How I let bulimia swallow me whole — Sonya Prior
There is this almost out of body push and pull of ‘I don’t know what I’m doing’ versus ‘I know exactly what I’m doing’. My head warms, my eyes blur and it’s as if all the fragmented versions of myself crash into one another, fighting and flailing against themselves until I choose what to do next. It happened whilst I typed this.
I existed in this blur, quietly at first then almost religiously from fifteen to twenty-five. It was the one place where I had total control, where I understood how everything happened. My ordered disorder. I ate, often binged then ruthlessly fat-shamed myself - in my head, in the mirror, physically. This part was always the longest, depending on how much anger I slathered on top of my entrenched sadness. Finally I’d vomit, always to the point where I had nothing left. Sometimes to the point where my throat felt grazed. Then my stomach would feel as empty as I did everywhere else and to my confused adolescent mind, this made me feel whole.
Everything you know is normal until you realise it isn’t. My parents would be together and then they weren’t. Our family would be growing and then it wasn’t. My dad would be ‘away’ and then he’d be home. This was cyclical, so routine that despite being anything but, it was normal. It felt like everything and nothing was happening. One minute we would be tearing at the seams and then we were fine, and never with any explanation. How do you explain something, to a child nonetheless, when you can’t make sense of it yourself? How do you explain a child lost before you, depression, miscarriages and Schizoaffective Disorder to your then only child, that you were simultaneously trying to shield from your shared pain, anger and misery? They couldn’t. So like them, I learnt to bury sadness which soured into rage.
On my bad days, I could range from unresponsive to vicious. When friends noticed my mood, I’d rely on ‘I’m tired’ but that can only get you so far. The noise inside my head would get so loud that I’d erupt and my parents were always on the firing line. I still feel ashamed when I think of how cruel I was. I couldn’t face my inexplicable unhappiness that it was easier for me to let it out in callous fits. But that didn’t always work. That feeble, chalky line between love and hate led me to use perhaps my greatest love, food as a weapon. If I couldn’t scream, I’d eat. I once took a day off school and ate KFC all day, genuinely all day in bed. I would eat until the skin across my stomach felt inhumanely stretched and then, unsurprisingly, it started to show. I was fourteen the first time I made myself vomit. I was in my room after school at my desk with a pen and a rubbish bin. I still remember the first, searing burn right at the back of my throat. Like when you brush your tongue and your eyes water. It’s terrifying how natural that discomfort became. How the entire process brought a false sense of quiet and calm to what sometimes felt like a burning house. It took me doubling over my toilet last year, three years after stopping, trying to force an old habit to gain some sort of consciousness around my bulimia.
I vomited to avoid the pain I buried in the riddled cavities within myself. As a teenager, I vomited to quieten the deeply rooted shame I felt about us hiding my dad’s mental health issues. I vomited so I wouldn’t have to scream. I vomited because I hated that my parents kept me in the dark about so much. I vomited because it gave me a sense of control that I had nowhere else. I vomited because I didn’t understand why I always felt sad. I vomited because if I looked normal then no one would see my fractured family trying to hold ourselves together. I couldn’t express any of it. Not to my family because I didn’t want them to feel responsible for my choices and not to my friends because I was embarrassed and scared. So I held it in, absorbed it like always and hid behind the unassuming regularity of life.
In 2014 our family snapped. My dad had an accident and it felt like my mum and I were holding our breath as we watched him distort into a stranger once more. It had been over ten years since his last episode but this time, my brother was old enough to register what was happening and instead of my mum being his enemy, it was me. It broke us. I remember my mum and brother coming to my work and sitting in the back room just to get some space. We all slept in my room downstairs, a pocket of air in our sinking ship. I started throwing up everywhere I could, just so I wouldn’t have to think about it. But I couldn’t keep up appearances. After months that felt like years, I sat in the fitting room at my work and messaged my group chat about my dad. About it all, in a very blunt and probably abrupt message. I was twenty-three and for the first time, at one of the lowest times in my life, I felt like I could breathe.
This only made sense last year, when out of nowhere my depression rushed back into my life. I was the worst I had ever been and like always, it didn’t make sense. But I couldn’t do it and realised that every time I vomited it was to distract myself from everything and anything else that was worse in that moment. My boyfriend was the first person I said ‘I’m depressed’ to that wasn’t a doctor or therapist. That didn’t fix it overnight but once I said it, like when I let my friends in, I started to breathe again.
The physical side of my disorder has stopped but the mental side hasn’t. It’s difficult to articulate, even still at twenty-eight. Some days my body plagues my mind, some days my mind taunts my body. It’s easy for me to devour my ‘failures’, to swallow disappointment, blame myself and shut down. To be an almost sideline victim in my own life when things aren’t going well. But just because it’s easy, doesn’t mean it’s good for you. There’s still a lot to unpack and unlearn but the only way I started to get better was by letting people in. First my friends, then in 2016, my incredible manager who in turn introduced me to therapy. My boyfriend and friends who helped me face my depression last year and have started to do the same with my eating. We’re so afraid of what other people think, that we’d rather pretend we’re ok over telling someone we aren’t. But we forget that we need people to survive.
I made the difficult decision to move away in 2017. It was a long-held dream that I never thought possible because my family needed me. I didn’t want to let any of them down or worst of all abandon my dad when his world got darker than ours. A few months before I was set to fly out, my mum and I were in my room when my dad came downstairs. Neither one of us had picked up on anything. He spoke so calmly and told us that he wasn’t feeling great and was going to check himself in. This was the first time he’s ever done that. I’ve never been more proud of my dad. It was his way of telling me we’d all be ok.
It’s rare when things are black and white. I don’t think they ever are, nor do I think they should be. Life is complicated and it can seriously hurt. Trauma and pain doesn’t need to mirror TV and books for it to be valid. Not everything has a reason or cause and that doesn’t mean you don’t have permission to feel the way you do. I thought it was easier to carry pain alone because I didn’t want to burden anyone else with it. I would have rather let myself drown under the weight of it than ask for help. I was so ashamed of what was going on that I alienated myself from people who loved me and I loved back. The catalyst to getting better, for me, was opening up to my friends. It was terrifying but their support allowed me to face what I couldn’t alone. It allowed me to reach out to more people and every time I did the weight of it all lightened. The undercurrent of shame surrounding mental health has shifted. I grew up afraid of sharing but it was the only thing that saved me. My parents always said ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’, not always so simple to do but it’s true. We’ve all learnt that along the way. The only way we survived was through letting people in. Allowing them to fill the spaces we rammed with fear, guilt, anger and shame with patience, kindness and understanding. People are scary, tender and wholly wonderful. No man is an island and nor should they ever be. Ask for help when you need it, it’s easier said than done but people have a way of surprising you even when you’ve preempted every negative way things could go wrong. Sometimes they go right.
Words — Sonya Prior
