I imagine my secretiveness is probably accompanied by a sense of inferiority, both moral and intellectual. It’ll be exaggerated by the inevitable self-hatred that all anorexics seem to manifest, but I reckon it could stem from my (putative) mild dyslexia and concentration problems. I read all the time, but incredibly slowly. My attention flickers constantly away from the page. Nothing seems to sink in. It’s as if each phrase or sentence instantly vanishes from my memory as I register it. I want to re-read and re-read, but then the meaning evaporates even out of individual words – they become meaningless sounds, and I grind to a halt. (Mind you, perhaps this is how everybody experiences reading.)

It’s best to push on, embracing the act of reading despite being all at sea, bewildered by words. Then, at the end, I might have a vague idea of the shape of a story. I am still left with the sense that I haven’t understood it at all, but I’m often able to blag or guess my way through discussion of a text, which suggests I’ve understood it better than I realise.(Even then, it needs to have a coherent narrative. History and fiction is fine, but rule books, instruction manuals, contracts – I’m completely at a loss.)

This was easiest to do when I was ill and living in a state of hysterical incomprehension so complete that it almost amounted to a philosophy of meaninglessness. If nothing makes much sense, there’s no need to dwell, particularly, on the fact that books don’t. You can just get on with them. Anyway, it hardly mattered in comparison to The Hunger.

The blagging is, of course, another form of defensive mask. The declarative self-assurance covers an inner uncertainty. This sense of duality, lack of integrity and psychological dishonesty adds to a lack of reliable identity.

If someone I admire, like Jo, contradicts me, mid-blag, I automatically assume that they are right. After all, my thought processes are pretty fragmentary at the best of times. I take my wrongness so much for granted that it often leaves me nonplussed. “Dammit!”, I’ll think, “wrong again! And I thought that was indisputable!” But I’ll argue my position defiantly, despairingly, to the bitter end, with the ground dissolving beneath my feet. I want to be right! Being right gives you a reassuring sense of solidity. I’m arguing to order my thoughts so I can convince myself, trying to think of reasons why I took up such a nonsensical position in the first place. To admit my error to my companion would somehow be to open myself up to excoriating scrutiny.

Presumably, though, it doesn’t look like this to Jo, who just sees some bloody-minded arse dismissing her opinion.

Incidentally, this deep sense of uncertainty may explain my tediously over-written blogging style. I’m constantly rephrasing the same ideas, searching for le mot juste (like Joseph Conrad!), because I’m not sure how to put things, or even what exactly I’m trying to say. I’m just droning on.

I guess everyone plays the roles required of them. It’s an essential part of being considerate and sensitive to others. And each role is a construct. When you’re asked a question, you want to give the answer that’s right for the situation, not the answer that’s inconveniently true. If someone says, “How are you, Xan?” I don’t reply, “I’ve been afflicted by the most terrible self-doubt”. That would be rude, embarrassing both of us. Language is call and response: Cows in a field, at night, locate each other. It’s not the statement of brutal, indisputable facts.

As previous posts have testified, I feel I have reasons to keep things hidden, so I have to remain alert. I don’t want to share my inner thoughts with other people. I might betray myself, reveal my true baseness. On the occasions when someone has penetrated the inner sanctum, and has been foolish enough to care, the revelations haven’t always been very pleasant for them. From my parents, to Lulu, to Jo, it has seemed to provoke explosions of anger, exasperation and distress. Better to keep things locked up, I think.

Ironically, the closer I am to somebody, the more I want to avoid upsetting them, the more important it is to keep emotional truths from them. If I’m feeling emotionally vulnerable, I can’t cope with the inevitable stress and friction, and if I’m just being a gloomy old bastard, there really isn’t anything worth saying about it. And, anyway, most of the time, I’m unaware of my own mental state.

Take Jo, for example. Our relationship has always been much more troubled than she had hoped for, while being, simultaneously, much better than I could ever have expected. We stagger from one crisis to the next, always precipitated by me. I expected this; she didn’t.

