It’s not just me, though. Dip your hand, for a moment, into the stream of media babble and you can haul out any number of articles on food anxiety of one sort or another. Over the last weeks or so, without conscious effort, I’ve acquired an essay on clean eating, an article on food waste, a Radio 4 documentary called Getting to Grips with Anorexia, Mark Austin’s documentary, on Channel 4, Wasting Away: The Truth about Anorexia, an article in the Guardian, yesterday, about how overweight people are being discriminated against at work…We clearly all have a problem with food.

Bee Wilson, writing in the Guardian (The Long Read, 12/08/17) suggests that the Clean-Eating movement is like a post-truth cult. This cult, she claims, calms the fears of their acolytes that they are being poisoned by Agri-business scientists, a fear she traces back at least to the adulterated foodstuffs of Victorian England. It’s not, she says, that there is white lead in the bread anymore, but rather “that our entire pattern of eating may be bad for us, in ways that we can’t fully identify…our current way of eating is slowly poisoning us”. By sticking to a rigidly restricted diet, the Clean-Eaters wrest back control of their diets, their guts and their waist-lines from big business.

This was certainly my experience. I’d developed Graves’ Disease, an auto-immune condition that gave me a highly over-active thyroid gland. Along with (because of) terrible insomnia, anxiety, acute heat intolerance, a complete inability to concentrate and a resting heart-rate of up to 120bpm, I was able to burn off any number calories and still weigh in at around nine and a half stone. I could eat a cheesecake and a pizza a day and remain at nine and a half stone. It was great.

But it wasn’t healthy. So, eventually, I had to have the wayward gland cut out. Then the chickens came home to roost, because, it turns out, there is no such thing as a calorie free lunch. I began to put on weight again – I’d got a little porky before I developed Graves’ disease. It dawned on me that modern processed foods were packed full of fattening crap, that, as Bee Wilson puts it “to walk into a modern western supermarket is to be assailed by aisle upon aisle of salty, oily snacks and sugary cereals, of “bread” that has been neither proved nor fermented, of cheap, sweetened drinks and meat from animals kept in inhumane conditions”. “Affluence and multi-national food companies [have] replaced the hunger of earlier generations with an unwholesome banquet of sweet drinks and convenience foods that teach us from a young age to crave more of the same”.

And it seemed impossible to stay slim under these conditions. All around me more and more people seemed to be morbidly obese, waddling, wheezing down the streets with type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Bee Wilson points out that in 2016 600 children were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes; before 2002 there were no recorded cases of children developing this condition from their diet. The Guardian (31/08/17) reports that 27% of British adults were obese in 2015, while 58% of women, and 68% of men, were overweight.

So when Jo asked me to cook more healthily, I got hold of the Hairy Dieters’ cookbook and, without any noticeable discomfort, my weight started to come down. By cooking all our meals myself, I was able to take back control of what we ate, and of my weight, quite easily.

I started to enjoy watching my weight creep slowly down. I began to see it as an achievement and I was proud of it. Week on week, my weight was the same or marginally lower. I started, inexplicably, to feel exhausted all the time, but on the plus side, about the same time my weight really went off a cliff. I’d got into the habit of seeing this as a pleasing thing, a success, so, at mealtimes, I started to carefully make sure I didn’t overeat, calorie counting, feeling anxious about it…

The point is that I got into this state by resisting the great insistent tide of food that’s sweeping us all towards morbid obesity. And it is literally a huge, physical, actual volume of overproduction. The Waitrose Weekend magazine claims that, in Britain, we throw away 7.3 million tonnes of food worth £13 billion. Our poor hunter-gatherer brains are obviously overwhelmed by the sheer abundance. We don’t know what to do with it. Our choices seem limited to surrendering and becoming massively overweight, or forming a habit of resistance and denial, which is an invitation to self-starvation. It is literally a case of “Cake or Death”.

This blog only deals with one aspect of my existence. Behind the tedious madness is a whole world of work, family and their friends that only appears as a shadowy, sketched-in backdrop. There’s a photograph of my village in the 19^th century which is eerily empty apart from one hansom cab and horse. Apparently, the square was full of people but the photographic plates developed so slowly that their movements have blurred them out of existence. They’re like the servants in Jane Austen novels: there but invisible. (“These our actors/, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and/ are melted into air, into thin air”.)

