When writing about anorexia nervosa, people often describe a ‘descent’ into illness. To me, the snake-like tightening of the eating disorder around my dwindling body never felt like a downward slide: it felt like a climb, like I was scaling a mountain, kicking away the rubble of ‘hunger’ and ‘flesh’ and ‘need’ as I clambered higher and higher. How would I know I had reached the peak? I would be empty, skeletal and horribly sick. That would be my apex; that would be my success.
My ‘anorexia story’ is depressingly commonplace. At 11 I was a chubby pre-teen, embarrassed by a body that felt too soft and too big, embarking on a diet that was too rigid and too extreme. By 13, I was a ghost. My friends had fallen away, unable to comprehend my strange, silent coldness. A bitter smell hung around me as my body released the chemicals produced by starvation. I ate a handful of cornflakes once every three weeks and called it control. It wasn’t control. It was self-slaughter.
After seven years of anorexia, I swung into bulimia. I puffed up and filled out and felt more hollow than ever. I gained weight but lost all traces of self-respect, hating myself more with every crazed, frantic binge. If anorexia is coldness, then bulimia is heat: a sordid, sweaty fug that enveloped me wherever I went. In my mind, bulimia tarnished everything I experienced or achieved. I left school with fine exam results, but they didn’t count, because I was bulimic. I had a place at a good university, but it didn’t matter, because I was bulimic. The sun was shining and the air was warm, but I stayed inside, curtains closed, because I was bulimic.
I wrote my first book, The Time in Between, at 18. Purging the darkness of my eating disorder experience was cathartic, but not curative. The book was published when I was 21, and six months later I started university, bulimia stubbornly in tow. What surprised me was not the relentlessness of my own demons: it was that, all around me, other young women were struggling with similar demons. University-wide internet support groups for depression, anxiety and eating disorders boasted hundreds of members, each person’s history intricate and alarming. I began to compare the posts on these forums with the superficial, sanitized depictions of mental illness that abound in mainstream media, and found a chasm of difference. I began to wonder whether I could tell these women’s stories more truthfully.
Over the following months, I interviewed around 70 young women about their experience of various mental health conditions, from post-traumatic stress disorder to borderline personality disorder. As well as a handful of students from my own university, I spoke to women from schools and colleges, in employment and out of work, from a wide range of backgrounds and cultures. Their stories were frighteningly dark, surprisingly humorous and universally touching. They were honest and brave.
From over 100 hours of recorded interviews, I set about compiling the narrative that would eventually become my second book, That Was When People Started to Worry. I did not want to write a verbatim report: most people did not want their own words published. Instead, I created a series of ‘characters’, each suffering from a different condition and each representing a composite of multiple women. The book gives a snapshot into the life of each character in turn, covering a period of weeks, months or years. Their stories are faithful to the experiences recounted by my interviewees, without softening or censure.
Writing and publishing That Was When… has been a privilege. The women I met over the course of the project were interesting and insightful, and it was an honour to be allowed to speak with their voices. My hope is that the book offers an insight into the torment of living with a psychiatric disorder, helping people to understand that these conditions are neither spurious nor minor. Such insight is vital for anyone who regularly interacts with a person with mental illness – and, knowingly or unknowingly, the overwhelming majority of us do regularly interact with people with mental illness.
It has been 13 years since my own demons took up residence, and they continue to linger. My body is normal, but my eating disorder rages on, disguising itself. Sometimes the constant mental chatter feels so draining I don’t want to get out of bed, but most days I put one foot in front of the other, and I make some right decisions, some of the time. I think of the warmth and respect I felt towards the women I interviewed, and I try to feel some of that emotion towards myself. Slowly, I move forwards. Slowly, I get better.
Nancy Tucker is the author of That Was When People Started To Worry: Windows Into Unwell Minds (Icon books, £14.99 hardback).
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"How would I know when I had reached the peak?" Author Nancy Tucker on her 13-year-struggle with eating disorders
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MumsnetGuestPosts · 13/06/2018 12:39
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