Practice.

She is spot on. What happens when you’re not hiding from the world, for whatever reason and through whichever medium, is that you get to practice being with other people and learning how it all works.

I am still catching up on this bit.

The conversation stayed with me, not least because it gave me an action plan for tackling an area that has felt, recently, like a closed off brick wall; but also because it highlighted the other stuff that goes on around the analysis.

Self awareness is not something I lack – its practice that I’m short on; and, unfortunately, the two don’t equate. Lots of one will not compensate for a little of the other – and the interaction between thought and action can change the direction again.

This is what recovery taught me, although the lesson was a long time coming.

You can not think it out.

It gets easier with practice.

It can feel, before you start practicing, like you will never be able to make it to the end – but doing moves you forward, and the movement changes the knowledge and the perspective that goes in.

I guess the same is true for other areas of life. That there is a bit beyond analysis where you just learn by experience. Where you have to accept that you can’t think life out in isolation and you have to realise that practice is part of the process –

Rather than waiting until you’ve figured out all the gaps.

To help me along this bumpy journey, I started to try and understand myself and my relationship to the world; to gain some insight into what had happened and why it had happened. The pen was my probe and my head, the subject. Or so I thought. Somewhere along the way, my psychological exercise stumbled into a sociological debate and took on a life of its own – particularly in relation to being a woman.

Whether career woman, ladette or a Bridget Jones-esque twenty-something, girl power, in its many guises, experienced a notable – and much noted upon – surge at the end of the last century. It confirmed and consolidated the dramatic transition that women, as a sex, were undergoing; provided a new way of being for the younger generation – and raised a whole host of questions for those of us who fell on the tipping point.

It is impossible for one person to understand or resolve the complexities of what went – and is going – on for women today; to explore the impact of the past century’s lightening speed race along the social evolutionary scale. One article cannot communicate or clarify what it feels like to be a woman within this wider historical context – but it might shed a little light on the relationship between what’s going on out there and what’s going on for me and, possibly, many other women in the UK.

Joining the Dots

What it meant to be a woman in the UK in the twentieth century has been a persistent interruption to my soul searching. It cropped up when I was considering identity; made another appearance when I got to body image; bounced into my biological or emotional debate: basically, it seemed to take a lot of space for something that I had considered to be, in the context of things, of little relevance. With my curiousity piqued and my frustration heightened, I decided that a little attention was evidently required – and opened a minefield.

My eating disorder seemed to be intricately and complexly connected to my gender; it had resonances with women today, yesterday and years ago; appeared to be informed by traditions and ingrained patterns that I had never consciously recognised; and, strangely, made a lot more sense from this perspective, as I will explain.

As you move out of the grey cloud of an eating disorder and, probably, many other mental health illnesses or addictions, one of the biggest challenges in the recovery process is working out who you are, re-discovering and re-claiming your identity. My exploration of the interplay between being a woman and eating disorders did not begin at the obvious point, i.e. the much discussed female form and the equally well discussed preoccupation with the female form; it started, instead, with identity, my contemplation of how we work out who we are and how we define ourselves to others – and introductory speech seemed the logical place to begin.

The female identity

Today, we are defined as much by what we do as who we are – “I’m so and so and I am a ….”. Our career is synonymous with our identity and, whether our career is reflective of our character or not, it is an easy and concrete starting point. Men are probably used to this; but, for the female species whose historical identifiers were mother, daughter or wife, this question has acquired a new significance. Now I’m all for equality and empowerment in the workplace; but I also wonder whether they have forced the question of how women define themselves to the forefront. If they have introduced another dimension into the female identity which has confused and complicated how, and where, women locate themselves.

So, where does this confusion rise from? Why should it be harder for women to identify themselves in this way than it is for men? And don’t the fathers and husbands and sons out there experience the same conflict in how they define themselves? No, I don’t think so. Men, as a species, are used to this way of things; women, on the other hand, are coming from a totally different state of consciousness. The conflict is heightened because our roots lie in an ‘other’ state which, while absent from our individual memories, seems somehow ingrained in our collective history.

If this argument feels too airy fairy for you, let me add some biological and sociological padding. Now I’m no historian (or doctor, for that matter) but it doesn’t take a scholar to map out the role of women through the centuries.

The Role of Women

Women have typically occupied a few select key positions: mother, home-maker and nurturer. Why? Because biology dictated this role for them in the evolutionary process: the smaller female physique is not as suited to the hardcore hunting/fighting/building initially needed for survival; women’s bodies and psyche are designed for motherhood and nurturing the young – and pregnancies are not conducive to a stable income.

