6/365: How Good Nothing Tasted.

Falling in love with Jesus.

An old friend sends me the message, look what I found, underneath is this photo of us both:

(I’m the one in all white. The skirt’s lace, I made it and was extraordinarily proud of it, a fact I now find simply, extraordinary.)

A normal enough photo of two teenagers dressed up for the school ball. Dressed down even. We thought ourselves too cool for ballgowns. I was about three months into being 16. Exams had just finished. We’d worked hard, our school expected us to achieve. It pushed us. We pushed each other. We pushed ourselves. We partied hard then too. Fags behind bushes. Skipped days of school when we could. The usual stuff. Vodka in coke bottles. Afternoons spent high in someone’s bedroom. Not everyone did. Some took school and the fact their parents were paying for it very seriously. Or some of our parents were at least; me, I was the scholarship kid, always worried my brains would fail to earn the fee. At private school, you’re never rich enough, but you’re always poor enough. Rich kids are bloodhounds, they hunt vermin out. We thought ourselves wild in comparison. Me, I couldn’t make sense of it. All the work. All the talk of uni. Not when I wasn’t going. The future was certain. God was bringing the end. Everyone else working to get the right grades for uni, for careers I knew I didn’t need. 16 and life was closed to me.

The photo reminds me of the first line of Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam, ‘There are times when what is to be said looks out of the past at you - looks out like someone at a window and you in the street as you walk along’, it’s not so much that I’m watching the person I was in the photo, but the person in this photo is holding me to account.

The night of the ball, we misbehaved, and not in a wild by comparison way, but in a wild by anyone’s standards way. I fear the ball was cancelled the following year, down to us. Not that it mattered. Four months after this photo was taken, I was so thin I couldn’t leave my bed. I never set foot in my school after that night. When you begin to eat your brain, school’s not the right place. I didn’t know it then as I leant in for the photographer, but this would be the last photo of me at a normal weight for many years. There is a photo somewhere of me that Christmas, propped up in bed in a holiday home, with my hair finally falling like Julie Christie’s, I look ethereal in it, an angel, a ghost, a lady Lazarus; impossible to tell which. Certainly, I was dying. My skin is the wrong colour. Criss-crossed with blue and green veins. I remember watching Love Story for the first time that winter with my mother, and not understanding why she was ugly crying so badly. Too small for shop bought clothes, I made myself miniskirts she refused to pin to my body for the way my bones protruded under her fingers. I became a doppelganger to her, she wanted the original version back. I wore long boots on my wasted legs, covered in thick brown tights, belted an A-line velvet trench (what I’d give to know where that is now) tight on my 16 inch waist. Or at least I did on the days I could stand up for long enough to stand the cold. I did, and still do, a passable late sixties impression. Some of us are born in the wrong decade, that’s for sure.

I have at various times, given various reasons for my self imposed starvation. It is such a slippery thing, even after living with it for nearly 30 years, a literal shapeshifter. The simplest explanation is that I wanted to die and was too scared to kill myself. I could say that I didn’t really want to die, and so I did it slowly, but even now, I am convinced I did want to die. I didn’t have any future that I could see. God wasn’t a purpose enough. And I knew my appetite was huge, and when I say appetite, I mean appetite for everything. I was hungry for the world. A world I knew to be passing away. No point then in existing, when this hunger was going to kill me. I needed to master all my hunger. It’s a neat, simple explanation, which is to say, it’s also a lie. Did I do it to myself? Did it do it to me? Certainly at some point the balance of power flipped, as distinct as a switch, and I knew I was not in control anymore. The pathology of Anorexia complicated by the physiology of starvation; the perfect toxic couple.

What I find curious about Anorexia, is it itself becomes a form of devotion, a physical manifestation of the metaphysical problem of the body and its many representations and possibilities. The categorisation of Anorexia as a disease, suggests not only that there’s a right way for bodies to look but also a correct and proper way for bodies to behave - the body is a wanting machine, a thing to be fed, to desire and to be desired; Anorexia throws this into question, which is perhaps why we continue to be so suspicious of it, relegating it to the realm of silly teenage girls preoccupied with thinness as the sole aim, staunchly refusing to think of what an Anorexic body might be saying.

