To go forward, sometimes you have to go back

My name is Lucy Howard-Taylor. I am eighteen years old. I have starved myself silent. I have slipped through people and out of sight, into black. Rigid at night from fear, curled against another day, I fell: unmoved by the landing.

But this is not the exposé of an individual. This is a chronicle. Of anorexia. Of depression. Of you and me, perhaps. And a stumble back into the light.

Certainly, experiences as I have felt and held them center this book. This “memoir”? Perhaps, more appropriately, this “social commentary.”

I am appealing to those of you who will feel this book, not just read it. I am appealing to your parents, to your family, your peers and colleagues, your judges. I am appealing to a social mockery and a stereotype that laughs off psychological torment as “selfish” and “vain.”

My full name is Lucy Shena Howard-Taylor. I say it with a swing: Lu-cee Shee-naa How-erd-Tay-la. The “Lucy” was as unusual then as it is common now. The “Shena” is a combination of my grandmothers’
names: Sheila and Una. People have always screwed up their faces and said “Wo-ow.” I’ve come to think it’s rather pretty.

I was considered “weird” all through school; now, at university, I am considered “eccentric.” Which doesn’t mean that I’m any less weird but merely that their vocabulary is getting better. I am a kooky, beatnik, artsy type. Apparently.

These are the things I like:

• The smell of an old and well-thumbed book.
  
  
• A fat cat who squawks and sits on my feet and another who sashays under my newspaper and misses the bench when she jumps.
  
  
• Subversive humor that feels really unfortunate.
  
  
• Halloumi cheese that squeaks and has been cooked crisp.
  
  
• Off-white grainy paper and scribbling with nicely blunted lead pencils.
  
  
• Businesspeople in the rain.
  
  
• Sydney University sandstone in the sun or winter or morning or rain.
  
  
• Nice peaky grass, soymilk (in hot chocolate), pepper mint tea.
  
  
• Interesting people with a) an imagination, b) strange buttons, c) a brain (whoa), or d) a façade I can crack.
  
  
• Poetry of various persuasions and those arresting images one chances upon occasionally that make you lob your head to the side or the back with their seeming irrelevancy yet startling truth.
  
  
• The Thesaurus, words and language.
  
  
• Oblivion (constant state of).
  
  
• Smiling at people who take it as a personal offense (see “businesspeople”).
  
  
• Contemplating the enormous insignificance of all this.

I also have a particular fondness for puddles, blueberry bagels, and earrings with bits on them (I just bought a fantastic pair of mahjong earrings).

Of course, three years ago I was your “average” anorectic cradling myself in bed and wobbling against a tide of lettuce jokes and purging gaffes, who felt herself to be a social failure; a personal “nothing”; a waste of (too much) space. She who thought too much, who pushed too far and forgot to take a breather, who forced and forced herself through squares she really didn’t fit, who withered with the agony of just not being “enough,” just not being “right,” and at the same time for just being “too much.”

Back then I had too many thoughts and pain and responsibilities and expectation and being… I felt there was just too much “me” in relation to “them”: the faceless them, the society of acceptables.

I am in recovery from anorexia nervosa, major depression, self-injury, and bulimia. It is still difficult for me to say this aloud. The social taboos surrounding these mental illnesses are just as vicious as they ever were. Mental illnesses are still seen as weaknesses of willpower or as a defect of personality. The depressed should “just snap out of it.” The anorectics should just “open their mouths and chew.” The fact that what we are dealing with is not so simple, but instead horribly complicated, is mostly bypassed.

I write this not to blame, but to challenge a society that all too commonly shrugs off the difficult and all too commonly ignores the ugly reflection of itself.

I have just turned eighteen as I write this. I should be writing an essay on the accuracy of Virginia Woolf’s representation of women in interwar Britain. Clearly I am not, and that is both partly the result of procrastination and partly because I am trying not to think too much about the roasted hazelnuts I just gave my body. But mostly it is because I have something to say.

Here are the facts. Make of them what you will, but they are an attempt to establish a context for the barrage of self-hate I heaped upon myself for an indeterminate number of years. Here are memories; here are thoughts; here are parts of my past that psychiatrists have narrowed their eyes at and scribbled about on institutionally lined paper.

I was born in 1988 in Auckland, New Zealand, to two of the most wonderful people in the world. My dear little brother followed two years later.