I expected this because I live in a constant state of existential dissatisfaction. I am now aware that this is an internal state, but I used to assume it stemmed from the external situation, so I questioned how desirable these situations were. I even (Fool of a Took!) questioned if my relationship with Jo was the right thing for me, whether I’d be more compatible with someone else. This doubt was too troubling even for me to suppress, and I became withdrawn and anguished, until, eventually, Jo dragged it out of me. When she did, it fundamentally shook her confidence in our relationship. She was distraught and very angry and she never quite trusted me again.

Jo has her own hang-ups, her own psychological history, and she feels an urgent responsibility to keep everyone happy. When I’m not, especially when I’m wilfully so, with no reason for it, she takes it as a criticism, or as a sign of a dissatisfaction with our relationship, and this makes her angry and insecure and miserable. This is all my fault, after my previous behaviour. Yet, if I unload to her, vomit forth my foul and leprous truth, breath upwards the stench of my green grave, she’d be even more unhappy and this would also be my fault.

So, when Jo tries to corner me on my feelings, I desperately try to duck under her arm and scarper: “No, no, no. I’m fine!”, I squeak, nervously, fluttering from wall, to wall, searching for an escape route. “Whatever gave you the impression I was feeling (morose/ frustrated/ irritable/ anxious/ doomy)?!”

Why spoil a perfectly nice day?

As you’ve probably noticed, under the influence of all the therapy, I’ve been attempting to create explanatory narratives out of my past stupid behaviours.

However, “what happens when people experience mental health disorders is sometimes they can get stuck remembering the past in certain ways, and when people experience things like low mood or anxiety they tend to remember the past in very over general ways that are very negative or very much focussed on fearful experiences…Eating disorders are also people who experience these sorts of memory distortions” Clinical psychologist and senior scientist Dr Caitlin Hitchcock , interviewed on Claudia Hammond’s D for Diagnosis, on BBC Radio 4.

Nonetheless, one of the advantages of anorexia, as I’ve said before, is that it surgically removes all traces of sexuality. It lifts out the whole network of neurones that govern sexual or gendered behaviours or thinking, not just the raw urges. When you’re ill, being sexual is utterly, utterly alien to you. I didn’t even want to want to experience desire. Not only was I incapable of having sex, I was incapable of regretting that I couldn’t. Sex acts seemed like pointless physical tics, crimes of passion the inexplicable behaviour of another species.

Anorexia also allowed me to demonstrate some of my intrinsic vileness, the original sin I was afflicted by, to hasten the inevitable exposure, and get it over with. Now everybody was disappointed in me and thought less of me. I’d disgraced myself, but at least I could get some relief from the awful effort of hiding it. I could stop pretending to be nice. Now I shall give my sensual race the rein…

When I first started working in a secondary school, I was slightly disturbed by the beautiful 15 and 16 year olds, with their skirts rolled up, the ultra-fashionable 17 and 18 year olds. I was used to working with adults, and the necessary recalibration of relationships left me feeling a little awkward. I gave them a wide berth, because I didn’t want to come across like that dodgy uncle at a wedding, a little too charmed by the bride’s pretty friends.

I mentioned this to a good friend of mine in a loud London restaurant. Glancing anxiously at him for reassurance, I caught the end of a grimace of distaste he had aimed at my lowered head. This horrified me. I’d been hoping he’d dismiss it, tell me I was being overly scrupulous. He’s so kind and supportive, and we were alone so he wasn’t trying to distance himself from me in the eyes of others. This was sincerely felt discomfort.

I pushed it to the back of my mind. After all, my friend didn’t work with teenagers and thus had never had to ask himself these questions. He could afford to be puritanical. But that look kept coming back and I began to question myself: did I have inappropriate feelings for teenagers? My experiences as an adolescent suggested that I was capable of serious confusions and misjudgement. I have a fragile sense of internal reality, and because I didn’t trust myself, I doubted my own reassurances. Horrible thoughts pushed their way in to my brain. I was testing myself, running diagnostics: how did I respond to the thought of somebody doing this particular act with this particular age or gender of child? I just didn’t know. I seemed to have no response at all. Was I, then, a latent paedophile who’d just never had his urges triggered?

