, I tried to work out what she wanted me to say and then said it, so I could get out of there as fast as possible with the minimum fuss. I was non-committal about how I was doing, emphasising my few concessions to recovery, while avoiding mentioning my relapses, not actually lying, but misleading, trying to imply that my lack of progress was just modesty and a fast metabolism.

I wasn’t fully aware that I was doing this. It was automatic, and it never even occurred to me to be open and honest, even though I knew Abi’s scales would give the lie to my excuses. “The scales don’t lie”, Abi says. The idea of admitting and facing up to my genuine state of mind and behaviours, was virtually inconceivable. Instead, I just agreed to everything. Then, at home, I simply disobeyed their rules, didn’t take their advice. I radically reduced eating targets to a fragment of the amount of extra food I’d promised, down to irrelevant pinches, literal lip service. Abi would say “I want you to add in a matchbox-sized piece of cheese” and I’d reply “Yes of course. Wonderful. Thank you.” But all the time I’d be thinking “Just agree to everything and get out of the room. Then we can decide what to do.” At home, I’d think, “right: cheese. I’ll start with a thumbnail size and then work up.” Of course, I never did work up. If anything, the cheese would get smaller.

I’d increased my exercising to compensate for any increase in calorie intake; I reneged on promises not to exercise, by reducing it, a little, then letting it creep back up. I compensated, mitigated, balanced out. I always told myself that I was working up to doing the right thing, taking it in stages, that I was just postponing the confrontation until I was ready.

And then, of course, I’d lie about it, exaggerate the efforts I’d made, play down the exercise I’d done. I didn’t lie deliberately, but I maintained a different interior reality to the one I expressed.

Safe in its secret chamber, anorexia continued to flourish.

It was really only the collagen shots (which came in irreducible, measurable doses) that made me put on weight at all. And the bread. Yet I told myself that I’d made progress, achieved my goal of not dying. That was all I was aiming for. Then, in some vague hypothetical future, I thought, with the constructive input from Phillip, the wonderful psycho-therapist Jo had found for me, I’d get on with dealing with the psychological roots of the problem.

Later. Manjana.