I’m becoming truly obsessive by exercise. I am currently running around the block twice in the very early morning, and doing 200 star-jumps. I also run around the block once, very late at night, on occasion. I run around the town once directly after school, also, and have recently added a loop through the park at the end. Whenever I add an adjunct, an ornament or curlicue, usually as compensation for an individual indulgence, it instantly hardens into a new habit, like some sort of instant setting concrete.

I also run around the house as much as possible, including while brushing my teeth for 2 minutes (on the kitchen timer, with 30 seconds mouthwash, also.) This usually garners me over 3000 calories, according to my Fitbit, but I like to break the 4000, which I do on occasion.

You’d think I’d have a catastrophic crash, given that, from a purely mathematical perspective, I should have a calorie deficit every day. As you can tell, my tone is one of regret. I want to have a catastrophic crash, which, ironically, is possibly evidence of hard-line anorexic thinking, which is, reflexively, evidence of a catastrophic collapse: complicated tangles of ambivalence are characteristic of the condition. Obviously, my meals are more calorific than they appear, and this makes me fret about them, especially about the amount of bread.

The canteen at work has also started remaking those gorgeous yogurts that I fear and adore in equal measure. They’ve actually got bigger – they’re now distressingly big, heavy in the hand, and horribly gorgeous to eat. Oh my god, they’re lovely! And depressingly nourishing (a terribly bad word for me). I have started brushing off much of the crumble topping, and binning 5 teaspoons of the stuff. I still feel too sustained, abandoned by my comforting hunger and exhaustion and searching desperately for it.

I’m even becoming faintly worried about my farts (too smelly, unlike when you’re really ill) and my poos (possibly less frequent but still soft and normal).

(“Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read” – Groucho Marx, (I think))

I’ve just read an article by Louise Gray, author of The Ethical Carnivore, about her bulimia. She says “Food…is bound up closely with emotion” (The Observer Magazine, 11.03.18) She’s not the first to say that, of course, and her bulimia is very different from my obsessive exercise and gentle food restriction, but it’s worth remembering, given the storms of emotion we seem to live through and cause.

Incidentally, Louise Gray used to be the environmental correspondent for The Daily Telegraph. She says “I felt responsible for waking the world up to climate change and every day I felt I was failing…I saw the world as a terrifying place, but struggled to explain to anyone why, or to accept that there was little I could do about it.” This is surprisingly similar to my experience of the drought that appeared to have some part to play in triggering my anorexia. We both experienced terror about the pitiless, overwhelming threat of climate change and a sense of helplessness to do anything effective to combat it. This was probably intensified for me by a biological imperative to protect my offspring. Our eating disorders appear to be an attempt to wrest back some control and preoccupy ourselves with something absorbing yet achievable. Phil always tells me that we make the best decisions available to us at the time. If you develop anorexia, it’s to avoid something that, at the time, appears worse. In the face of a truly dreadful threat, self-starvation may seem the better option.

I’m also reading Decoding Anorexia by Carrie Arnold (2013, Hove: Routledge) which was recommended to me by the head of research at BEAT. I’m only on page 10, but, so far, it’s fascinating: accessible, but also reassuringly scientific. Ms. Arnold’s thinks that Anorexia should be considered from a biological, genetic point of view, rather than as a self-contained system of psycho-social causes and effects, as therapists tend to view it. As you can tell, this informed my thinking around my mother’s attitude to anorexia, which I discussed in my previous post. It is highly illuminating to remember that thought is bio-chemical; chemistry both causes thought and is thought. Thought initiates further synaptic chemistry. Odd to remember this, but exciting. I don’t know what conclusions she’ll draw from this. It confirms, for me, though, something I’ve been saying for a while: although quite possibly triggered as a coping mechanism, anorexia causes, or at least enhances, the anguish it assuages.

Finally, I’ve found an interesting point from a review of Natural Causes: Life, Death and the Illusion of control, by Barbara Ehrenreich, in the Observer New Review (08/04/18). They gave terminally ill patients who had an overwhelming fear of death the active ingredient from magic mushrooms, psilocybin. Apparently, this substance suppresses the part of your brain that constructs your sense of self, and the patients lost their fear. They experienced “ego-dissolution” and become comforted by “a profound sense of unity with the universe”, The universe “seethes” with life. Self is simply one, temporary, structure in it.

Ok. So, we know that starvation dismantles the brain, as it ditches non-necessary functions. Carrie Arnold (Decoding Anorexia, 2013, p.6)confirms what I suspected, that the mortality rate for anorexia largely consists of suicide and heart attack. Perhaps this is why anorexics are so blasé and unconcerned with the death of others, and so reckless with their own lives and health: their sense of self is becoming eroded or corrupted. I’m becoming obsessed with running, despite the possibility that I might drop dead. I need to stop this.

Incidentally, “erosion” and “corruption” – why are these (admittedly arch-conservative) terms not the ones associated with change? All this talk of “Disruptors” and “Progress” is a capitalist myth, as I keep saying! Ditch your old self and buy a new one from an officially endorsed vendor!

1. Parents
My parents have been visiting for Easter. I dreaded their arrival, in a mild, diluted sort of way. They’re good people but it felt like a band of dark cloud on the horizon. I have so little energy that anything that adds even the slightest extra resistance to the laborious progress of getting to the end of the day, any head wind, is a source of dread. This means any socialising, but especially the company of people who care, who have too much invested in me, and who I therefore have a responsibility to. Family, in other words. I fear they’ll scrutinise me too closely and will have opinions and emotional reactions to what I do and what I am, or have become. And I guess I’m ashamed of myself.

Mum directly asked me a question about being anorexic. I forget what. In response, I cautiously made some comments (maybe two), acknowledging that I had it. Embarrassing, but mum had the sense not to talk about it anymore, other than to pass some comments: “Well, I just don’t understand it”; “Maybe you just need to try harder” and, when I mentioned that Jo and I had coined a family motto of “Be kind and try your best”, “Well, you need to try to be kinder to your family.” Am I being overly critical to consider these as a little crass?

I think, for my parents, anorexia is fatally “psychological” and therefore evanescent in conception. They don’t seem to be able to understand it, which may be why mum doesn’t try to comment on it. They seem not to consider thought as bio-chemical. It is a self-contained system that operates and on itself and thus controls actions and decisions with perfect precision. So, for mum, psychological conditions can be instantly cured by simply “getting a grip”. This makes it incomprehensible as a reason for self-destructive behaviour. You just appear wilfully and illogically self-harming.

Of course, I may be projecting my own prejudices about the condition and how undeserving of sympathy or excuses I am, but I remember, as a teenager, my parents catching me with cuts on my wrists from a bout of melodramatic self-harming. They shouted at me, “Do you want us to get you therapy? Hmmm? Is that what you want? Well!?” (etc.), to which the answer was clearly supposed to be, “No, of course not! The very idea!” When I’d dutifully said this, they seemed satisfied with the outcome.

So I guess having them here was stressful. I acted as if I was highly stressed and was bloody rude and nasty to my poor old mum and dad, making horribly critical comments, sniping, arguing, aggressively challenging, criticising, sounding disdainful and full of dislike. Yet I felt that disassociation with my own emotions that I usually get. I felt as if I was looking on my own actions with a coolly rueful disdain, shaking my head with disappointment at my own behaviour. I felt that I could, at any point, make the decision to be much nicer and more tolerant, and that this would cost me very little. Yet, again and again, I found myself acting like a complete twat for no apparent reason. Perhaps I’m adopting my parents’ model of cognition, here, and thus viewing my behaviour with the same puzzlement.