I walked around for months in the most terrible stew, tortured by nightmarish thoughts and fears, periodically drenched in a cold sweat as I tried to push away a thought so awful it felt like my whole brain was buffering, under the strain, and yet I could tell no one. How do you bring that one up without losing your job, your wife, your children, your liberty? I thought I might have to live with a secret and suppressed inner evil for the rest of my life.

Eventually, I regained enough calmness to realise that I was just in a mad lather of self-doubt. I was having obsessively intrusive thoughts. After all, I was in my 30s and had never exhibited any inclinations of this sort at all. Rather than my mental distress being caused by these thoughts, the thoughts were a manifestation of the mental distress. The root cause was not a sexual attraction but a crisis of identity, a fear that If you don’t know what you are, you could be anything, even the things you fear most, the aberrant (or abhorrent). This ought to have been obvious from the fact I thought myself guilty, on a deep, spiritual level, of sins I hadn’t committed and hadn’t displayed any symptoms of: original sin.

I’d never heard of the term “intrusive thoughts” at that point. I now realise that I’m quite prone to them, especially as a side effect to self-doubt or existential angst. Probably we all are. When I’m feeling particularly psychologically uncertain, I worry that I might be psychopathic, utterly lacking in compassion or empathy, incapable of grief, that I might be capable of murder or rape. I think this was just one of those episodes. I’ve always had a dismayed, distractable consciousness. I’ve always found it difficult to concentrate. At the time, I was flickering, existentially. The self, that wavering, guttering slip of candle flame, was dwindling almost to nothingness inside the storm lamp of my body, the surrounding darkness surging in.

Anyway, after a few years at the school, my own daughter is now 13, and I’ve known many of the alpha-queens since they were 11 year olds. They’re just kids. Beneath the sophisticated exterior, you can still see the pixie-child that scurried anxiously along the corridors in year 7, hugging the walls, or the heartlessly disruptive little madam in some young teacher’s lesson in year 8. You remember the fits of self-righteous temper, over something utterly trivial, in year 9. They’re brilliant, ingenious creatures, teenagers, but they’re all mad. They’re mad, morphing children in make-up and so utterly different from adults as to be no threat at all.

I think the majority of my mental activity has always been unconscious and affective – below the level of articulated thought. My conscious mind seems pretty vacant. Yet, somewhere in the building, the incubator of bad ideas, the engine of poor decisions, is purring away.

That locked-up interior isn’t a void. It’s an attic or a basement of mortification, storing all my humiliating crimes, all my base and shameful urges and the grubby incidents they’ve caused: a history of the inappropriate and the slightly indecent.

I’m desperate to put all this behind me, but, ironically, if you’ve blinded yourself to the very existence of the subconscious, it’s difficult to police the escape of these ideas and their transformation into habits. The bad things creep out through the sewers, seep into the ground water. They are well integrated, deeply ploughed into the soil that sustains thoughts and behaviours. You take them for granted; you start from their premise. Your theories are predicated on them, and thus take on their shape and proportions.

Through the incidents I’ve talked about recently, and a hundred other infelicities and minor, yet ignominious, defeats, I’d shaken my confidence in myself. Right at that point of adolescence when you are most vulnerable, because you’re trying to construct a mature personality, I’d lost trust in myself. I feared repeating these squalid acts, these tedious impositions on people. Maybe everyone has these wobbles at that age.

Many of my cringing memories involved poor, exasperated Lulu, the girl I pursued for many years, from whom I was too stupid to take no for an answer, because we got on well. I thought I was showing fidelity to something.

My persistence forced her into searing rejections, which I responded to with equal ferocity, thus further undermining my probity, which I’d then attempted to regain by being the first to apologise. On occasion, I found myself literally on my knees before her, clutching the hem of her skirt, begging for forgiveness. With good reason (which makes it even more humiliating.)