I know I can sound monstrously solipsistic. One of the trademarks of Anorexia is a duality of mind, thoughts so deeply fissured as to represent a crisis of ambivalence. We are fully aware of our selfishness, our cruelty and our treachery. We exist in a welter of self-blame that further lowers our sense of self-esteem. We agree with all the criticisms you make of us. But we armour ourselves with a hunger so urgent that we can’t be dealing with that right now. We store up the self-blame and the sense of injury and abandonment for when we’re better because we all think our condition is temporary: surely you can’t stay thin for long in the modern junk food world.

All this gives us a skin as thick as rhino hide and a stubbornness to match. Those of you who live with us probably recognise the set jaw, the hunched shoulders and the general air of miserable endurance that makes a truculent anorexic look like a Tommie digging in on the Western Front. You’ve become an utter shit, and you know it.

In my defence, though, the blog is supposed to help me articulate my thoughts on a specific problem and thus help me process and solve it. Part of this process is an act of communication, but, dear reader, if you dislike my approach, please do turn to something more to your liking.

I guess I’m describing anorexics’ isolation even in the bosoms of their own families, and this characterised the rest of my summer. I spent my time trying to creep unobtrusively into family gatherings, cringing with self-consciousness. Anorexia makes you anti-social because it makes you so socially inept. You flail and flounder around, knocking into things and damaging them, hurting people close to you – a bull in a china shop.

The problem is they care too much. The air seems to become charged as people notice you’re there. There seems too much meaning behind each greeting. Rather than simply accepting your presence, everyone knows; everyone tactfully doesn’t mention it. Everybody, sincerely and genuinely, wants to know how you are, sometimes even squeezing your hand compassionately.

And they notice. They noticed me cautiously trying to scrape the least béchamel-y, cheesy pasta-y bits of mince and tomato out of the huge slab of lasagne that somebody’s slapped on my plate. Before every meal I had to create a whole battle plan in my head to ensure I could end up cooking and helping to serve so I could eat standing up by the cooker and not be overlooked. (“No, no, I’m fine. No, no, I’ve got enough…”). It was exhausting.

We went to a Yorkshire temperance inn for dinner with my family. It was good, hearty Yorkshire fare: black pudding, rack of lamb, steak and chips. Scanning the menu, I hissed to Jo “I can’t eat, any of this…” Around us the conversation seemed to drain away as everyone pretended not to be listening. I wanted to leap up and shout “oh for Christ’s sake! Leave me alone! I’m trying. I don’t even want to be here!

I clung rigidly to my food plans and felt alarmed if they got altered. Emotionally, the consequences of this seem catastrophic. You can’t express yourself properly but it seems desperately important that you do before somebody forces you to eat something terribly fatty and this would be awful, for some reason I’m not sure of, so your voice goes all shrill and you start gabbling.

Then everyone over-reacts, attributing anything you say to your illness, so any conversation can go rapidly down-hill as you flounder around trying to extricate yourself. Stuff keeps coming out wrong and You don’t want to spoil everyone’s holiday but everyone is hurt and worried and forgiving and everyone knows it’s your fault, but they’re not blaming you and you wish they’d just leave you alone.

A typical scenario might go like this: we’re going for a picnic: sandwiches, sausage rolls, cake, “one small apple for the vitamins”…I want to nip to the shop to get a little sushi tray, which I know is exactly 274 calories, a pleasing and recklessly low amount for a lunch. Jo says “Well, why don’t you just have that last bagel and the bit of smoked salmon in the fridge? That’s probably the same as your sushi. It’ll save you money, and it’s not fair that we should all have to wait while you go to the shop”, but I look at the bagel packet and one bagel is 230 calories and god knows how much the salmon is but now I feel I can’t really go to the shop and I’m upset, because anorexics look forward so much to the food they allow themselves, and sort of confused, but then Jo says “but go if you really want to” and now I don’t know what to do and it all seems too important and I’m hissing at Jo as quietly as I can “You’re just making it more difficult for me” and my sister and Mother come to Jo’s aid crying “Oh Xander!…” the diminutive they used when I was a child.