Worst of all I ended up actually shouting at Jo, in frustration and panic over something very minor. I hate doing this. It seems unforgivably horrible because it’s bullying: forcing your mood on someone else. Luckily Jo is too strong to put up with that behaviour, but it still makes me terribly ashamed, especially as poor Jo has to shoulder almost all the responsibility for the children and even for being nice and welcoming and sociable to my parents, which should be my job.

Unsurprisingly, and deservedly, she was highly critical of me when Mum and Dad had left. I always hope she’ll congratulate me on the many instances of successful restraint, or at least reassure me that I wasn’t all that awful (and she had done so at various points during my parents’ stay, when I’d apologised.) Not this time. She confirmed that I’d been bloody awful.

Unfortunately, I’m pretty certain this is one of the reasons why I’m reluctant to get better. Anorexia provides a perfect excuse not to pull my weight, especially if I return to a bio-chemical model of thought and emotion, at odds with that of my parents. I have an incentive to be bloody awful. The more badly behaved I am, the more I can justify not making the effort. And yet, if I was asked, “I’m anorexic” would sound like a paltry and feeble excuse, especially in front of my mum.

Even though I seem to be relapsing, I’m more concerned for other people than I was last time. My anxiety has settled on Meggie’s food behaviours. She’s now 12 and very teenage-y (god, girls develop early!) I’m just waiting for her to manifest problems with food. In our house, everything to do with food is too fraught, too emotional, too pregnant with meaning and significance. It’s too important.

I think she’s developing worrying tendencies. She will suddenly abandon food, abruptly announcing that she doesn’t like certain things, and has never liked them; She will say, 3 mouthfuls from finishing, that she’s full, and even that she’s willing to forego her pudding in order to stop eating. (She’s calling my bluff.) She becomes highly exorcised if she doesn’t get exactly what she wants on her plate.

It’s clearly a way of exerting control and establishing independence. She’s beginning to understand the highly charged semiotics of food in this household and has weaponised it: not getting what she wants is an example of paternal tyranny or neglect; a tiny difference in the perceived size of her portion, compared to her brother’s, is an example of favouritism (I recently had to weigh their pieces of birthday cake on the kitchen scales, and she only backed down when it showed her piece was actually 3 grams heavier!)

But the language of food, and its messages, are more wayward and insidiously powerful than she yet realises. By giving it a social utility beyond its simpler, more wholesome and sustaining functions, she runs a very serious risk of becoming anorexic in her turn. This would ruin both our lives, so I’m scared shitless.

Here’s the attraction of relapsing. When you’re seriously ill, you’re too tired, befuddled and hungry to give a shite. You can expunge these excruciating guilts. Anorexia is a cosily familiar room, Spartan yet comforting. You can lock yourself in, away from the terrible storms of responsibility and self-blame, of newspapers filled with unstoppable disasters, tsunamis of murderous hate-crime, breathe a sigh of relief, and focus on small, domestic issues. You can curl up with half a bagel and a calorie count…

When my daughter was in year 1, her class teacher instituted a good hand-writing award. It was a small, gold painted trophy made of paste, and worth, it turned out, £8. Each week a different child would win it and take it home.

My daughter became fixated on this trophy. She was determined to win it. Each Friday she would come home dejected because some other, more careful child had carried off the prize. But Margaret was an unusually focussed and hard-working creature and so, about a month into this competition, she burst through the door, almost radiating delight and triumph: she’d won the cheap bauble!

As I cooked tea, Margaret wandered around the kitchen savouring her victory. I think she was imagining silent applause, when she threw her arm up in a gesture of gracious acceptance and the precious trophy slipped through her fingers, fell to the floor, and broke in half.

There was, of course, a moment of horrified stillness. After only 20 minutes, all joy instantly vanished. There the trophy lay, apparently magnified: the impact mark fragmented and then a clean break right across the middle revealing a strange interior substance that was both like plaster and plastic, and, we soon discovered, sullenly resistant to glues designed for either.

We replaced it, but this memory lies somewhere in the bottom of my psyche, let alone hers, like an unhealed wound. It is still awful, its edges still bloody and aching.

