Weightless Words?
After a hard and lonely illness, Lucy Howard-Taylor speaks to Anya Poukchanski about writing her way out of anorexia.
In the past few years, Lucy Howard Taylor has been called selfish and vain by friends and family. It is difficult to understand why such barbs would be aimed at a sick girl, almost destroyed by a chronic disease. If Lucy had been suffering from cancer or diabetes she probably would not have heard those words. But her illness was different: she was living with anorexia.
“There isn’t any education about it at all, and that’s why I’ve come up against people who say ‘I know nothing about anorexia except that it’s about vanity and you decide to lose weight because you want to look like the people in magazines,’” she reflects. “And I say you know what? You are so off the mark.”
Now recovering and in her third year of Arts/Law here at Sydney Uni, Lucy has bravely offered her personal experience to help people understand the condition. Her recently published book, Biting Anorexia, is a vivid account of her life when she was at her worst.
Anorexia nervosa is both a psychological and physical illness in which the sufferer becomes obsessed with losing weight, unrealistically believing that they are fat. The outward effect is starvation; inside, the anorexic faces terrifying depression and anxiety. The old name for anorexia is ‘the Slimmer’s Disease’, reflecting the lingering assumption that suffers are just dieters that have gone too far, become too fixated on the prize of a perfect body: that they are selfish and vain. “People think it’s an indulgence,” says Lucy. “As if, ‘oh I might just be anorexic today and not eat my cereal’.”
Research has since redefined the causes of the disease as genetic, chemical and psychological, though the stereotype persists. Anorexia is related to depression and anxiety, conditions suffered by more than a fifth of people at some point in their lives. It occurs overwhelmingly in intelligent, ambitious young women. It is chilling to consider that this disorder, so often dismissed as teenage petulance, has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric illness: approximately one in twenty anorexics die from their condition.
I remember I used to say that I wish I didn’t have family and I wish I didn’t have a brain so I could just stop eating and dedicate myself entirely to anorexia
Lucy decisively rules ‘glamour’ out of her disease. She refuses to disclose what her lowest weight was or provide photographs of her emaciated state, even though some members of the media have tried aggressively to get hold of this sensational information. She stresses that the psychological aspect of anorexia is the true source of the illness; the weight loss is simply a symptom.
The food obsession didn’t start because Lucy wanted to be beautiful (though she is already, and strikingly so), but on the contrary because she wanted to succeed academically. Setting out a diet plan in her HSC year was, at first, about dealing with the stress and expectations placed upon her as a brilliant student. “I was trying to absolve myself of responsibility so I didn’t have to run so fast,” says Lucy. “It was basically a response to my incredible fear of failure, and I thought that well, instead of risking failing I may as well not try at all. Just stop and not try.”
Focusing on the minute daily challenge of eating less and less was a way of escaping the intimidating outside world. Her private girls’ school environment was hyper-social, and the introverted Lucy could not keep up. “It’s a way to deal when you feel that you can’t. It’s a way to express a deep self-dissatisfaction. You’re trying to constrain yourself, reduce yourself.” Lucy kept a meticulous diary of everything she consumed and whittled her weight away until she was threatened with hospitalisation. When she began to recover, just eating an extra marshmallow for lunch was a distressing task.
Western society’s adulation of thinness is often blamed for triggering anorexia. It is true that the growth of the illness has coincided with the shrinking of our models and celebrities. But Lucy says the connection between the two trends is more complicated than simple copycatting. She adopted anorexic behaviours to deal with her anxiety, but once she did so she found an abundance of material to help on her destructive way.
“I think very strongly that images and the media played a role in normalising my behaviour. I never really cared before about supermodels, but once I started to get very sick it was like feed. I used to buy Vogues compulsively and cut out their pictures and keep them in a folder. It didn’t help to seed it, it just helped to continue it.”
With the clarity of hindsight it is easy to see how a young and outstanding student can begin to confuse academic success with the success of thin role models, control over her future with control over her body and the richness of her intellectual development with the realisation that there is something very wrong in her mind. But the most difficult thing about anorexia was the way that it trapped Lucy within a distorted and lonely reality, from which she couldn’t ask for help and where the words of others bore no comfort. She admits: “I couldn’t speak to any of my friends because they would have been horrified. They would have literally thought that I was insane because of the things I was thinking.”
“I remember I used to say that I wish I didn’t have family and I wish I didn’t have a brain so I could just stop eating and dedicate myself entirely to anorexia. It’s only now I realise how absurd that is, how sad that is, wishing you didn’t have a family so you could get sicker. But that’s not me: that’s the diseases speech, not mine.”