Poor Jo has to manage and handle me. I feel like an old, mangy, bad-tempered bear with worn down teeth that Jo has rescued from the circus and is trying to house-train. Everyone is nervous that I’m going to take a crap on the sofa, then suddenly lunge at somebody…

I was asked to cook dinner by my in-laws. There weren’t enough large bowls for my fish stew, so I cunningly provided myself with a small bowl, hoping to get away with a much smaller portion than everyone else. My father-in-law, with thoughtless self-sacrifice, made straight for MY bowl and started filling it. So I said “Oi, that’s my bowl!” I was trying to make a joke out of it, but my alarm and irritation, mixed with their expectations, must have made it come out badly, because there was an almost audible gasp. My poor father-in-law leapt to his feet and everyone else started examining their spoons minutely. Jo started to shush me! I realised I was making a spectacle of myself, standing there, waving my ladle, so I hazarded a grim, baleful half-laugh that fooled no-one.

At least I only have to deal with this in the summer. It must be awful to be an anorexic teenager, living with concerned, martyred brothers, sisters and fathers, perhaps with a mother who has taken on the thankless task of forcing her child to keep to their meal plan because together we’re going to beat this thing. The pressure must be awful. You must want to scream “Oh, just FUCK OFF”. Actually, I think they probably do, all the time, which proves how horrible the anorexic child has become and how virtuously long-suffering their family are.

By the way, yes, I am fully aware just how banal and trivial these situations are. That’s their great advantage. You can fully absorb yourself in histrionic little dramas and thus avoid confronting the truly ominous. And we call your bluff, really, by being willing to actually starve ourselves to death over such farcical nonsense. Anyway, it passes the time. A boy should have a hobby.

I’ve been away all summer, dragged reluctantly from Croatia(!) to Norfolk to Yorkshire to Norfolk again at the whim of relatives and friends, trailing along in their wakes, muttering darkly…

Croatia is a curious blend of Italy, Greece and the French Riviera, with a typically Balkan divisive and volatile history. It’s got Roman ruins; frescoes of Venetian winged lions; waterfront promenades with cafes; cicadas; barren, rocky coasts; warm, clear, salty Adriatic swimming; carb-heavy Mediterranean diet (grilled calamari. Yum!) It’s a fascinating place, but I don’t want to bore you with it. This isn’t a travel blog; it’s about my relationship with FOOD. So:

I found it difficult. Going on holiday necessitates abandoning the foods and food rituals that you know keep you at a “safe” weight. You lack control over the food you’ll be confronted by and forced to eat. You have to emerge from your bunker and embrace the experience and whatever it throws up, telling yourself that you’re doing it for the family (which they find gratifyingly annoying), telling yourself that you’ll just have to find a way of coping, which means exercising to compensate for any extra calories. Bring your running shoes.

Abi, the eating disorders specialist, thinks I need plans and routines to help me deal with this, and she advised me to think about what I was going to do when confronted by a greasy pizza. I never came up with an adequate response, but I went for a half hour run (or stagger) every morning, followed by a plunge into the sea. Very quickly anorexic exercise-inflation had increased this to a half hour swim.

The problem is that I’ve never been very good at calorie counting and I find scanning menus and plates of food and assessing their stodge factor very difficult. I love food and so I’ve always found it difficult not to finish my portion. I tend to err on the side of caution. I’d prefer to just have a tiny portion and finish it all up and lick the plate, yum scrum. I do leave food unfinished, but it feels like such a waste, and my anorexia has something to do with not wasting any food at all. It’s probably that control issue again. I’m the most ghastly food nag with Daniel and Maggie. I hate myself as I stand over them hissing “finish your damn spinach!” Luckily they argue back and Jo comes in on their side bearing down like a ship of the line, with all three decks of cannon run out and primed. The result is that I retreat wounded and sad, which is just as it should be, and they eat cake. Thank god I’ve got a compost heap at home to help justify the spoilage.

Anyway, back to Croatia. I was very cautious and suspicious at first, reluctantly leaving some of my potatoes and bread and living off tuna salad. By about day 4, however, I was beginning to feel pretty odd – I didn’t feel hungry at all, (was that the heat?) but I felt exhausted. As I’ve said before, I’ve become so alienated from my own corporeal urges that I don’t recognise hunger, anyway (What is that feeling? Thirst? A sore throat? Stomach ache? Constipation? Habit? An entirely imaginary, evaporating mist.)

Then I began to feel, in an odd way, that my sense of self was being dismantled. I couldn’t quite decide what it meant to be me. Perhaps I needed the guy-ropes of purpose, place and routine to secure me; perhaps the lazy freedom of holidays doesn’t suit me. Whatever the reason, I began to feel twitchy and distressed. Then I began to feel that I was no longer able to think straight – my thoughts didn’t quite link up, or I couldn’t comprehend the emotional meaning or impact of any situation or conversation. This, in turn, led to me entertaining some dreadful thoughts almost as a way of testing my emotional response. I know these thoughts: they are the beginnings of those infamous “intrusive thought” that we anorexics specialise in and come back to like a tongue probing a sore tooth.

I mentioned an edited version of all this to Jo and we decided that it was probably my under-fuelled brain shutting down again because my calorie intake didn’t match my calorie expenditure, like poor Hal slurring “Daisy, Daisy” as Dr Bowman removes his circuits.

My options were then either to reduce the exercise or up the calories. I opted to up the calories – the easier option for me, because I like eating. So I started finishing my portions, and having a yogurt ice-cream every day. (Yum!) This seemed to do the trick and the most distressing symptoms subsided, leaving me feeling only slightly lost and purposeless, which was a relief. When I got home and weighed myself, though, I’d actually gained a pound! I wasn’t happy about this at all, although I know I should be. It’s difficult to feel a sense of achievement and control when your successes involve surrendering to your basest appetites.

Imagine, then, the Croatian scene: Jo, Maggie and Daniel stride down a path through Mediterranean pines, beach towels tucked under their arms, skipping happily, to where the Adriatic sparkles in the sun. I trail along behind them, twitching, creeping through the dark, withered forest of my own blighted synapses…

And this is exactly why anorexics don’t need to go on holiday anymore. I can make an immensely complicated, hysterical, life-or-death melodrama out of a tuna salad. It’s a much, much cheaper way to find interest in your life. It’s like taking drugs! It’s just a pity it’s so deathly boring for everyone on the outside.

Appropriately, towards the end of the holiday, I lost the hearing in both my ears, completing my isolation from my gorgeous family. A build-up of wax, the practice nurse tells me, probably something to do with all the swimming: the ignominious humiliations of the human body.

I’ve been away on holiday – not my idea. I’ll tell you about it soon. In the meantime, I’d want to apologise for descending to the level of personal attacks in my previous post. I hold to what I said in principle – these are issues that need to be dealt with – but I don’t want to attack perfectly lovely individuals who simply happen to disagree with me. There’s far too much of that on the internet already. Personal disagreements should be conducted face to face and in a conciliatory tone, if possible. If you do feel you have to express disagreement or condemnation it ought to serve some wider purpose than just sounding off.

So, anyway, sorry, Ms. Sandberg.

I’ve just realised that this is another of my “I’d just like to apologise for calling Yoko Ono a talentless, gold-digging witch” moments! I really, really don’t think that about Yoko Ono, you know.