Yet there is a purity to it. I could not make it better. Nothing I could say could lessen the obvious enormity of the disaster, but it wasn’t my fault and I could give myself up to embracing her and sharing her misery. It confirmed a communion between us, and a capacity for empathy in me.

I truly do not want this memory. I wish it had never happened. That it still upsets me is of no benefit to anyone, which, ironically, seems to make it more valuable – it is unadulterated or is it uncompromised? Like the sadness that comes from music.

This is not the case with the most upsetting memories I have of my treatment of Daniel.

As I’ve said, because I doubt my ability to control the little mommets, and keep them safe, I used to be particularly fierce about crossing roads. I told myself I was trying to impress upon them the extreme dangers of something so apparently mundane. However, I suspect, now, that it may have been an outlet for my suppressed irritation which was growing as I became thinner and I found it more and more difficult to find the energy even to just walk them home from school.

One dark, rainy afternoon. I was talking to Margaret and Daniel was poddling along behind us, singing to himself. I turned around just in time to see him jump off the kerb, into the road, to splash in a puddle. He was silhouetted by the headlights of the oncoming traffic, through the whirling rain.

And I shouted at him, I really shouted; I gave him such a terrible roasting: did he not realise how foolish and dangerous this was? Did he realise what a fright he’d given me? I didn’t let up, while he wailed in apologetic misery, heart-broken, because I’d never done anything like this to him before, his loving daddy.

I worry, now, that this may have marked a dark and malignant paradigm shift in his subconscious psyche. That his father, who up until that moment had been, by and large, warm and supportive, helping his mother to create a stable, nurturing home-life, should suddenly turn on him, like a snarling animal.

Could this have undermined the foundations of his security? Because, the thing is, he’d done nothing wrong. Yes, it was a narrow-ish one way street, but we were on the right-hand pavement and the oncoming cars were probably over to the left. It was a moment of absent-minded happy play. So how could he know when I would turn on him again?

And, of course, I did. I can remember how I first gave in to the urge to be nastily sarcastic to them – first to one, while the other laughed in a bewildered manner, and then to the other. I told myself that I was being humorous, but I knew, and I know, the black shame of it, even through my hunger.

Because Daniel is now a mass of nervous tics and habits – nail-biting, hair-chewing, compulsive apologies, hysterical weeping. He is the gourmand of anxieties, a boy of catholic and eclectic fears, who can take any half-formed thought, any misheard adult conversation and expertly turn it into a fully formed sleep-depriving terror in a matter of minutes: monsters, climate change, terrorists, war, famine, all find a place in his ghastly library of horrors.

I did this. I am wincingly sensitive to his nervous, overly cheery, false persona with me, followed by heart to hearts with his mother where he reveals what is really worrying him. And he clings to her…

Now, back to the children. We were discussing how we damage them. And why. Here’s the thing:

Somebody needs to stop the wild and self-willed bunnies running onto the motorway. You have that responsibility. Congratulations. As Jo went back to work and got promoted, more of the parenting duties accrued to me. I was ok when Jo was there to confirm my decisions, but it always made me feel breathlessly overwhelmed if she was out, and I became much fiercer and dictatorial, as a consequence. Lacking moral and rational authority, I tried to compensate with added fierceness.

But the delicate little creatures are so easily damaged. I can remember a number of times when my parents wounded me with a moment’s inattention or a sharper response than I was expecting. Such trivial things, to them, but I’ve never forgotten them. I don’t dwell on them, but I’ve worked them in to the material of my being: weaknesses in the foundations of who I am, the roots of a twisted tree. Children are pitiless in their accusatory insecurities, in their pointed self-harm.

You forget how big you are, to a small child, as an adult and their parent. You don’t know your own emotional strength. Like Hercules, cursed by Hera to child-killing frenzy. When other dimensions of thought are returned to me, empathy, for example, they add depth to my hunger-flattened perceptions. I feel like a psyche-destroying Hercules: as the mist of madness fades from my eyes, I survey the carnage, the butchered beloved, body parts strewn across the floor. Who would have thought I had such strength, such cruelty? Who would have thought they had so much blood in them? Because it was only little me, after all. I needed to exert myself to control the situation, didn’t I? How could I control it, otherwise?