Whilst times, circumstances and behaviours may have changed, if we consider the idea that our fundamental nature shaped a very different role for us to the one that we are trying to fill today, we’re getting closer to understanding the conflict around self-identification.

If we take this line of thought one step further and combine the biological make-up with the career identifier bit, we can also see that it is only the fortunate few whose careers bear any meaningful relationship to who they are. Pregnancies, maternity leave and the school runs aside, it can be difficult for women to really connect to a career or a vocation in the same way as men can.

Thus, defining ourselves in terms of what we are do, as society so often dictates, jars with our sense of self; yet we are negated totally if we return to our original identifiers.

So that sorted that out a bit – if I put myself and my confusion in a bigger context, the difficulties I was experiencing in working out who I was, whilst unresolved, started to make a bit more sense. And so did the issue of women and food or, more precisely, the powerful relationship between women and food. I have often wondered why food was my weapon of choice: what was it about food that was so difficult? Why did it seem so much harder for me and my female counterparts, to manage than for men? Back-tracking through the female experience again shed some light on the question.

Women and Food

It is difficult to imagine today’s constant debate over diet and body image having much place in early societies: if you’re just looking to survive or keep your family fed or meet society’s idea of femininity, I suspect that counting calories or exchanging waist measurements is not on your radar. Food, however, probably was: women and food seem to be intricately and intimately linked from the beginning.

Biological make-up, ie. breast feeding, is the most obvious illustration of this connectedness; but then there’s also the nurturing role, the cook function, the home keeper and, later, the supper on the table for the hard-working husband. Food has always been a central part of the female role and, consequently, the female identity. Could this, too, explain why I, as a woman, seemed to put more emphasis on food and find it more emotive than my male counterparts?

Let’s follow this argument a little further because it also seems to encompass the other side of the coin: eating. Back to caveman and the home keeping woman: if males had been out fighting or hunting or cavorting around the countryside, then they physically required more sustenance than their female counterpart and, thus, the differentiation between what women and men eat (in terms of how it looks, and not simply physiological need), is established. Speeding along again to Scarlett O’Hara squeezing into her corset; or the working class women donating their meat to the men; or the notion of dainty female behaviour: it’s not difficult to dismiss an evolutionary trend emerging around women and the act of eating.

The female form

So, finally, we move smoothly on from eating to the female form and, taking a walk through any art gallery demonstrates the long-standing obsession with women’s bodies. Whether the fashion has leant towards thin or fat figures, the female form, historically, seems to have attracted fascination and scrutiny – and we’re back to identity again. Whilst the position of men was informed by money and occupation, these avenues were limited to women: looks operated then, as they possibly still do now, as an asset or selling point.

My lightening bulb moment happened at this point: traditionally, women were defined by food in terms of both their value and their function. No wonder it caused so many problems.

It’s all interesting food for thought, to excuse the pun; but things have changed and, you may well be asking, what’s the relevance now? Possibly nothing more than a few minutes of contemplation or a little introspection before you rush back to the office or feed your own brood their overdue tea or head off for a night on the town with the girls; but, for me, the relevance comes from learning about myself through going back to my predecessors. It comes from gaining a little of that often lacking empathy with and connectedness to the female race. And it helps my journey.

Through putting my personal battles in a wider context and adding a little rationality to an irrational experience, I am moving away from the isolation and confusion that governed my illness, and gaining a little of that empathy and compassion which has also helped to define our gender.

Sights like this make me sad.

At 5 O’clock on a rainy, winters afternoon, people shouldn’t be standing alone in the rain, especially when it’s Valentines day. It makes me wonder what the point of it all is, really; and whether I’ll ever make sense of what we’re doing here –

And then I remembered, as the lights changed, that we don’t really know the answer, and we’ll probably never get what it’s all about; but the thing that keeps it going is a little four letter word called Love –

Because, when all’s said and done, it’s love that makes the futile feel bearable and gives meaning to what’s mostly mundane; and, it’s the human connections that provide an anchor when everything else is a little hard to grasp.

So, instead of feeling sad as I drove past the man in the rain, and rather than feeling sorry for myself, as I headed back to my empty flat, I felt an unexpected kind of connection and a strange kind of peace with it all; because the answers to life might be totally out of my grasp –

But the point of it isn’t.

