Small Acts of Disappearance (7 page)

I still want, sometimes, someone or something to take from me the burden of being myself, this burden that I could perhaps only bear, for so many years, through hunger. But by being small I can enact this physically. I can be, quite literally, transported.

I've wondered, too, what might have driven my suitors to pursue me, what could possibly have been attractive to them in the way I looked then. When I was physically at my sickest, I had no interest in sex – much of this, of course, is biological: the last thing any starving animal should do is reproduce, especially if that animal is female; and as the body cuts back on unnecessary functions in order to keep itself alive, hormone and fluid production are amongst the first things sacrificed, and the ovaries – just like the heart and stomach – shrink. I didn't seek out relationships, because I had neither the energy nor the bodily imperative to do so, but I still responded, however inexpertly, when others showed interest in me.

One of these encounters I remember most: it was winter, and I was wearing two layers of long-sleeved thermal shirts beneath my blouse, two jumpers, an overcoat, and stockings underneath my jeans. He'd joked that undressing me was like playing pass-the-parcel but grew gradually more quiet as the parcel of my body grew smaller and sharper before his eyes; this was the man who, before we slept, folded a blanket up against the scythe of my shoulderblade, which had been digging into his chest. I was untouchable, and never truly naked; my borders were still intact.

But to move away from ‘terror and death', to be teased out of their world: isn't that the kind of consolation we all want? Miniature objects don't just resist death because their visible boundaries and finite details make them knowable and graspable, but because their self-containment makes them somehow still and out of time: the miniature's stillness ‘emphasises the activity that is outside its borders,' writes Susan Stewart, ‘the miniature is a world of arrested time.' And this stillness, this timelessness is two-fold: miniature objects are functionless objects, they are decorations, displayed, but not used. And they focus our attention – like hunger – because we have to narrow in, to concentrate on their small form, their even-smaller details, in order to see them, and because this concentration, at its most intense, makes the rest of the world fall away. Time thickens. So too when we are hungry: not only does time slow when the starving body is anticipating the next meal, but our illnesses hold us still and almost static within our own lives. We can't be touched or hurt, but we also cannot love, take risks, or change or learn.

So the miniature is a different, perhaps more complete, occupation of time, as much as it is a different, because more tenuous, occupation of space. Time becomes thicker, heavier, when we're faced with the miniature. Stewart also writes about a University of Tennessee study, where participants were asked to look at miniature houses at different scales, to imagine themselves moving within them, and then to
indicate, by ringing a bell, when they thought thirty minutes had passed. The smaller the house they were concentrating on, attending to, the more slowly the participants perceived time to have passed; more incredibly, the ratio of this time as they experienced it, compared to real time, corresponded almost exactly to the scale of the miniature house.

A hummingbird's heart beats at up to 1200 beats per minute, they rarely live for over a year. A mouse, with a heart rate almost half as fast, lives for twenty-four months, twice as long. An elephant has a lifespan of about eighty years, a heart rate of twenty-eight beats each minute. It is because of how much longer, denser time becomes in miniature that it might move us away from, forestall, somehow, that very terror and death.

This desire to move away from death is another of the perversities of hunger, another of the strange contradictions that seem to be the mode in which anorexia always operates. It is a disease of fear, or bodily terror at times, yet it is the very things we fear that it brings closer: we fear that we're invisible, but our disease makes us smaller; we fear that we are powerless, yet our illness changes our ability to make rational decisions and moves so many activities and opportunities – eating in restaurants, travel, maintaining relationships, even holding down a job – out of our reach. We fear failure, yet our hunger makes it impossible to concentrate for long enough to achieve; we fear that we're unlovable, and our disease makes
us selfish, manipulative, flighty and unreasonable, makes us avoid social occasions or attend them only anxiously and disembodiedly. We fear death, and yet we let our bodies slowly destroy themselves, our hunger turn us into skeletons, with loose teeth and failing organs, bodies that are shutting down, but somehow still walking around.

It's a strange thing to remember now, but I've always loved tiny things. As a child, I had a collection of miniature bears, none larger than 7.5 cm high – and I remember that measurement precisely – all of them fully-jointed and most of them handmade, picked up in various craft shops in which my mother, a patchwork quilter, would spend what felt like hours (but how much thicker time is too when we are children). Years later, I bought home a tiny, china tea-set, even the teapot was smaller than my pinkie finger, and a perfect, cast-metal Buddha less than three centimetres tall, from an overseas holiday in Thailand. I've collected buttons, thimbles, tiny seashells, none of these things useful, none of them valuable or important. This fascination with the miniature has been with me always, I realise now, and for a long time before I could count my own body as one such treasure. I don't want to be a treasure, or a token or a doll, but haven't yet discovered how I might live a full-sized life instead.

IN INCREMENTS

 

 

 

 

 

I
'll never know the point where my physical illness gave way to something different, something more complex, but more and more I think now that hunger was always with me, always gnawing away somewhere in me, and my illness just allowed this hunger to assert itself in the only way that could possibly have been acceptable to me. I couldn't see myself as one of
those women –
I thought that eating disorders only happen to women who are vain and selfish, shallow and somehow stupid; it took me years to realise that the very opposite is true, that these diseases affect people, men and women both, who think too much and feel too keenly, who give too much of themselves to other people. I knew I wasn't vain, I wasn't selfish; but I have always felt vaguely, indeterminately sad, too vulnerable to being hurt, too empathic and too open, too demanding and determined in the standards that I set for myself and my life.
This was always the case, although my disorder has certainly sharpened these traits. Sometimes I think that my physical illness, together with my personality, the length of time it took for the doctor to find a diagnosis while my body and brain adapted to malnutrition, were all together a perfect storm that broke, at some point in time that I'll never quite pinpoint, and left this devastation in its wake.