Incidentally, I think I might be reaching some sort of crisis point with my weight. My left hand has become raw and scaly again, and little cracks or cuts are appearing on the knuckles which don’t heal very well. I’m feeling exhausted, physically, a lot of the time, and daunted by the effort of confronting the simplest of daily tasks – picking James up from school, for example. It’s possible that the emotional richness is being slowly leached or bleached out of my perceptions of the world (possibly), and that the metaphysical depth is being flattened like a cardboard box being dismantled. (The world seems made of empty boxes, inhabited by insubstantial spirits that evaporate into nothing as each box folds down. Were they ever there?) Yet my brain often seems full of baseless anguish that’s attached to nothing, and I’ll suddenly experience pangs of sourceless poignancy, like those tangy salt crystals in vintage cheddar or gorgeous cookery smells wafting from somewhere out of sight. (Food image! Mmm!)

Behaviour-wise I seem to have become highly mercurial again. That’s an even better word than volatile, I think, because it’s not a simmering rage that bursts out. Inexplicable blades of fury suddenly stab upwards, through my chest: I’m fine. Then I’m not. I’ve started snapping savagely at my kids and, also, the naughty ones at school, which makes me feel dejected and humiliated, feelings I enjoy. I get easily agitated by Meggie and Daniel and am then horribly nasty to them. I find it difficult to guard against this because the nastiness comes out of nowhere.

It feels good to be back here, in that anorexic, reverse thinking sort of way, although I still feel much better than I did at my worst. Basically, I need to be cared for, but Jo is suffering from exhaustion from over-work. She needs to be cared for and I need to gain absolution by doing so. These are all warning signs, I think. I need to back pedal quickly. But how?

It is obvious where the source of my next set of anxieties would lie. Watching your child wobble along a pavement, next to the massive wheels of roaring juggernauts, reminds you that the experience of parenthood is one of terror and guilt. They are so vulnerable and trusting; there are so many ordinary things in the world that could do them severe physical harm, cause brain-damage, even kill them: cars, crossing the road, choking, chicken-pox, falling off the swings, high temperatures. And each of these would be your fault.

I always used to dislike flying. Every time the plane built up speed on the runway, and I was pressed back into my seat, I tried to reconcile myself with the possibility of my own immanent death. I tried to say to myself “I could die, here, now, but it’ll be very quick and I’ve had a good life” I don’t know if it worked. I probably just lacked the imagination to panic and Jo truly hates flying so I had to be the designated calm one.

I only flew once with Meggie. She was a toddler and I was terrified. I felt I was suffocating. I wanted to run up and down the aircraft wailing and battering at the windows and walls. I thought, if what I feared actually came to pass, there would be nothing I could do to protect or reassure the little blonde-headed one, as we spun downwards, through the dreadful roaring air. We never flew again.

Then there’s the psychological or moral damage you could do by getting it wrong, by being inconsistent; by threatening to punish but then going back on it; by absent-mindedly dismissing their ideas, being petulant, letting them see what a twat you really are: small, inconsequential acts with deep impacts. And these, also, would be your fault.

Behind all this there is the Big Guilt: that you have somehow engendered a breathing, vivid, emotional consciousness out of nothing, and, by doing so, committed it to suffering and death. Inevitably. It can be no coincidence that Meggie was a toddler when I first became obsessed with the drought that our part of Britain was experiencing. I bequeathed her a mortally wounded planet: “Darling, welcome to your birth-right: the whole dying Earth. I’m really sorry…”

And, allied to this, you feel powerless, or at least lacking in control: powerless to protect them; unable to control them or the effect you are having on them. This probably starts, for the parent who isn’t giving birth, with standing uselessly side-lined in the delivery room, wringing your hands, irrelevant to the most profoundly important drama in the lives of all three of you, although this seemed appropriate to my self-conception, at the time. It always perplexed me that the children used to do what I told them. Why would they listen to me? What the hell did I know about anything? I hadn’t even read the parenting manuals.

