Recovery

The Nine Years War

Content Warning: This essay contains discussions of eating disorders, including symptoms and recovery.

Today, I am nine years in recovery from an eating disorder.

I do not call it ‘my’ eating disorder, it does not belong to me anymore, it is not mine. The past is a foreign land; I did things differently there.

Nine years ago, I drove to Cork city to see my therapist at the Eating Disorder Centre, a woman I had been working with for three months. She had asked for my parents to accompany me; she wanted to have a session with all three of us. They drove in a separate car, parking behind mine on the steep hill outside the Centre, and we walked in together. Inside, we sat on the leather chairs as the therapist smiled encouragingly at us. “Tell me,” she asked my parents. “What do you know about Louise’s eating disorder?”

I had to sit there, in silence, as my mother and father revealed, in excruciating, granular detail, the extent of what they had witnessed in the last two decades. Seventeen years of secrecy and lying and what I had thought were quite brilliant attempts to conceal my behaviour; they had seen through it all. I burned with a shame so fierce, I thought I might die from it, but my parents did not seem angry. Instead, I noticed, they appeared to be exhausted, worn down. One of them, I can’t remember which, said something like, “we have accepted that Louise will always struggle with this. But we just want her to be able to live as normal a life as possible.” And then my therapist said these words:

“That doesn’t have to be the case. People recover. Full recovery is possible.”

It’s possible. Full recovery is possible.

***

If you are reading this today and you have wrestled with the monster for too many years to count, did you know that full recovery is possible? Because it is. I am here to tell you that it is. I am proof of that.

I went to Croatia in May to speak at a book festival. The hotel I was staying at had a buffet breakfast, and every morning I would go down and examine its offerings and think – how can I put more on my plate? I need enough protein and I need enough carbs to make sure I am full until lunchtime and I had better add some greens, and I’ll sprinkle these seeds and nuts on the side of fruit, just to make sure I’m getting all the nutrients my body requires. It was second nature, at that point, to look at food in that way, but I marvelled at the change all the same. I am not exaggerating when I tell you this – that would have been impossible nine years ago. At that time, all I thought about was food and my weight and what I had to do to skip this meal, or I would promise to friends that I had eaten a huge lunch when they knew I hadn’t, or wonder how I was going to get to the bathroom after a meal, to kneel down and vomit, as quickly and quietly as possible. Days and weeks and months lost to this sickness, and then years too. Seventeen of them, gone, taken from me or perhaps given away gladly. Fed to the monster to keep the pain at bay, the grief, the trauma. It was too overwhelming, all the horrors I had known. I could not stand to feel any of it, so I broke myself apart instead, piece by piece.

***

It is strange to celebrate nine years of recovery in this particular time in history. Yes, I am talking about GLP-1s. Here’s my take: it’s none of my business if someone is taking blood pressure medication, insulin for their diabetes, antidepressants for their depression – it is not my body, not my medical history, not my decision to make – and similarly, I don’t have strong feelings about people taking Ozempic or Mounjaro to manage their weight. (I must add a caveat here: I have never lived in a larger body and I know that many in the fat positivity movement are fearful that this will only reinforce fatphobia. If you have come across any good essays on the subject, please share in the comments. I’d love to read)

But whilst acknowledging GLP-1s have been miracle drugs for many, including women going through hormonal shifts during peri and menopause, surely it is okay to say that I find the re-emergence of very frail bodies to be alarming. Female celebrities on the red carpet, influencers on social media; already slim women shrinking at an unprecedented pace until they are visibly brittle. Let me clear - there are plenty of women who are naturally small, who are genetically built in a certain way. This is not the same thing. What we are witnessing here is medicalised anorexia.

“Are you triggered by it?” a well-meaning friend asked when I said how shocked I was by a recent photo of a female pop star, and I almost laughed out loud. Yes, if these drugs had been available when I was still unwell, I would have done anything I could to get my hands on them. But now? I am not envious of tiny bodies for I know the horrors that they contain. I remember it all too well.

I remember what it’s like to look at a calendar and realise that I havrn’t had my period in over two years. I remember what it was like to see the numbers decrease on the scale, down and down and down again, to see bones floating to the surface of my skin, and to still feel as if it was not enough, it was never enough. I remember taking a shower, turning the temperature up as high as it can possibly go because I was cold all the time, so cold, and the clumps of hair gathered in my hands, as I tried not to scream. I could not sit on a wooden stool in my family kitchen, one which we’d had since I was four years of age, because there was so little flesh on my body. I could not sleep because there was no way to get comfortable, I could feel every bone grating against the mattress. A boyfriend who told me, so gently, when I got undressed during a major relapse, that he couldn’t have sex with me, not when I was this thin. “You’re sick, Louise,” he told me. “Can’t you see how sick you are?” Going out for the day with my mother and on our return, when I took off my coat, she gasped, “your shoulder!” for the strap of my handbag had left a cluster of vicious bruises across my skin. I think of the painful IBS, that which I deal with to this day. I think of the hospital visit where the doctor told me I was at risk of osteoporosis. I think of the heart monitor I wore for the first week after I was hospitalised, for fear I would go into cardiac arrest at 21.

So no, I do not feel triggered when I see bones and wide eyes, fragility once again dressed up as beauty. I feel desperately sad. I am sad for those who will lose years to this, I am sad for the families and friends around them who will watch it unfold and feel powerless to do anything to stop it. I am sad for the teenage girls who will, like I did, grow up thinking that to be beautiful, you must be thin to the point of emaciation. I am sad for all women who, instead of being encouraged to focus on strength and hormonal balance, all of which requires eating enough food, we are, once again, being told to shrink ourselves, and the devastating health consequences we will face when we are older if we comply. Why are our bodies always the first ones heaped on the pyre?

I don’t have any easy answers. Resist? Yes, with everything we have. Get off social media? Refuse to listen to the voices, both implicit and explicit, telling us that the answer to all that ails us is to lose weight? All I can tell you is this - I have been on the other side, and it is not glamourous, it is not beautiful, it is not aspirational. It is a living nightmare and you want no part of it.

Save yourself and save the girls coming up behind us, too. We need flesh on our bones and food in our bellies, we need to feed our guts, our bones, our souls.

Because we deserve to be fed. We deserve to be nourished.