Modern Girls And Anorexia – Lucy Howard-Taylor

Lucy Howard-Taylor’s memoir of her battle with anorexia nervosa was published in 2008, when she was just nineteen. Biting Anorexia describes Lucy’s despair at the darkest points of her illness, and her escape from its grips to recovery, health and happiness. Lucy went on to study law and English literature at Sydney University, and recently won a place at Durham University to complete a Masters of Poetry. On Tuesday 9 March 2010 Lucy Howard-Taylor shared her experiences in an address to The Sydney Institute.

MODERN GIRLS AND ANOREXIA

LUCY HOWARD-TAYLOR

Anorexia is a word I don’t really like to say out loud all that much. It is a hollow, hard word, and I hate it. But, nevertheless, I am here to speak to you about Anorexia-and my book Biting Anorexia which was published in Australia in July 2008.

Let’s start out with some facts. My own experience is so necessarily subjective, that I find it helps to have something real and proven to hold on to. Anorexia is the most fatal of any psychiatric illness. It enjoys a suicide rate 32 times beyond what is considered “normal”. It is the third most common chronic illness for young women in Australia, falling just behind obesity, and asthma. One in ten of those suffering are male, although recent figures would seem to indicate that that number is as high as one in four. The average length of the illness is seven years. Just under half its sufferers will fully recover. Twenty per cent will die.

I have been in recovery from anorexia and major depression for three years. Time has stretched a curious gulf, and the memory sits uncomfortably now, rather like an awkward old friend. My memory of that black time is retreating. I know the details, of course; my mother unfortunately remembers them all. I spent most of my HSC year at home in bed, or in psychiatry and dietary appointments. I generally had only energy enough to stay at school for an hour in the morning, before I’d have to leave, and that’s if I got there at all. Most days I couldn’t leave the house, either because the idea of stepping outside my front door into the world was too frightening, or because I simply couldn’t lift my legs.

My school work suffered enormously. My marks plunged. I stopped interacting with my friends, and my teachers. I would walk about my school in a daze, pulling myself up the stairs to the year twelve common room by the hand-rails. I started to skip classes for the first time in my life because I simply didn’t have the stamina to attend them. I remember, particularly, one teacher chastising me severely for “wagging”. I remember another teacher passing me, grey in the hallway, and simply telling me to pull up my socks. And I remember one teacher, taking me aside during one of my dazed school wanderings, and quietly asking me how I was, and whether there was anything she could do. That occasion is burned into my memory. I can remember the heat of that summer’s day, the midday sun glancing from the glass of the library windows and slicing me across the eyes. I can remember it so well, because she was the only teacher who ever did mention my illness. The only other time it was brought up was in a meeting where it was suggested that I drop out, because I was setting a bad example.

I was put on suicide watch. My skin fell off in clouds, and I used to sit in my locker at school and snap my socks just to watch it. I tipped the majority of my “Urgent Medical Supplies” down the sink. I was absolutely convinced that even the smell of food would fatten the cells in my stomach. Using moisturiser or Vaseline was particularly risky, as the oils would most certainly seep through my skin, magically infiltrate my digestive system, and thus contribute to my daily caloric intake in a grossly terrifying fashion. I was heavily medicated, with anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, sedatives. I came to like standing in the shower and pulling my hair out. It made me feel lighter. If I sat for too long, my tailbone would bruise. I had perpetual bruises on my hipbones from lying on my stomach on my mattress when I slept. I look back on that dark, closeted time and I recall very little of the months I spent in bed. I recall little of the crushing fatigue when even breathing was a conscious effort; little of the hours spent drawing spaces in my shadow as I walked, the ages spent cushioning my spine with a pillow, staring blankly at the shifting shadows of trees on the ceiling.

Sometimes I can’t help but think that I imagined it all. I run my fingers from collarbone to stomach and puzzle at the warmth of the thing that is my body, the very softness of the skin, the curiously persistent life beneath. The fact that I have had anorexia, I find very difficult to believe. I can’t reconcile my present with what supposedly went before.

But so it went, and consumed by depression, a body and mind weakened from lack of food, I walked in front of cars, forswore seatbelts, beat and clawed at my arms, my tiny thighs, my face, in a desperate attempt to rid me of me, to absolve myself of myself. To cut me out, so I wouldn’t have to try so hard. I didn’t want to die – I just wanted to cease to exist. I wanted to stop. I wanted, in retrospect, an easy way out. I didn’t want to have to deal with anything ever again, because it was all too hard.