Next I tried to dismantle my former character, and reconstruct a personality Lulu would love. This was, predictably, a dismal failure. It just made me weird and erratic, as I tried to maintain alien and unsustainable affectations. And this further undermined my sense of self.

God, I encroached on Lulu so much! I’m surprised she didn’t throttle me (more often).

Then I felt belittled by my own actions and words. I began to doubt the justice of any position I maintained. I began to assume that I’d be universally condemned, that I infuriated everyone, and they despised me. Of course, I resented this deeply, and stubbornly argued against it, hoping to prove to myself that I was right, that my assertions, however baseless, could define me. I began to provoke and encourage cruelty against myself, because it would justify me, allow me to gain, for a moment, the moral high ground. And I began to feel I deserved it.

I couldn’t shake off the suspicion that, perhaps, one or two of my past actions bordered on the criminal: worth a caution, if not an outright conviction. They haunted me. They hung over me. They could catch up with me. Were these a form of intrusive thought? They bled out into my conception of myself, into a general sense of my existential criminality. Convicts seemed to me the embarrassed casualties of life’s difficulties, unequal to the simple tasks of living without fucking it all up and then getting caught: The inadequates. I felt a spiritual affinity with them. I was among their number: I was, by nature, a committer of crimes; I was, somehow, always to blame: an original sinner.

Then there’s the wayward autonomy of other people. I feared being confronted and accused by someone from my past, some avenger. My past posits a dangerous world, because, if someone as ordinary as me is capable of such impulsive, solipsistic, careless relationship violence against others, without even meaning to, why shouldn’t others do that to me? Why shouldn’t somebody curate their memories, and their analysis of the past, to fit a narrative of victimhood that reduces me to motiveless villainy, ripe for condemnation and punishment? That’s what I’d do. (or would have done.) Isn’t that the lesson of my aborted visit to Dr X – that we make memoried events suit our own fabricated narratives?

Hence, perhaps, my sense of threat, my wariness of others and my anti-social nature, my secretive defensiveness.

Despite a sheltered, nurturing upbringing, I managed to achieve all this self-damage before the age of, say, 22 (and God only knows how much more to Lulu). What a clever boy!

You won’t remember it, but there’s a Goon Show that contains this dialogue:

– Eccles: “Ow! I’ve broken my leg!”
– Neddy Seagoon: “How did you do that?”
– Eccles: “I got a hammer and I went BANG!”

I’ve buried this incident at the back of my mind for so long that it’s difficult to unearth. Periodically, it’s sent tremors through the waking brain, though. Confronting it, even now the memory shakes so my single state of man that function is smothered in surmise.

It’s difficult to find the right words to capture it. I keep resorting to quotation, partly to allow me to disown it, because it seems like such a self-pitying, self-important over-reaction to be troubled by it, to feel it’s even worth discussing.

And the memory is so fragmentary, yet so upsetting, still, that I sometimes wonder if I invented it. It so precisely embodies my worst fears for the reaction that my revelation might provoke: the cruellest, most accurate, most well-deserved response to my self-serving fabrications. Or maybe, in that encounter, those fears were formed.

There must have been a misunderstanding. Or did my medical notes set out, in pitiless detail, what an unmitigated, time and resource-wasting arse I was? Was he a medical student who’d seen my stupid behaviour in the student bar?

Or am I being unforgiving? Of myself? Of the doctor? In one way, I seem like the villain of the piece, but in another, he does. Maybe he didn’t realise I had an appointment. Maybe I didn’t say it right.

I was immature, still a teenager. Well, I work with teenagers, now. They’re good fun. They’re all idiots. It’s a necessary part of their development: brains awash with neurotransmitters, feverishly emotionally volatile, horribly self-conscious, refreshingly naïve, childishly shy and risk-averse, finding safety in numbers, in the tribe.

