What's It Like Living With An Eating Disorder?
How would you describe living with an eating disorder?
What images and words come up for you?
It’s so easy to fall into cliché, isn’t it? Or say things that sound right or that you think you should say but you don’t really mean it.
I never knew how to sum up those years. I was too close to the action.
When you’re in it. You’re in it, aren’t you? What’s needed is some healthy detachment and curiosity. For me that came years later.
I started a screenplay about my experiences once but I couldn’t make it work. I didn't know how to dramatise them without sounding self indulgent and boring.
To this day I can’t watch or read much about eating disorders. Not because I get upset, because I get bored.
How do we talk about them in a different way? One that is constructive and helpful? One that is creative?
I think so much of eating disorder behaviour is about repressed creativity.
Let’s get creative. Curious.
I’ve written some sort of analogies off the top of my head about their worst aspects.
Like a full time job that never pays. Every time you ask for your wages your boss says:
Boss: Next week.
Me: You said tomorrow.
Boss: Do we have a problem here?
Me: I have no money.
Boss: Get back to work.
Like having a stalker and the police do nothing. So you buy blackout blinds, new locks and fantasise about moving to a new country. Just as you start to relax you see your reflection in the mirror and realise your stalker is you!
Or
You’re invited to a party when the host opens the door they say:
Host: Sorry. Wrong day!
Only they’re not sorry. Through the gap, over their shoulder, you see your other friends laughing, the door slams in your face.
Or
Like climbing endless stairs. Every now and then you glimpse the top and then it disappears.
Like a waste of life.
Like living a double life.
Like hiding in plain sight.
Your conversation is peppered with:
Sorry I can’t…
Come out.
Eat that.
Or that.
Talk to you.
Tell you this.
Not for me, thanks.
Sorry. I just can’t.
And other variations on a theme.
Here’s the catch.
It wasn’t all terrible.
Especially at the beginning.
They were my greatest protectors and defenders. Like my very own Special Forces Team. Such is the ambivalence at the heart of many eating disorders.
But that’s for next time.
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