And, when we pause, unexpectedly, to find out whether what we’re thinking they’re thinking, is even close to what’s really going through their minds; and find ourselves, so often, on entirely different pages, then it’s immediately clear that we’re all just trying to make sense of a fragmented assortment of feelings and experiences and thoughts, reflected and refracted in a thousand different ways –

That one word, misheard, can lead to years of heartache; and an action, derived from love, can sometimes cause pain.

That obvious to and oblivious to aren’t that far apart; and, shared visions don’t always look the same.

That the subtle intonations and inflections in what we say are subject to interpretations that we can’t even imagine and we might not ever know, if we don’t stop to ask –

What do you think? – and how are you feeling? – and what does that mean to you?

And so, on those rare occasions when the barriers are down and we’ve moved beyond what is normally said, then, with the sudden clarity of sunlight, we can start to understand the behaviours and actions that we’ve only been able to guess at (like the silences I’d taken for dislike and the looks you’d assumed were anger).

And, if we’re brave enough – when the barriers are down – to articulate the thoughts, and feelings, and assumptions that normally remain behind closed doors and carefully regulated mouths, then it starts to become clear that no two versions of the story are the same (like the holiday marking my descent into illness and your epitome of childhood freedom) –

And, no two interpretations of an experience are identical (like the loneliness I felt in contrast to the popularity you perceived) –

And that the margin for error and misunderstanding is terrifyingly wide (like the time you thought I was trying to hurt you, when actually it was about hurting me) –

Which we’d never realise, if we didn’t stop to ask –

and we weren’t prepared to talk –

or we had forgotten that, really, we’re all just working with half versions of the truth, and trying to make sense of a fragmented assortment of feelings and experiences and thoughts, reflected and refracted in a thousand different ways –

“Should” has always been bit of a problem for me, but I’d kind of prided myself on my ability to problem solve and think creatively and take the initiative …

The realisation that I automatically see objections – rather than possibilities – is a little sore.

I’ve also noticed that I assume there’s a “right way” and a “wrong way” of doing things; and, that “but” often emerges in this context, typically within phrases like “but that’s not the right away” and “but I don’t know how I’m meant to do it”…

This is another ongoing theme for me. It means that the first obstacle in any activity is identifying the “right” approach and, sometimes, that just doesn’t exist.

Last week, an article on ‘conformity’ that was winging its way around twitter joined the dots for me. Apparently, eating disorders are more common in people with a pre-disposition towards conformity; my over-preoccupation with “getting it right” – as signified by an increasing use of the word “but” – would suggest that I might fall into this category.

And that I haven’t quite grown out of it yet.

So, because I have been a little frustrated by the confines of my own thought process; and, as I have an inkling that my current mentality will always result in a general sense of worry and the impression that I’m not quite good enough, I think it’s about time that I had a little look at what’s really been going on, because addressing the conformity issue and the need to do it “right” might, perhaps, make life a little easier, and me, a little more “but” resistant.

When my eating disorder started, I was bang in conformity target zone: new school, new people, new social codes. Desperate to ‘belong’ and ‘succeed’ and ‘slot right in’, I became something of a chameleon (“whatever you want me to be”), willing to shoe-horn myself into which ever socially acceptable code of behaviour was present at the time.

As well as wearing the “right” clothes, and going to the “right” places, and saying the “right” words, eating the “right” foods and being the “right” weight, seemed like good ways of making sure that I met the social criteria…

Conformity comes at quite a high cost: along with messing up a previously healthy diet and tumbling straight into the unforgiving grasp of an eating disorder, I also managed to negate everything that made me, me, in the process.

Fast forward 18 years and add in the realisation (finally) that my attempts at eating the “right” food had spiralled dramatically out of control, along with the fact that the social markers had moved somewhat over the years (what’s on your plate is no longer quite so important); and I find myself still acting out the same need to “get it right” – just with a different set of criteria.

This time round, I’m trying to identify the key to fitting in at work, and the “right” things to do in my spare time; I’m attempting to go about relationships in the way you’re meant to go about them, and desperately trying to understand how life should be approached…

The contexts are different, but the feelings are exactly the same -

So, in the lingering assumption of a “right” or “wrong” way of doing things; and, operating within the restrictions of ever-changing and subject-to-multiple-interpretations social codes, I am losing myself, again, and reinforcing the same message that me, as me, does not stack up.

And, because I’m no longer sure which is “right” – or “wrong” – or acceptable – or not-acceptable, then the objections (but you can’t possibly do that), and the apprehension (but that might be wrong), and the need to get it right (but how should I be doing it) are getting louder –

And “but” is a big warning that I am about to make the same mistakes, all over again.