But, to continue my story about having children:

When I was younger, I occasionally experienced something akin to depression. I guess this is the common experience of being human. This has happened to me perhaps 3 times in my life, the first time when I was an undergraduate. At its worst, for perhaps two weeks, perhaps a month, I lost the ability to understand speech. Or I believed I had, although I still seemed able to give the correct verbal response. People would say something to me: “verbalburbleburble”. I would look at them blankly, then hazard an answer: “yes”. They would then hand me a cup of tea, or something.

It felt like I’d become paralysed while swimming in the middle of a great lake and that I was sinking deep, deep down into the dark and silent depth, the last air, under pressure, chuckling in my ears.

I dealt with this by telling myself that this experience wouldn’t last forever. It could be endured. I should just sit and wait for it to pass. And it worked! After a while I got better. From then on, I prided myself on my capacity for resignation. I thought my strength was resilience. I endured, with relative good humour. I didn’t care where I lived, as long as it was warm and dry; I didn’t tend to care what Jo and I decided to do together, where we went, what we ate. I exhibited a philosophical tolerance, let her decide because I wanted her to be happy.

Now, confronted first by one, then by two babies, I had not actively chosen, I attempted to live by that same philosophy. I loved all three of them profoundly, but I demonstrated this by being passive, by not making decisions and telling myself it was a form of self-sacrifice because I loved them.

The philosophy that suits one mode of being doesn’t necessarily suit another, however. This was just a refusal, a suppression, a cultivation of indecisiveness. Abdicating all responsibility wasn’t good for me. It was storing up problems.

The Guardian reported recently that “the number of patients admitted to hospital with potentially life threatening eating disorders has nearly doubled over the past six years” (Sharp Rise in Admissions for Eating Disorders, 13/02/18). They reported that the figure had risen from 7,260 in 2010-11, to 13,885 in the year ending April 2017. A chart shows the numbers rising steadily over that period.

The Guardian is concerned with the lack of funding for community services, leading to sufferers being admitted, fed up to an acceptable weight, then sent home and abandoned, where they lose all that weight and become anorexic again. A woman called Becki Copley calls it “the cycle of discharge and readmission”.

I guess this has been my experience. Abi, the eating disorders specialist, always said that you couldn’t think straight about your condition until your brain was no longer starved. The problem is that, once you reach a healthy weight, you then need to address whatever it was that caused the anorexia in the first place, but this is the point that you are discharged and left without NHS support. I was briefly and, in retrospect, I think rather disdainfully assessed by an NHS psychiatrist, at one point, who saw me twice and confirmed that I wasn’t suffering from depression, and didn’t need any further medication. There was never any question of the Health Service providing me with any psychological or counselling support, either while I was being treated or when I had reached my target weight. They couldn’t afford it. And I guess I wasn’t ill enough.

I found being discharged a great relief. I hated being scrutinised and assessed and asked bluntly why I hadn’t gained weight. I hated the physical effort it took to get to the joyless appointments, although I really, genuinely, liked and admired Abi and the dietician they assigned me, and was very grateful to them.
So I immediately began to lose weight again. It became apparent that one of my motivations for getting better was to avoid their displeasure. Now I was free to restrict my eating and increase my exercising once again. I could go back to proving to myself and those around me that something wasn’t right, that I’m genuinely ill, not just an unpleasant little toad, etc. etc.

My weight has steadily dropped, since then. In fact, I rather like the idea of being committed. It would be a relief to relinquish all control of food. Is that what I’m sub-consciously aiming for? But, I suspect I would gain weight, be discharged and then start losing weight again: “the cycle of discharge and readmission”.