What’s most important to understand, firstly, about anorexia is that it is born of years, not of a quick flick through Vogue, or of a passing comment one day at the gym. One does not wake up one morning, decide “to be anorexic” and forgo cereal that day. People invariably ask me what caused my anorexia. I have had it suggested to me that it developed in response to an over-ambitious, feminist mother. I have had my twelve years of learning ballet posited as the sure-fire cause. I have been asked whether it was my private girls’ school education that proved the final straw. I have been asked, more times than I care to remember, whether I was ever fat, or the butt of merciless teasing. And I have been consistently asked to answer to questions of vanity, of selfishness, of attention-seeking.

The problem with eating disorders is that there is no one factor. They are deeply and variously rooted. For me, it was the end point of years of critically low self esteem, unchecked perfectionism and agonisingly high academic and social expectations, both those I placed on myself and those I believed others to have placed on me. It was a way of withdrawing from a world I found so at odds with myself; a world where I could seemingly draw no place for “me”, but stood, adrift, looking on and awkward. It was my way of dealing, of dealing with a woman on the brink of the rest of her life. It was a way to excuse myself from the race; to avoid the possibility of failure (which is my absolute terror) through not trying at all. It was, in many respects, my haven: my screaming, hellish refuge safe from the heat of the world.  Anorexia is not a weakness. It is a misguided way of coping. It wouldn’t exist if it didn’t serve some purpose.

The second thing to understand is that contrary to popular belief, an anoretic cannot “just eat”. Not only have you literally brought yourself to the point where you have forgotten how to, your body cannot physically process food like it once could. For months and months any food at all just sits like a dead weight in your stomach, painfully refusing to shift. For the first few weeks of my recovery I could not think beyond having one pink marshmallow for afternoon tea, instead of my usual piece of spearmint gum. The idea of having a marshmallow in the afternoon was so frightening to me, that it took me about half an hour just to eat it. To have something in my mouth – even water, sometimes – literally terrified me. It sent me into a spiral of panic attacks.  Obviously, there is something deeper at work here than mere obsession with weight.

And that brings me to my third point. You see, what is commonly misunderstood when it comes to anorexia is that intrinsically, it has nothing to do with weight. Weight – food – becomes the adopted nexus of the underlying issues. Starvation of body quickly becomes starvation of mind. You lose your ability to think beyond yourself, and it is liberating, in a way. Emotion numbs. Nothing matters anymore. And then, of course, the adrenalin kicks in. For the start, at least, the anoretic has more energy, more vigour. What once served as a biological power surge to help find food in times of scarcity, is warped into a perverse validation of this very hunger. The trap is set, and from here it is set completely – now it is harder to eat than it is to deny. The ability to eat, the functions of appetite, are lost – are wilfully forgotten – and as starvation establishes itself, the dangerous rhetoric of an eating disorder becomes harder and harder to penetrate from the outside. But this is only the beginning, and for those suffering from an eating disorder, there can and will only be further surrender.

It is very difficult to stand here and try to describe what it’s like to be in the grip of anorexia. It is psychological torture in the extreme.  You completely lose the ability to live in any way other than that which is dictated to you by the illness. Anorexia develops such a strong mental force, that many sufferers personify it, and call it “Ana”. My every waking and sleeping moment was spent in service to it. I used to dream of food, vast tables steaming with the stuff, and when I woke up I remember often being so anxious that I might have ingested something accidentally while sleeping, or by some improbable process of dream osmosis, that I’d have to get up and weigh myself, and vomit for good measure.

People always ask me when it was that I “decided” to get better again. In answering I always end up confusing myself. There was no “when”; no one locatable moment when I realised that I didn’t have a spare life to sacrifice. There was no “decision”. I had no capacity to make any such decision because I was so convinced that anorexia was me, was my definition, that to decide against it was effectively-in my understanding-to decide against myself. Several things combined to make the decision for me, I suppose. I couldn’t fathom dropping out of school, of watching my ambitions concede defeat to an illness, of having to forfeit my talent and let others take my place. It was a matter of pride, then, in some respects. But also of trust. I was ruining my family. I had to trust that they, in their agony, needed me to get better. An eating disorder isn’t conducted in isolation. Even I, in my blindness and cold, had moments of clarity when I could see their torment. What it must be like to watch a daughter or a sister, or a son, or a friend, slowly starve herself to death, with the knowledge that for all your effort, for all your love, she would continue to turn away, and that, at the end of it all, you simply could not force her to eat to save herself-I can’t imagine. It is beyond the limits of my imagination, but unfortunately not beyond the limits of my parents’ and my brother’s recollection.