So, I’m going to try a little experiment (this time round), and give myself a little breathing space, because conforming has become claustrophobic and I am finding my quest for the “right” way is starting to stifle.

And, instead of assuming that there’s only one option or answer, I’m going to try and replace “but” with “maybe”, because entertaining the possibility is the first big step on the way to “could”.

Rather than checking out whether I’m “right” or “wrong” or the same as the girl next door, I’m going to see – for a little while – how it feels to just be me –

And, instead of assuming that there’s a correct process or procedure for every given action or experience, I’m going to see what happens if I try it my way –

And have a little faith in me.

That we start, not as a blank canvas, but as a sketched outline, already shaded and shaped by the people that went before us – and those that preceded them; and, that the final masterpiece rarely resembles the vision but is, instead, a mishmash of the truths and illusions and feelings and experiences that we’ve picked up along the way.

That we are never really this – or that – but a blur somewhere in the middle that glimmers, golden, from one perspective, but turns a steely grey if you move an inch; and, that, in those minute fractions of distance, are a hundred million possibilities that, butterfly-wing-like, change our worlds–

Because, really, this thing called life, is just a series of seized and lost opportunities, and sliding doors and disappearing exits, and a confusing jumble of chances and choices and consequences that you can either dive into – or skirt around the edge of –

And, ultimately, the picture that we end up with will never be completed and will seldom be a reflection of just ourselves; but will, instead, be a muddle of colours that represents the feelings and experiences and people that shape and animate our lives –

If we’re prepared to accept the confusion –

and throw caution to the complexity –

and jump straight in.

It was a tried and tested part of the recovery process, and the subject was meant to be clear. Me.

Somewhere along the way, my psychological exercise got sidetracked and made a slight digression into the world of sociological and anthropological contemplation.

It got a tad distracted in the tangled web of philosophical and literary exploration.

But it wasn’t a wasted trip.

I may not have the academic expertise or the celebrity status required to make a bona fide social commentary; but, journalistic etiquette aside, I had lots of time to think, the emotional intelligence of a decade’s worth of therapy to draw upon – and an English degree to put to good use.

Because my diversion started with Jean Rhys and Emily Dickinson, with George Eliot and Thomas Hardy.

It started with people who could articulate me better than I could.

It started with the surprise and comfort that came from hearing my thoughts expressed by people who’d lived – if only in the author’s imagination – before I was even a twinkling in my grandparents’ eyes.

There’s nothing like realising that you’re not totally out of sync with the world. It makes things considerably easier when you realise that your thoughts and feelings and emotional traumas are nothing new.

It’s just the context that is different.

And therein lay the next challenge. I could get where my feelings came from (being human – and there was a long track record to prove it) – but I couldn’t quite get how the context and the consequence worked.

I just knew that it was important to look at the bigger picture.

History says that the Romans had a strange and socially acceptable form of bulimia.

I haven’t really pursued the subject; but rumour has it that anorexia has been around for years. Apparently, there’s even an anorexic take on Jane Eyre (refusal and food – I stumbled across it during my degree).

Following the literary line further, the emotional context is not that dissimilar from stuff that people were describing years ago. It’s just the manifestation and the response that’s different.

And that’s the crux of the situation. There’s a whole pretext to anorexia and bulimia, a whole lot of similarities to age old emotional baggage– yet they’re very much a modern disease. A regular 20th/21st century phenomenon.

Let me explain.

If I had been born 50 years earlier, I wouldn’t have developed anorexia so young.

It would have been stamped out by a society just out of war rations. It would have been jumped on by adults who told you what to do and didn’t take any answering back, thank you very much. It would have been picked up at family meals – before working demands and outspoken children made them an impossibility.

If I had been born 5 or 10 years earlier, my bulimia wouldn’t have spiralled so dramatically and excessively out of control.

Without the aid of a trusty credit card (or two), I wouldn’t have been able to afford it for a start. Without all night supermarkets, it wouldn’t have been so easy to succumb to the fatal urge. Without BOGOFs and meal deals and a MacDonalds on every corner, it would have been near on impossible to reach the obscene quantities that my bulimia demanded.

And then there’s the whole issue of anonymity –society ain’t what it used to be – and freedom – great if you look after it properly. If I had lived in a rural area or in a different less developed country, things might have been very different.

My eating disorder wasn’t caused by society; there’s no blame gaming or scape goating going on here.

It’s just interesting to take a look at the bigger picture when you’re trying to piece the bits of the puzzle into something that makes a little more sense.