As I became more and more ill, I became obsessed with Jesus. I still wasn’t convinced by his dad, but I really loved him. And I loved the idea of being pure, free of all carnal wants. Francis Bacon asserts we are all meat, and in having little flesh to spare, I was no longer carnal. I was free of flesh and the desires of the flesh. I did not realise at the time, in doing this, I brought myself in direct competition with God; spirit transcending flesh. In an effort to highlight how old the illness was, my psychiatrist, perhaps unwisely, introduced me to the idea of Holy Anorexia. The connection between starvation, corporal punishment in the most literal sense, and early female Catholic saints shouldn’t be surprising, given that communion essentially is cannibal in nature, in the same way Anorexia is. This is mostly why I can’t do it anymore, I don’t mind eating my flesh, but draw the line at consuming my own brain. The most famous of these Holy Anorexics, was Catherine of Siena, whose wasted, severed head is still on public display. I am still fascinated by Holy Anorexia, and think it might offer answers to the problem of contemporary Anorexia Nervosa, taking it away from being an illness fixated on thinness and food, and to some point of devotion, purity, absence and presence. It is a fascinating thing to work so deliberately against the body’s simplest needs. As if food is ever that simple. As if hunger is ever that simple.

The first event I did for The Last Days, with Sophie Heawood and Kat Lister, was about writing the taboo; what that event threw up was how limited we still are in our imaginings and perceptions of taboo. Is it really still taboo to write about sex when that’s been done for so long? To equate desire with only sex? Or is it a bit, done? It’s taboo to write about Anorexia in any meaningful way. When I wrote it in The Last Days I wanted to really write from inside it, to give it the momentum, colour, desire it gave me, because all addictions are fun at the start, otherwise they’d never materialise into full blown addictions; but are you allowed to write it that way? Are you allowed to write about falling in love with Jesus? How much of your strange little self are you prepared to give to a book, and more, to an unknown reader?

I look at that photo now, and the version of me that’s in it doesn’t seem like a stranger. She seems like someone who knew what was coming. I think I knew what I had to give up, Anorexia stopped time, stalled the inevitable loss. I knew my hunger. I knew my capacity for destruction. I tested in on myself first maybe, just to see if I could survive its force, when I knew I could, I destroyed everything to escape.

The thing that strikes me most about the photo is my eyes. In a way it’s the last photo of me as a child. My eyes are normal there. They don’t know things. They haven’t seen things. In every subsequent photo of me, my eyes are changed. That happens when you come too close to death too many times too young. I’d like those eyes back.

A photo makes mockery of our naivety, exists only to taunt us. Strange to think of our dependence on them now. I have over 41,000 on my phone. I panic at the idea of taking them off. My phone constantly warns me the storage is full. I delete most apps to free up space for more photos. Perhaps I would be best without them.

My grandfather loved film. Long before home video was a thing he had his cine camera, we’d spend evenings looking at slides and grainy, fast films, laughing at my mother and her sister in impossibly short skirts at their brothers’ weddings - hardly a man’s handkerchief from my grandmother whose own skirt was barely any better. I loved seeing the past brought to life like this, in it, my mother was different version, one we all mourned already. By the mid-eighties he had a VHS camera. Red. Every family gathering and he’d balance it on his shoulder, capturing us all. I’d love to see those films now. An uncle sent me one a while ago of his wife - my aunt - and my grandmother shortly after my cousin was born. Late December and them in the hospital, head bend over the baby, granny in a blouse, a knitted, sleeveless cardigan, her hair done - I cannot pair the words grandmother and tank top, I just can’t - my aunt in her nightdress, my cousin in her shawl, knitted by granny most likely, my grandfather’s voice off screen from behind the camera. My aunt didn’t live to see another Christmas or her daughter’s first birthday. Did she know then what was coming? These videos, some strange pharmakon now.

This photo, the same. This girl looking out holding me to account now. How much she gave up, how much she survived, I have a duty to pay her back. She looks out at me, I look back. What a time we’ve had.