Growing pains

Trigger warning: disordered eating

I am 14, maybe 15. I am developing physically, but still a child, full of emotions, unable to deal with any unfamiliar person or situation. There is too much, so I begin a new strategy, one to attempt to combat my core of insecurity. I need a stronger defence than this fleshy shell of skin and tissue: a friend to help me through my non-existence.

I lack the skill and confidence for a human version so settle on another. This other wears camouflage I know well by now, the shield of self-masochism. He tells me to change my resources. I need a passion, a calling and he settles quickly upon denial. It is a good test to see if I can be taken further. I begin my days of starving.

Me and my friend are all I care about but I notice, behind his chatter, that others seem to be sufficiently upset, which is funny, as I can’t feel much of anything. I take this as another sign I must work harder. But I am pleased at the bonus of exciting feelings in others. It gives me a strange kind of pride to be in control once more, the master of the invisible string. For a while I revel in my new paradise. I spend my time in secret, on my own, always on my own, at every moment available to me, in my parent’s cosy plastic kitchen.

I am in the kitchen now. Everyone is out and I am in their kitchen, but not. Really I am inside my head and its limitations, intoning prayers to the food gods. I begin to wildly grab packets and cartons and pots filled with anything that is edible, and sometimes not. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. I am here on some deeper purpose, in the fizzing, blinkering lights where there are no blacks or whites anymore. Flailing arms and staccatoed gulps assault me – I am Judas receiving the divine word, all tongues. I am mouth and belly as everything in me concentrates on the process of stuffing as much as I can, and as quickly as I can, into me. I dance around the kitchen with the energy of a banshee, eye of the storm: quietly purposeful in my demolition of the week’s shopping budget. Never am I more alive than when I am bent on my own destruction.

The microwave glows yellow and pings intermittently.  I seem to nod forward and back, scalding my tongue in the process of supply and demolition. Time means nothing, but I am cautious. I rarely have the nerve to stay until all is gone. I always retreat, wary of staying to hear my inner timer go off, in case I should be caught in my crime – sentenced and disgraced. All of this exhausts me, but then I get to undo it all as I rush back to the bathroom. Oh sweet salvation! Resting my head on the cool edge of the toilet bowl, savouring the last minutes of feeling powerful and free. I throw my head forward, replaying everything backwards as I force it all back up, sometimes still fully formed. Cherry tomatoes and mushrooms that swim in an orange and pink juice with little hard, orange lumps. The bathroom is my best bit. I feel no shame. I love the control I hold over myself as I realise my power: reversing everything and never having to wait. Instant gratification. Just three fingers touching the back of the inside of my gullet, and all the waiting I have ever had to endure is swept away as my work rushes back out and hits the clean white of the toilet bowl.

Other times, I am weaker. I need to be punished. I am filled with hatred. My friend sentences me. I must substitute my trusty toilet bowl for a stronger cure – the round, pink, horrid, little laxative pill. Even thinking about it makes me feel sick. Right at the back of the throat, that small area you can never reach – the area where you see cats opening their mouth, all teeth, retching in vain to try and dislodge the feeling of something that is glued back there.

They were cherry flavoured and friendly, and the instructions cheerily stated that one would do the job. I took nine that first time, chewed them down, all grit and pink-spit foam. I think I nearly died. It certainly felt like it. The pain was almost immediate and dirty. Rush to the bathroom, collapse on the floor. I found myself unable to move as I stared up at the toilet. It stared back at me with crazy white rays, smiling coldly, as I shit myself through my clothes. Shit like piss running down my legs, over my knee. River Styx flowing over my torso. I was all colours and no colour at all. I was piss, shit, vomit and blood. I was white, black, yellow, and green. I lay there being stabbed in the stomach, all these boundaries doing my head in. Woozy, tripped off, then woozy once more. I lay as I whirled around and around the room, body fluids emerging and drying. ‘I’m dying’, I thought. And I was happy. And then I was hit by my leaden straitjacket of guilt and was terrified. Terrified I wouldn’t die, or worse, I would live and never be able to die, never ‘be’, because I didn’t know who I was, or even if I deserved an ‘is’ or a ‘was’.