They try to secure their position as valued members of that tribe. They try out a sort of personality bravado, turning themselves into interesting caricatures so they’ll be recognised as individuals. They’re drunk and giddy on the whole perplexing riddle of self-hood, how it can be so present, such a powerful governing principle, making all their drives and impulses cohere, and yet so difficult to come to grips with, to pin down; how it evaporates like mist as you approach it.

They need to be like this. They’re learning about identities: how much of it is conscious, how much instinctual. They’re trying to author themselves. If they didn’t experiment with how to exist, how would they know?

I enjoy their vitality, their cheery idiocy, their open-hearted ego-centricity, their indignant absolutism. If they displayed a weary sobriety, at their age, I’d be disappointed. In fact, I’d be worried about them.

But I don’t extend that forgiveness to my childish self.

Imagine this scenario: I’m a self-serving little gobshite undergraduate who thinks he can use his non-standard initiations to his advantage, to get some interest and sympathy, and, possibly, some consoling sex.

I’m fine, but I tell anyone who’ll listen (mainly myself) that I’m not, and this leads me, by a process of referral that I can’t remember, to see an analyst at the state’s expense for to assess whether I would benefit from therapy (good old NHS – as if it didn’t have better things to do with its inadequate funding.)

She’s lovely – young, attractive and perceptive enough to realise that I’m going to need an analyst who isn’t. I spin her my yarn, a story in which I am the innocent and troubled victim and everyone else is a motiveless perpetrator. It’s all factually true, but the way I tell it feels dishonest, so it’s a relief to hear her say she thinks I have a good case for therapy, but that I’ll need, under the circumstances, to see an older man, and she refers me to her boss.

I’m overjoyed. I’ve been given professional, medical vindication for a version of myself that even I doubted. But I still feel like an imposter and it feels like a betrayal of the other people involved, my co-conspirators. They, too, were vulnerable and confused and don’t deserve to be sacrificed on the altar of my fiction, my bildungsroman. It’s with a sense of guilt and trepidation that I arrive at the big, run-down hospital-type building.

My memories, here, are sketchy. I don’t remember checking in, but I remember standing at the bottom of a large flight of stairs. A young, harried, doctor comes down and takes me into some Spartan side room with elderly chairs. He’s not the man I’m here to see. I tell him I have an appointment, but he says I should tell him what the problem is. It all seems worryingly informal, but he’s a doctor, so I spill my filth out in front of him. It’s pretty personal and embarrassing and squalid, said out loud to a total stranger. He fixes his eyes on me with a look of polite concern, but I get the impression (probably in retrospect) that he’s not really concentrating. I don’t remember him asking me any questions, for example. Perhaps he’s going through his more pressing business, his more deserving cases, in his head.

When I’ve run to a halt, which is quite quickly because I’m not feeling comfortable about this, he leans forward, and in warm, sympathetic tones, he says something like, “Look, you’ve clearly got yourself in a bit of a tizz, but Dr/Mr X [my appointment] is very busy, at the moment, and I think you should go home and try to relax…” I say, “But I’ve got an appointment” and he says, “Dr/Mr X is very busy, at the moment…”

And I’m horrified. Horrified. I’m crushed. I ‘ve truly got my come-uppance. I creep to the door and I turn and thank him. I thank him. Then I creep out. I creep home, silent, to village wells, up half-known roads, through a hissing dimness, and all noises, dog barks, bus engines, people calling across the park, seem tiny and far away, submerged in a sort of ear-singing shock.

My introduction to sexuality was slightly unorthodox, though, god knows, it’s common enough. Kids experiment. It’s all new and unfamiliar and you don’t get it quite right. It did me no harm but it may have left me with a misguided sense of what was appropriate. I wasn’t properly trained. I couldn’t easily identify the borderlands of the unacceptable.

It seemed to me that sexual urges were largely independent of wider social expectations and obligations. That had been my experience. Sexual activity could be a gesture of affection and tenderness, a token of regard, and might, perhaps, hopefully, be the beginning of a meaningful, monogamous romantic relationship. Or it might not, and that was ok. It had its own rewards.