I thought that understanding what it was like to be me would be enough to make sense of my experiences; I didn’t anticipate contemplating the far bigger mystery of what it was like to be a woman. To be honest, it seemed kind of irrelevant…

Until I noticed that it kept coming up – and it appeared to be connected; kind of like this….

Hello, I’m…

Working out who I am has been a major challenge in my recovery, and I’d been working on the basis that my difficulties were solely down to the fact I’ve introduced myself as an eating disorder for the past fifteen years. I’m now beginning to think that I might have been a bit simplistic and that women’s identity are often a complicated affair, regardless of the circumstances.

Now I’m no historian, but it doesn’t take a scholar to map out the role of women through the centuries. We’ve been, for the most part, lovers (wives) and mothers: Tom’s Mrs, and Charles’ Mum.

After emancipation – and because we’re more than Tom’s Mrs and Charles’ Mum – things are a bit different now; and identifiers don’t work in quite the same way. Mothers and wives are in amongst there, but we’re expanding the definitions. Introductions are now far more social and far more about what you like, or what you do: the “I’m Melissa and I’m a xxxx” line; just like a man –

Only, some habits are hard to break.

If there’s such a thing as a collective memory – and I’m inclined to think there is – then being wives and mothers and daughters is old hat; but talking in men’s terms is still relatively new. Maybe the finding an identity thing isn’t a unique experience but, at some level, we’re working out how to juggle a biological identity with a social one..

And, if we’re carrying that around still, then what else is in the load?

A difficult relationship with food

I have always been curious about the food issue. With a whole range of self destruction aids to choose from, what was it about food that made it such a natural weapon? Why, with no previous food-related issues, did I turn to it so instinctively?

There’s a whole women’s relationship with food debate to explore, and a huge conversation about guilt and greed and giving to get your head around; but when you factor in the identity question and the sociological theorising…well, it actually starts to make a funny kind of sense.

Clearly calorie counting, and weightwatchers, and Victoria Beckham’s dress size weren’t common currency amongst our stone age predecessors; but I’m betting food was a pretty central subject, particularly as it was at the heart of the woman’s world.

From breast feeding to meat for the men, kitchen maids to housewife domesticity; there’s been a direct link between food and the female identity for a long time, and body image has got all mixed in -

Before you know it, there’s Scarlett O’Hara squeezing into a corset and dainty feminine table manners; food and status, and looks as currency…

And we’re back to the whole identity debate.

It’s all interesting food for thought, to excuse the pun, and I’m open to the fact that it’s probably just idle speculation; but there’s definitely a lot of arrows pointing in the same direction – and some value in widening the lens -

Because, it may not tell me where I’m going – but it’s helped me work out where I came from; and it’s made me remember that I’m not in it on my own.

Comfort Food. Pretty self explanatory. We give a crying baby milk and a heartbroken teenager, maltesers. Chicken soup for flu and macaroni cheese for winter days; custard and crumble for Sundays, and chocolate for when you’re down.

Bulimia links in to comfort. It’s about feeling bad and wanting to feel better. Macaroni cheese and chocolate topped the binge food bill.

Anorexia resists comfort: it’s all about punishment. And the message starts early.

Sweets are a reward for good behaviour; if you misbehave, you’re not likely to find your favourite food on the menu. We use food differently now that we’ve got enough. It’s got all tangled up with deserving and non–deserving. It’s often dished out on a bizarre kind of merit system rather than by need.

Anorexia plays on insecurity – and links the two. Bad people don’t deserve nice food. Self punishment is a strange form of self discipline.

Hunger strikes are about punishing other people. They’ve been using them for years.

Resistance is a powerful statement – with multiple translations: ‘please listen because I haven’t got the words to say what I’m feeling’, or ‘watch out I’m so angry that I want to hurt you’; ‘go away’ or ‘pay attention, please’ -

My eating disorder was screaming them all.

Control fits in to the hunger strike theme. It’s a way of manipulating people – I will stop eating and make you listen to me. Probably subconscious; but no less powerful.

Saying no thank you to the offer of a second piece of cake is commonly taken as an indication of self control. It’s an asset in modern society.

I could go on….

Nurture and nourishment, and the fundamental purpose of food -to help us grow and develop. Not something anorexia’s particularly interested in.

…But I’ve proved my point.

Food is not just what sits in front of you at the table. It’s no longer just a need that keeps us going and growing. It’s become representative and associative and analogical -

And it’s not surprising that it sometimes gets used in the wrong way.

Re-learning how to eat.