The stigma of having a mental illness was a strong disincentive to open up. But when Lucy describes the emotions she was having, thoughts she can only now bring herself to share, they do not sound strange or crazy. Feelings of blackness, suffocation and entrapment are not just widespread symptoms of depression but common signs of sadness that people experience every day.
The only thing is, agrees Lucy, it is not acceptable to talk about them. “People still see it as a defect of self. There’s a lot of shame associated with depression because people assume you can snap out of it and it’s a matter of you wanting to be depressed. But it’s got nothing to do with volition at all, it’s biological, it’s chemical.”
Undoubtedly, watching a friend or loved one be consumed from within by a mental illness is miserable and confusing. It is easy to become frustrated or resentful towards someone that exhibits no external signs of pain except those which they appear to inflict upon themselves. But there is also a tendency towards simple boredom, especially among less mature social groups, with an acquaintance who doesn’t want to go out and do normal, fun things. And so it was for Lucy: “My friends basically didn’t talk to me, my teachers didn’t talk to me, my family avoided me because they didn’t know how to talk to me about it.”
But not talking about anorexia is precisely the wrong course to take. With no one to hold a mirror up to her thoughts, Lucy took a long time to realise that anything was wrong. Now she warns that “friends and family literally cannot afford to ignore it. If you don’t know how to deal with it that’s fine, not many people know how to deal with mental illness. But if you at least make it explicit that you know something’s up and that you have an eye on them, that’s what is needed.”
Confronting a friend with an eating disorder is, however, much harder than it may seem.
Anorexia becomes a part of a sufferer’s identity – indeed Lucy’s diary entries show that at her worst moments her disease almost eclipsed her – and to challenge it is to criticise their sense of self. Paradoxically, anorexics draw strength from the very actions that may kill them. In this way, the illness could be compared to a drug addiction. Compulsively controlling their food intake becomes empowering because the person feels they are controlling their life or their body; Lucy describes it as a process of “willfully withdrawing.” For these reasons an unpleasant confrontation, which is accusatory or treats the disorder as a caprice, can alienate a sufferer and send her or him further inward.
At the same time, friends and family have an essential role to play. They needn’t have any special knowledge, Lucy insists. All they have to do is say “I know something’s up. I’m not going to pretend to understand that, because I know I can’t, but if you want to have a cry, or have a scream or just chat incoherently give me a call.”
Now that she has made her experience public, Lucy can finally appreciate the scope of the silence in which she lived. Strangers, friends and family are all coming out of the woodwork to tell her that they know how she feels, they also had these problems and they too remained quiet rather than assume the label of ‘mentally ill.’ Some of them have never before spoken about their conditions.
All this has left Lucy convinced that mental illness needs to be normalised and community awareness raised. This will finally mean those affected do not have to suffer twofold: once from a frightening sickness and then again from the veil of shame that they must wear. But education itself is fraught with complications, as dispersing stories of eating disorders may awaken anorexic tendencies in people already that way inclined. This was, in fact, how anorexia crept into the picture for Lucy. Studying Lori Gottlieb’s account of her childhood anorexia in Stick Figure was perversely fascinating for Lucy. Today she realises that the story was simplistic and did not do justice to the horrors of the condition. But back then, she writes in her own book, “to a self esteem already probing its own worth, it was very potent and very swaying.”
Having offered a far less romanticised chronicle of her illness to the public in the hope of correcting stereotypes, Lucy has also turned her attention to the anorexic community itself. She started a website for recovering anorexics which provides a place where sufferers can meet and have a positive influence on each other.
The site stands in contrast to the ‘pro-ana’ sites which Lucy frequented when she was ill and which have mushroomed all over the net. These pro-anorexia sites form a controversial online community that promotes anorexia as a lifestyle and gives encouragement (“thinspiration”) to participants through galleries of starved bodies and personal stories of weight loss. For Lucy, though, the self-destructive quality of these sites was counterbalanced by the companionship she received on their forums, the only place where she could meet people who shared her experience. She formed some close and enduring friendships in those grim places.
But eventually, she and some of her friends decided to move on. So they defected, and set up www.webiteback.com, a site which is recovery oriented. “Over time we grew from being pro-anorexia to realising that maybe there was something else we could be doing with ourselves.” That was the first time Lucy took her weakness and turned it into strength. The second time was with the publication of her book. After anorexia, she is doing something else with herself.