My only memories of preschool involve food (lemon icy poles, Nutella, and extolling my own magnificence in being able to spread margarine), shyness (being unable to say one word to the poor boy I dubbed my “boyfriend,” not being able to play musical chairs because I was terrified of dancing in public), and embarrassment (chiefly represented by one visual memory: a rearing pink bike manned by a blonde rival, cutting a corner and bearing down on my little, and very humbled, self, who mumbled tearfully and through a flush of red that she didn’t know how to ride a bike—even with training wheels).
I was cocooned away in a private girls’ school for twelve years. I was considered “precocious,” a “prima donna,” a “drama queen.” In year 2, my teacher called me a “show-off.” I invented wild personalities and lied chronically. One week I was Polynesian, the next I was supposed to be in a wheelchair, the next I was secretly an angel who could control the winds. I threw myself into imaginary universes, writing endless letters to nonexistent people and taking an invisible Anne (of Green Gables) to school with me. I lied to impress and confessed to assuage guilt. I lost friends as quickly as I made them with my propensity to overdramatize everything.

“There’s nothing I quite so much enjoy,” I remember saying, “as a good argument and playground drama.” Needless to say, others did not feel similarly.

Time frustrated me. I was too young and there was too much to do. I was going to be an Oscar-winning actress. I was also going to be the first woman president of Australia. At the age of ten, I was endlessly frustrated at my inability to do anything “proper” and to have people take me seriously.

I remember lying in bed sick and being inspected by my mother and her friend. “Goodness, she’s got such big eyes!” she said. I tried to imperceptibly widen them further and then wondered whether “big” was good. Completing years 4 and 5 in one year, I skipped a year at school after many visits to behavioral therapists in an attempt to understand my appalling behavior at home, such as emotional manipulation and domination, constant deception, and varying between silence and raging arguments. All I remember of the first day with the “big girls” of year 6 were my burning cheeks and the sweat on the back of my neck.

I did ballet for eleven years. In the later years, and at 5 feet and 9 inches (175 centimeters), I was taller than the other girls. Taller and less…spindly. And taller, you see, equals “bigger.” I was always placed in the back row for performances. I was always designated the bigger costumes. I had no confidence, so danced clumsily and forgot routines. As girls my age dropped off in favor of netball or for social preservation, I continued for the sake of my pride. Soon I was the oldest dancing in a class of girls up to six years younger. Little prepubescent bodies in navy leotards versus my own developing one. The little girls did well. In ballet, “little” is best. Lightness of foot, lightness of body for lifting and jumping and spinning—at complete odds with my perceived physicality. I eventually stopped (a little thankfully) when my doctor told me it wasn’t a good idea to do any more exercise, in an attempt to preserve the bones I was starving hollow. I folded my off-pink soft shoes into my battered pointes and filed them away in my wardrobe. Sometimes I take them out, trace arabesques and développés. Mostly they sleep undisturbed.

Senior school was when the private-school mold hardened and dyed itself blonde. I did not fit in any better than I did in junior school. I amused people but did not really bond with them. I taught myself to be funny, because being funny kept you somewhat socially afloat. I was the one with the goofy face and the branch of tree I named “Mabel” and hid behind the school-ground dustbin. I was the one who made up silly stories and could jerk comically. I was also the one doing well in all my subjects, and I was also the one who couldn’t rebel if my life depended on it.

I spent years trying to be rebellious at school like the girls I idolized. It never worked. If I got in trouble, I didn’t sulk; I flushed scarlet and apologized profusely. I stuck to the rules, taking my frustration out on my family. I didn’t skip one class until I was in year 12 and very sick.

I never dyed my hair. I never used fake tan. I have, to this day, never set foot in a gym. Quite an achievement if you consider the girls I went to school with. I was absolutely hopeless with boys. My red cheeks when talking to guys were a widely held joke. I was too shy to dance, too shy to sing. And yet, I was comically a show off.

Comically, I desperately prostrated myself for attention. Comically, I masked and hopped and tried to ignore the cracks.

In year 9, my English class studied Stick Figure by Lori Gottlieb. It is true that the current limited awareness of eating disorders is inexcusable, that the stereotypes of sufferers (as inherently selfish, narcissistic, and purely physical) are still kicking, that most of the population has the wrong idea. It is true that the issue must be publicized and discussed. It is true, it is essential, that these stereotypes be broken. But at the time, and at that fragile age of fourteen, studying this book merely served to exacerbate a fascination with vanishing; with the whittling down of being; a gradual fading of self. In hindsight now, when I reread Stick Figure, the representation of an eating disorder is very … simplistic. I laugh a little, I must confess. But back then, to a self-esteem already probing its own worth, it was very potent and very swaying.

The cult of the private school strangled me. I tortured myself with my inability to be just like “them”: the giggling, shrieking, nonthinking them. The “them” who attracted guys, could wear a bikini, could recite the American cheerleading movie Bring It On from beginning to end. The music was R ‘n’ B and short-skirted. The boys were private-schooled rugby players. The “books” were the magazines Cleo and Cosmopolitan. The eyebrows were professionally plucked, the legs were waxed, the mobiles were very shiny.