In 2008 my book, based on my diaries from my blackest time, and the slow beginning of recovery, was published in Australia. Last year it was published in North America and Canada. Which I suppose sounds impressive for a girl of 21. I’ve had a number of people call me “brave” or “strong”. And it confuses me, because I don’t feel brave, or strong. I feel weak. I feel fallible. I feel more or less how I always have, just in a happier and healthier and slightly older incarnation. I’m still me. I still fumble at my days. I still have crises of confidence. I’m just really ashamed that I can’t just “deal” with the memory of my illness, and “move on”.

But it’s getting easier. I am getting stronger. The memory is hideous, but my reality, right now, is wonderful. I love being alive, and to be honest I never thought I’d be able to say that.

The book has meant, however, that I can’t forget. Where I would have otherwise consciously covered over the past few years in an effort to move on, and away, my illness as it once was walks with me, inked on the page. Words are funny things. They survive, where you don’t. The girl of those pages no longer exists. Her thoughts are, to all intents and purposes, dead thoughts. I am a completely different person. But the words – the memories – are still hanging there. In the light of International Women’s Day, I’ve realised that that’s the risk we run, particularly as women, as we create dialogues for ourselves where there have been none before. It is especially true for dialogues of mental illness, for which a language has never really existed. There’s the risk of being held back by the very words we create in the effort to free ourselves.

To be honest, I never really considered what it would feel like to have such an inner part of myself available for anyone to access. I mean, of course, I chose to publish my book, and it wasn’t a decision made lightly, but the practicalities of that publication seriously eluded me. That I would be recognised by a girl in Broadway Shopping Centre, who proceeded to run up to me and tell me that she knew “everything about me, and wasn’t it weird, because I knew nothing about her” (quote), never even occurred to me as a possibility. That I’d have people pick parts of my life apart on internet forums which I’ve never been to and never heard of, I still can’t get used to. In New Zealand last February for publicity, one interviewer, upon opening the door and seeing me for the first time, told me she had prepared a pot of peppermint tea, because she “knew it was my favourite”. I’d never seen this person before in my life. I have people from Utah befriending me on Facebook…!

The attention isn’t always welcome. In New York when I was signing copies of the American edition, one woman came up to me and said that she’d been looking forward to my book because she wanted to lose some weight, and as she put it, “catch some anorexia”. One radio host asked me whether I was initially reluctant to get better because I took a perverse pleasure in living out my own “medical romance”.

But I don’t regret putting my words out there for an instant. The incidence of mental illnesses globally is at an extraordinary historical high, and it’s only increasing dramatically. I won’t speculate as to reasons why, but there’s obviously something intrinsically wrong with the way we view and value ourselves. Eating disorders have been documented throughout history, but they sped up and really entered the picture somewhere alongside our modernity. We no longer know how to eat. We have been so far removed from the most primal means to existence: which is the harvesting and gathering of food – that we now need to pay people to show us how and what and when to eat. We have websites springing up in chains that argue for anorexia as a legitimate lifestyle choice. When did we start thinking half a foot’s space between a model’s thighs was even remotely attractive or ideal? Why are there scales capable of independently “tweeting” your weight every time you’re so bold as to step up to the challenge? There are arguments in favour of such pro-anorexia sites, and I similarly defy anyone to suggest that anorexia is caused by the absurdly proportioned girls needling their way down the catwalk. But both site and model are illustrative of a society whose perception of itself is seriously compromised, and seriously unhealthy.

I know that there are people in this very room who have suffered, or are suffering, from a mental illness. And I know that there are still more here, right now, who know someone who is struggling, right now. Too many people turned their backs on me when I was ill for no other reason than they simply didn’t know what to say. So if you take anything from this evening, then take this: if someone you know is suffering, for God’s sake reach out to them. If you think that you, yourself, are struggling; again, speak up. It has taken me a long time to realise that the only thing I, or anyone else has to be ashamed of, is our silence on the issues that matter.

I don’t think it has ever been more important than now.

Beaumont, P & Touyz, SW, ‘What kind of illness is anorexia nervosa?’ European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 12 (2003): I/20-4 [hereafter ‘Beaumont & Touyz’].

Beaumont, P, The Encultured Body: Policy implications for healthy body image and distorted eating behaviour, School of Nursing Queensland University of Technology, 2000: 80.

Paxton, S, ‘Do men get eating disorders?’ Everybody Newsletter of Body Image and Health Inc., (1998): 41.

Beaumont & Touyz, I/20-4.

Hamburg, P & Werne, J, ‘How long is long-term therapy for anorexia nervosa?’, Treating Eating Disorders, San Francisoco: Jossey-Bass, 1996: 71-99.