I became properly sexually active at university. The British, especially the English, seemed thrillingly at ease with full-blown, actual sex, rather than the clumsy, late-night after-party frottage-between-friends that I grew up with, and I misjudged things. It seemed impolite and ungrateful not to have sex with someone if we got on, and they wanted to. I needed demonstrations of tenderness, and sex meant you were close to each other and important to each other, at least for that while. And who knew, maybe it would blossom into a passionate love? I used to check whether people wanted to go to bed with me. If not, that was fine. No harm done. But I might check again, on another occasion, to see if they felt differently today. I thought desire might not be admitted to, might need to be coaxed out. I didn’t think my presence had enough weight for my suggestions to be an imposition.

But sexuality, in any society, is fiercely policed, presumably because it is so wayward and urgent a drive. It can be so easily taken advantage of, so easily forced on people. Unwanted attentions are an invasion. Dating was still quite patriarchal and unwanted male advances were perhaps more troubling than I realised.

Whatever the reason, by the time I’d worked out my error, and changed my behaviour, I’d been kind of pushy, a bit of a pest…It was an ignominious reputation to have…

I added this to other causes of shame. Some urges and memories I’d brought with me from home and some I’d newly acquired. We were an emotional and intemperate bunch of undergraduates, liberated by booze and weed, and there was anger and vindictiveness and selfish cruelty and callous neglect and thoughtlessness and cowardice and lack of self-control and lots and lots of attention-seeking to be hidden or suppressed. They felt like betrayals of self. I was disappointed. I’d hoped to be a much better person.

Anorexia makes you literally and figuratively thin-skinned. Not only do you eat your own sub-cutaneous fat, you become hypersensitive, emotionally. You find yourself shaken by paroxysms of cringe. Everything matters too much. You have no resilience, are completely unforgiving. These thoughts undermine my sense of my own integrity, because they disrupt the coherent, controlled and knowable moral character I am trying to construct in the conscious stratum close to the surface of my memory. They challenge that character’s probity. They fragment me.

I avoid confronting them, but they ambush me, still, in unguarded moments, my worst transgressions transformed into intrusive thoughts. I find myself whimpering aloud, “no, no, not me…I didn’t mean…I’m sorry…” That mad guy you saw shambling down the street gesticulating and muttering to himself? That was probably me.

I was brought up not simply to reject, but to actively disdain the pursuit of self-knowledge. This seems odd, now. What could be wrong with having a little awareness? However, in our house, it was associated with a sort of pseudo-scientific mysticism that preyed on the gullible and weak. It was sentimental quackery and encouraged a risible, self-obsessed flakiness.

I guess there was an apprehension in our attitude: It didn’t pay to investigate yourself. Who knew what might rise to the surface, like Tennyson’s Kraken? (O let me not be mad. Not mad, sweet Heaven!) The idea of False Memories, a hotly debated topic in my youth, was not only deeply alarming, but extremely useful in maintaining this mind-set. It proved that therapy was worse than useless: it actively messed you up. It betrayed you into embarrassing yourself.

There may have been a political dimension, also. Therapeutic disciplines were associated with the fanciful naivety of the Left. My dad read The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, both of which prided themselves on their astute socio-political pragmatism. And I grew up in The Republic of Ireland in the 1970s and 80s. Liberal and progressive it was not.

This scepticism has combined with my need to hide the inner self from scrutiny. Over the years, I’ve compiled a whole dossier of shameful experiences to squirrel away. There’s enough for a complete, unspoken history of how rubbish I’ve been: stupid, self-obsessed, venal, insensitive, narrow-minded, attention-seeking, inappropriate. It must never be revealed to others, or even confronted by me. The teeming landscapes of my interior sustain a whole community of thought-in-denial, a post-war Germany, a post-colonial Britain, of the mind. (And, yes, the cringeful impropriety of the comparisons is the point: I have a tendency to over-react.)