I'll never know, that is, where and when the ground shifted, and yet I can pin down the moment I first realised that I needed to be well. In the preceding months, a summer I remember as so brightly lit that my pale skin almost fluoresced, now that I was finally freed from feeling cold to my bones and had exposed my limbs at last to the warm air, a friend repeatedly told me stories about an anorexic girl she'd been to school with, who'd eaten sushi from a garbage bin and whose heart had given way. I'd pretended I didn't know why she was telling me this. Two of my scruffy scientist friends, who worked at the university near my house, had visited me in their lunch break on a day when I was working from home and tried to take me to a medical centre where they'd pre-emptively made an appointment. I'd refused, insisted everything was fine, had drunk a sugar-free soft drink even though I had no physical reason to avoid the regular variety, and delayed my meagre lunch until they left. In the preceding months, my housemates had asked me to put them into contact with my parents, insisting as we sat together on the steep wooden stairs of our terrace. I'd agreed, but I never followed through. I had received
a long-distance phone call from a friend living in China who'd been shocked by my recent photos on Facebook, and I told him that I was just working too hard. I said that I was stressed, that I was tired, that I had a lot to do, but everything otherwise was fine. I kept busy, ceaselessly busy, going out almost every night to drink with friends and watch on when they ordered dinner, telling stories and talking constantly as they ate, but never taking my eyes off their utensils. I hardly slept, and often walked, almost unconsciously, to the fridge at night, stealing the vegetables from my housemate's boxed-up leftovers and drinking litres of tastelessly dilute cordial straight from the bottle, trying to stave off my hunger with liquid.

In the preceding months I'd been heartbroken, time and again, by all of this concern that I was sure was misdirected. I felt so sorry for my friends, that they should be so worried for what I truly felt was no good reason. I was sad for their distress, that is, but never once felt my own.

On the evening that I first realised that I needed to be well, I was stopped at a red light on Fairfield Road, it was late and there were no other cars in sight. I was heading east, back home to the inner west, after visiting my family for a dinner where I'd been unable to sit still, where I'd steamed myself some vegetables rather than share their barbecue, where I'd felt I watched the whole evening as if from the wings of a stage, everything disconnected, too flattened and foreshortened, to feel real. The evening had crawled past – hunger stretches time; in this, it is like any kind of waiting.
I was exhausted. I was sobbing in the front seat of my idling car and I knew that I couldn't go on, not like this. It still feels strange to me that my tipping point, the moment it all became unbearable, was so mundane.

But more and more now I think that these things work by a slow accretion. In the same way that my hunger crept up, inch by inch, on me, each tiny change so unexceptional and unremarkable that it could go almost unnoticed until I'd cut all but a handful of ingredients from my diet, so too did it slowly become intolerable. So is the process of recovering, of change, so piecemeal and fragmented that it's sometimes hard to recognise that it is happening at all.

After this evening, I asked a friend for the phone number of the psychologist who had helped her with her own anxiety. I perched on the very edge of the hard brown couch in the appointment and talked about feeling frantic, but kept zoning out to watch a leathery man in a stretched grey singlet prune back the flowering vines on the balcony of the next building. It was a month before I told my family about these appointments (my mother almost cried with relief), several more before the psychologist convinced me to attend the eating disorders clinic in the psychiatric ward of my local hospital. It was more than two years before I recognised my condition as anorexia.

In this time too, I barely noticed the small changes that were unfolding, the firmly held beliefs about who I was, how I felt and how I ate, slowly shaking loose within my mind. Each victory was so tiny, often so partial or unabsolute, so easily lost against the background of how
many more things needed to shift, that it was impossible to track them or to ever pin them down.

The horrible irony is that eating disorders only happen to people who like definition and delineation, who like clarity and knowing where they stand, so part of the process of moving past the illness is to learn that recovering can only ever be undefined, slow and without schedule, and riddled with mistakes and mess and temporary measures. We have to stop trying to recover perfectly, that is, in order to recover at all.

These are the metaphors that were repeated in the hospital. It's like learning to drive a car. It's like breaking up with an abusive partner. Like any kind of drug addiction. Like a path you've worn into the grass. Paddling a canoe against the current. Think of visitors to a house. It's ripping off a band-aid. Living with a broken leg. It's background noise. A CD jammed on a track. A frog in a pot. A cork in a bottle. A secret world. A safety net. A parasite, a function, a friend.

More frequently I think now that our minds aren't any different from our bodies, in the ways that they replace themselves and change: something like sixty billion of our cells die off each day, and like this our entire physical selves are replaced every seven years. In between, we never know which parts are new and fresh, which are decaying, which will be the next to die. Our minds shift like this too, and it's
hard to write, to map, what happened and is still happening, to chart the things I did and said and felt when I'm still not sure what any of it means. Or if I ever will, or should even try to, find that certainty.

Because this isn't a narrative of sudden healing, of epiphany or of discovery, not for me, or for any of the other unwell women and men I met through hospitals, or friends-of-friends, or advocacy, we'll all be sorting through it for a long time yet. I'm not sure that there can be a narrative about potentiality, provisionality, for what it means to try to change.

One of my friends from hospital, a bubbly and huge-hearted woman a few years older than me, tells me that she's treating her recovery as an experiment: if she decides later on that her bulimia was better than whatever the other side holds she can always go back, but she's giving it her all in the meantime. Another, an acerbic but nervy trainee nurse, says she chooses which battles to fight on any given day, which days it's better to just hold on. One woman, who was in her first year of a media degree when we met in my second admission, and reminded me then so much of my own nineteen-year-old self, has regular Fear Food Fridays, where she ate something that terrified her while watching a horror movie on her couch. She had bought herself stamped metal cutlery that read ‘Calories don't count on this spoon' and ‘Knife in shining armour'.