Hey –

I’ve been away on holiday in Croatia(!) I’m working on a post about that but, in the meantime, to show you I’m still alive, here’s an unprovoked and totally unfair attack on Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, which makes me ashamed, but I have to go and catch a train now and haven’t time to write anything more reasonable;

Sheryl Sandberg was on Desert Island Discs. She said “Well, now we talk about our mission as building community”. She seemed like a lovely person, and has had to deal with a terrible tragedy, and I promised myself that I wouldn’t use this blog to attack people and add my own tuppence-worth to the howling cacophony of hate-filled outrage that is the internet, BUT…Isn’t this a bit like your Crack dealer, who got you hooked as a kid, telling people “Well now we talk about our mission as giving palliative care to addicts”? If communities need to be built or rebuilt it’s because the internet has destroyed traditional communities and replaced them with lynch mobs of alienated sociopaths conducting online pogroms against anyone who dares disagree with them. We were promised jetpacks, folks, and instead Facebook and friends drowned us all in a tsunami of inanity, endlessly reproduce memes and internet porn and then told us we were empowered because we could persecute anyone that the mob singled out, while still cowering anonymously in our bunkers.

 

If you want to build communities go and have a cup of tea with somebody, face to face. Listen to an opinion that’s contrary to your own and don’t reply to it, let it hang in the air. You’ll have plenty of time in the future to put your own point of view.

 

Ms. Sandberg also mentioned “imposter syndrome”. This is another unpleasant idea. Greeting your success with a momentary sense of disbelief isn’t a medical “syndrome”, it’s a sign of humility, a sign that you’re normal and appreciate your luck. I think the first users of this term were signalling that they were still like us, despite their achievements. But to take it seriously as a syndrome is to medicalise modesty, to claim it is a bad thing, an illness that needs treating, and that the reverse, to meet your achievements with a horrifyingly arrogant sense of entitlement and self-value, is a form of mental health! Well, if humility is an illness, it is, by definition, not one that stands in the way of anyone achieving their goals. In fact, if you don’t have it, you must be a monster!

 

And another thing, what’s this use of the word “mission”?! AAAARGH somebody save me from my nasty self!

Phoebe, the Oracle, was telling me, with her trademark restrained outrage, about the new Netflix film To the Bone, which she feels glamorises anorexia. Since then I’ve seen a one star review in the Guardian (“Nothing useful or insightful [is] said about anorexia or anything else”), and Hadley Freeman has attacked it in the same publication.

 

I haven’t seen the film, (I know, I know, how can I pass judgement? Give over…) but Lily Collins looks far too beautiful not to glamorise her role. A truthful representation of anorexia ought to be too boring to watch. How long can you watch somebody else dithering over what to have for dinner or getting stuck in the loo for hours because they’re so constipated? How many times can you watch somebody changing their mind in the chilled foods aisle? Where’s the drama in somebody refusing to leave the house and being incapable of speech or thought? One of the reasons anorexia got such a grip on me was because it allowed me to concentrate on trivialities rather than confronting the enormous geo-political or psychological terrors that surround and beset us all. Jo, my wife, once called me “the most tedious person in the universe” just because I was agonising over what to cook. With typical anorexic inversion, I was rather pleased with this. I’m not sure why (which is also typical of anorexics) perhaps it proved to me that I’d successfully hidden myself among the details.

 

From the inside, of course, anorexia is a fevered and surreal melodrama; you’re crashing around your own life, falling over the furniture like a giddy drunk but without the hilarity. (It also makes you literally clumsy. I’ve broken so many glasses. The kitchen is outlined in tiny, sparkling glass shards that I couldn’t be bothered to sweep up properly.)  As you begin to recover, or at least gain a bit of weight, you become more capable of analysing your own experiences. This inevitably makes you pretty introspective because you’re asking yourself “What the fuck just happened to me?”

 

The writer-director of To the Bone, Marti Noxon, “based the movie on her own experiences with the illness” but how do you make such a boring condition worth watching when its about somebody else? Well, you add spurious, but engaging story elements. You make the anorexic’s journey to recovery into a compelling narrative. You make it a satisfying and ultimately positive experience. This is, by definition, glamorisation.

 

If a writer-director is somebody who’s had an eating disorder in the past, then of course their film will glamorise anorexia. You can never, never trust what an ex-anorexic says about anorexia. It is anorexia that gives Marti Noxon the authority to make a film about anorexia, just as it is anorexia that gives Hadley Freeman the authority to condemn that film. Ms. Freeman mentions her “first three hospitalisations” and her “last three admissions” with a hint of pride; disappointingly, I have never been hospitalised, but it is my experience of anorexia that allows me to comment on both these people. Anorexia gives us importance and interest. It gives us something to say that’s worth listening to. And because of this it keeps getting off the leash – it blurts things out through our mouths, especially when we’re explaining our condition or giving each other advice.

 

All this is a way for us to express our damaged souls. Ms. Noxon has said “I started to need to turn to the other female producers quite frequently and say: ‘I’m going to need you to tell me that I don’t need to lose weight’”.  So you see, the film is about Marti Noxon. It is part of her ongoing struggle with the need to starve herself. She is the sufferer at its heart.

 

It is also interesting that she made Lily Collins, who has also had eating disorder issues, lose enough weight to look “credibly anorexic”. This is a dangerous thing to do, because the thinner you get, the weirder your thinking becomes and the more likely you are to have a relapse. We are a very disloyal bunch. The spiritual, metaphysical and emotional dimensions of life turn out to be functions of the brain, and, as it begins to starve and shut down, it sheds its ability to include these aspects in your mental life. One of these deep brain structures is empathy, the ability to immediately imagine and identify with another person’s experience. You don’t realise how easily you do this every day, until you lose it. You are all far more empathetic than you think you are.

 

But lose it you do, if you’re anorexic. We can become very cold-blooded and Machiavellian and will happily sacrifice each other to validate our own positions. In Marti Noxon’s case, she will need reasons not to relapse, and one of these will be her film. She might well be willing to sacrifice the well-being of some little upstart, encroaching on her pre-occupation, in order to improve her film. And, yes, there could be such an involuntary edge of cruelty in her manipulation of her star. I was babysitting a class recently, and one of the girls was being extremely snappish. Eventually she told me she hadn’t “eaten for a week”, then she collapsed on a chair and started shaking. Her friends swept her off with great excitement and more appeared out of nowhere, summoned by text, to fuss over her. It must have been very satisfying for her. I felt annoyed. I thought to myself “you’re not the only one with a psychological problem, Sunshine!” I was being territorial about my own disorder. I didn’t want other people to have it too. That would cheapen my experience.

 

So any work that we produce on the strength of our illness is going to be “Pro-ana”. Having had the condition allowed us to create. Without it, there’s be no work. This blog is partly pro-ana: You too will have the right to enter the debate if you keep denying yourself food.

 

The creature will always, always try to hijack our voices. Sometimes even we can’t be sure who is speaking from sentence to sentence. When we lick our lips, you should notice that the tongue is forked.

 

Oh, and can I just say, the eating disorders team did consider hospitalising me, so I still get to wear the Anorexia Campaign Medal, right?

I’m sorry I haven’t posted for so long. I guess I’ve been busy – another disadvantage of recovery. I do have a job and kids, though I neglect both, and I like to formulate my posts carefully on a word document before I upload them (Is this obvious?) but this process slows things down.

 

Over the past week, I’ve had many revelatory moments. I’ve formulated innumerable phrases that seem to encapsulate a concept or lyrically articulate my condition, and I’ve promised myself I’d write them down the minute I got to a notebook. Many hours later I’ve remembered that I had the thought, I’ve remembered the exact feeling of having the thought, I’ve even remembered what the thought referred to, but the actual thought itself seemed to have just that moment vanished. I could still hear its echoes dying away, see its afterglow, but it had gone.

 

When my daughter was a toddler, she burst into tears as she woke up one morning. She was saying “where’s my sun petal gone? Give me back my sun petal” and her little hands were opening and closing. I think a beautiful dream was evaporating as she woke. It seemed like a loss of grace. We are programmed to yearn for insubstantial dreams, I guess.

And I’ll be as trite as I damn well please, thank you very much!

When I was younger I was desperate for attention. I’d worked out that the basis of most types of humour is saying something inappropriate, flouting the expectations of a particular social script. So I clowned around, verbally. I said the first thing that came into my head. I got a lot of laughs but it was very hit and miss. There were also a lot of doubtful looks, puzzlement, offence, irritation, disdain. I grew increasingly sick of the sound of my own loud voice wittering on. I began to associate it with exposure and humiliation.

 

By my early 20s I’d managed to condition myself to associate hangovers with shame, largely because of stupid things I’d said. Waking up with a headache, I’d immediately by coated in a sweat of embarrassment, assuming I’d made a fool of myself, even if it turned out that I’d been very good and quiet.  On one occasion, I stood up at breakfast at a work training weekend and announced “I’d just like to apologise for calling Yoko Ono a talentless gold-digging witch…” I was the only person who’d stayed up that late who’d also made it to breakfast. (Mind you, my party piece, at this point in my life, was taking all my clothes off and running around naked, which requires no language at all.)

 

I’m not knocking humour. Victoria Coren-Mitchell said, on Radio 4, that she was brought up to believe it was extremely rude not to make light of everything. I like that idea: humour can be humble and compassionate; taking the piss is often the only way we can challenge the self-important newspeak of corporate diktat.

 

Looking back, I think I was never very good at relationships. Friendships were immensely important to me and I realised that conversation was the most important element of these. But my only area of expertise was myself and expressing that, and you tend to keep to your comfort zone. Besides, asking people about themselves seemed like prying. Is this something associated with men? Has society conditioned us to make statements and expect response, rather than actively inviting others to join in by asking questions?

 

When you’re really thin, your poor, wasted brain can’t cope with language very well, especially conversation. There are too many streams of data –  you are overwhelmed by all those yammering, competing voices going on and on, overlapping. It’s not the noise that is distressing so much as the turmoil of information. You yearn for simplicity and cool emptiness and to be presented silently with single things.

 

Talking itself becomes difficult. My voice-box locked up, at one point, so that everything I said came out in a hoarse, forced monotone, as if a small, angry and exhausted person was shouting for help from far away.

 

I also couldn’t work out how to organise my words, what to emphasise, how to properly explain myself. So, if cornered and forced into speech, I’d just keep rambling on, more and more desperately, until somebody cut me off. This started happening with greater frequency and I’d feel grateful to be side-lined, to become silent and withdrawn, a solitary figure dozing in the background. And this felt good, after all those years of endless, head-ache-inducing, mouth-drying monologues. I could ask questions, pretend to be attentive, to be a good friend.

 

And, anyway, you become impervious to awkwardness. Embarrassing silences were just chances for me to have a little snooze, a micro-nap. I didn’t care.

 

The problem was that the worn circuitry of my brain couldn’t cope with any conversation at all, even a quiet chat with the people I was closest to. The people who were most concerned for my well-being were the ones I felt most tormented by, forced to respond to when there was nothing to say. It was so exhausting. I could follow what people were saying but I couldn’t feel the importance of it.  I began to dread meeting them.

 

So it became clear that there is more to being a good companion than just not dominating the conversation. You need to be willing to make social noises: cows in twilight signalling that they’re still there and still aware of each other, mapping the herd. Speaking is part of showing concern for other people.

 

Now that I’m better(ish) the compulsion to TALK ALL THE TIME has reasserted itself, a constant urge to join in. My working day is full, full, of contributions, of asides, bon mots, quips, my tuppence-worth, anecdotes, jokes, my version of events, droll observations, theories, interruptions, personal histories. I am hoarse and hateful with it. I am soiled and exposed by my own lack of reticence. I have nothing useful or unique to contribute. Everyone got on perfectly well without me when I was silent. Of course, I tell myself that human contact is necessary for mental health and I’m only being polite and avoiding awkwardness, cultivating necessary relationships and nurturing a mutual sense of community, but it’s not true. All the things I say seem to be about myself because that’s what I know best. (Apart from literature and politics, which no-one likes to talk about). I’m forcing myself on people. I should just ask them about themselves and listen attentively.

 

It’s not solipsism. Honestly. I’m very very interested in other people (and bored with myself) but I find them difficult to reach. That‘s part of the reason they’re so fascinating. I just find negotiating relationships difficult. If people approach me, or if I find myself in company, I take fright, throw words at them and gallop off down the field like a startled colt, until I come to a halt, quivering and agitated. Is this more alert state simply the condition of being a communicative person connected by a network of relationships? Have I just been shaken out of my somnolent (somniculous?) existence? What’s wrong with talking?

 

All the same, I hope reticence is something I can salvage from this collapse. Most days I find myself praying: “please, please let me be quiet today”.

 

But enough about me. How are you?

I’ve just read an article in the Guardian about a 15-year-old anorexic girl who killed herself by stepping in front of a train. Because you know she’s anorexic, you think you can see it in the photograph: the pixie-small face, the panicked, manic grin, a pallor to the complexion, black leggings loose on the legs, a feral bewilderment behind the lethargy.

 

In the article, her parents are critical of the NHS, who have done pretty well by me. They feel their daughter wasn’t given support and treatment early enough and so the creature had time to really get its claws into her. This sounds a fair criticism: the longer you live with anorexia, the more entrenched and habitual it becomes, I think.

 

The poor, old, impecunious, overworked health-service seems to have done its best later on, but her parents are probably so sodden with responsibility that some of it leaks out as blame. It’s only fair to share out some of the weight of it.

 

But nobody should be blamed. Anorexia is sentient. It possesses us and fights hard to survive. It squirms in our heads. It is a cuckoo, a clumsy parasite that weakens us physically and impoverishes us intellectually. It hijacks and cannibalises our own thought processes, replacing our rational objectives with its own mad agendas.

 

It makes us lie and cheat. We want to please you; we suspect disdain and weighty disapproval. we know how much trouble and distress we are causing to everyone, so we dutifully add in the bowl of cereal, as we promised, even though it makes us feel wretched and anxious, but then, somehow, the yogurt in our lunchbox doesn’t get eaten; we go for a quick extra jog around the park after work, just to get the endorphins flowing, to restore our mood because the eating flusters us so.

 

And parents and the people who love (or loved) us (once) can’t watch us all the time. They can’t imprison us forever. Sooner or later they’ll have to go to work or bed; they’ll just have to trust us, and then we can betray them. And they can’t force us to eat, or properly supervise us because, the problem is, we do eat, sometimes, it feels like all the damn time. We just don’t eat enough.

 

And if you confront us, ask us if we’ve eaten or how much, we’ll tell you what you want to hear because we are ashamed. We’ll exaggerate the size of the bowl, the number of pieces of bread, reduce the length of the run. We’ll lie and lie. What hope do parents have against that? Parents, who have spent our whole lives knowing best, nagging us, being right and hurt, rescuing us, infantilising us, caring too much. Of course parents are the last to be told.

 

The Manchester bombing, the London Bridge attack, now the Grenfell tower block fire: as always, the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart. I don’t know what the bloggers’ etiquette is about commenting on these things. It belittles what we do and I don’t see how we can usefully contribute in print. Asked to write a poem about the 1st world war for some publication, a poet (Yeats?) replied something like “about some subjects the poet should remain silent.” I feel we should perhaps fall silent. Of course, in the lived world we must help out,  embrace the victims, but I don’t think it is our place to force our way into other people’s grief online.

 

But I guess (I hope) there must always be other discourses and maybe they could provide relief from such irreversible tragedy just by being about something else. The internet isn’t the world – it’s just a medium of communication. But communication is good. It fosters empathy. So hopefully it is ok for people like me to continue to chunter on bellyaching as normal. (As you can tell I’m feeling guilty and trying to justify it to myself).

 

Being severely anorexic protects you from all this monstrous, threatening gloom. You’re too bloody hungry to concentrate on it. You are going to talk about making soup and you don’t bloody care if that makes you seem selfish or boring. You have reduced yourself to a fierce, feral, bewildered little mind, a primitive, snarling creature, and other people are just vague shapes in the fog. This may make you seem pretty independent, but that’s just a complimentary way of saying “unable to engage”.

 

So I think my “Male Anorexic blogger” persona is, by necessity, self-absorbed. I’m trying to illustrate and explicate a condition that protects itself from a threatening world by retreating into an urgent form of self-absorption that demands upkeep. I hope there are many, many different aspects to a life but the blog isolates and abstracts, and then cultivates that one aspect. It’s my USP.