Boys never looked twice at me. I didn’t have the right jeans. I was cringingly frigid and reserved. I didn’t have the right hair or the pretty bras or that way of carrying myself that seemed to equal popularity. Instead, I did too well at school. I hated going out (it exposed my social ineptness). My skin was either very white or very red. I didn’t run around the block in mini-shorts every afternoon, and I didn’t like the beach. I thought too much and didn’t speak flippantly enough. I answered enough in class for my geography teacher to draw me aside one lesson and ask me to “give the other girls a go.” I had none of the sexually confident charisma everyone else seemed to have.

I was very lonely. And I came to understand that there was something intrinsically wrong with me. These were the only girls, the only surroundings, the only boys, I had ever known. Therefore I was the odd one out. I was the one who was “wrong.”
Being fitted for a costume for a role in the school play, a friend turned to me and asked me what size I was.

“You’re a 10, right?”

“Oh yes,” I nodded.

That day, walking home from school, I realized I didn’t actually know what clothing size I was. It had never occurred to me to check before. I just wore what fit me. I shut the door to my bedroom and took a dress out of the wardrobe.

It was not a size 10, and I wondered what that meant.

In year 11, I went on a school trip to Italy. There was wonderful, wonderful food. Broad beans with pecorino and olive oil, pastas, pomegranate mousse, coconut gelato; five-course meals twice a day were not uncommon. I ate everything out of politeness, as I had been taught. Our guide remarked that she liked to see my “healthy appetite.” Across the table, girls pushed their pasta around and asked for a salad. I raved about this to a friend. What was their problem? We were in Italy, for God’s sake, enjoy the food! But after two weeks of watching bronzed girls eat apples and sugar-free lollies bought from a highway-side supermarket, instead, I began to feel uneasy.

The academic pressure I put on myself to perform at school was extreme. It wasn’t good unless my results were 100 percent, and even that wasn’t good enough. I remember looking at the nicely rounded figure of 10/10 at the top of an English essay and wondering why I couldn’t be more than that, why I couldn’t just surpass the whole construction of “marks” altogether.

Midway through year 11, the pace changed from a hurried frustration to a speeding panic. My dear, dear grandmother died, and I was standing next to her at the moment her heart ceased to beat. I was chosen to be head prefect of my school. I was approaching the final year of my schooling, and a year in which I had to do well, because otherwise, otherwise, I would never be able to do what I wanted to do. I was going to save the world. I was going to work for the UN. I was going to be the High Commissioner for Human Rights, nay, the Secretary General. I was going to act and write and spread the awful truth of animal cruelty and factory farming. I was going to be a diplomat and one of the judges on the International Court of Justice. I was going to study at Oxford, teach in Africa, and volunteer in Romania. I was going to be an aid worker in my spare time. I would “succeed.”

But success can carry with it crushing criteria, if you let it. If you expect too much from yourself, you will eventually have to confront the fact that you can only ever do as much as you can.

And so “something” started. I had to be very healthy for year 12, very healthy indeed. I had to eat organically. I soon decided to stop eating meat because of the appalling brutality involved. All fast food followed. I wanted to be healthier, cleaner, neater, so I could do more, read more, achieve more. Good God, school was stressful, and there was no way I was good enough. The girls thought I was an absolute loser. Work was everywhere. Work and notes. Unorganized, indistinct. I felt I couldn’t do this. There was too much. My stomach felt strange when I thought of the exams, the HSC (Higher School Certificate). There was always a hovering panic. Oh God. Now, cut that food up. Carefully, perfectly. Play the act and keep the audience laughing. Retreat into the pillows of your bed and the pages of your diary and cry at your own falsity, at your own pretense. Why can’t you just be “real”? (But there is no time, no time at all. No time for an unpeeling of self. You have work, work, work, you have work and marks and school and exams, and you must succeed.)

At the year 11 formal at the end of the year, a friend commented on my thin legs. I danced with and kissed a boy whose name I never asked for. I contemplated being a few kilos lighter, still. What about –kilograms? That was a nice, round, clean weight. Nice and even. Nice and contained, ordered, simple.
But of course, it is not common knowledge that if you alter your weight you alter your mind.

I’m going to lose ten kilograms, you say. I’m going to lose ten kilograms and then I’ll be exactly the same except thinner and more attractive.

Wrong.

Everyone has a set point, a set weight, below which one ceases to think independently. I know exactly what it is for me. If I go below it, I succumb to compulsion—stuff any intention otherwise. With anorexia, we are not dealing with a superficial vanity. We are dealing with a combination of knots and anxiety unfathomable to those outside. We are dealing with a psychological mess of which weight loss is merely a symptom.

And so it started. And I refused to open my eyes.



Excerpt from Biting Anorexia: A Firsthand Account of an Internal War by Lucy Howard-Taylor.

Pre-order at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble