My Secret Life (11 page)

The various facets of my illness aside, I look back on the decisions I made during that time in my life with utter embarrassment. I’ve had so many moments of wishing I could return to that place, go back to that girl and shake her. I would tell her that it’s never going to be worth it; that if she continues this way, she will damage her family, her friendships, her education and future. But most importantly, I would tell her that she will damage her mental health almost beyond repair. Perhaps it’s a good thing I can’t do that because if I did, who knows what kind of person would be writing this, or if indeed such an account would even exist.

Both the fast and the binge have, until this point, been the blurriest stages in my disorder. Denial reigned through them and thus, distorted my recollection a great deal. It would be a very long time before I would ever admit openly what I had finally admitted to myself, as my denial to others outlasted my self denial by a large stretch. But in my own mind, there was no doubt anymore about what I had become. I knew it before I had even purged. Finally answering the screams of that person who lived in my mind, I thought to myself,
Yes. I am bulimic.

The Purge

I stared at the toilet bowl in front of me, now painted in an array of oranges and skin coloured pinks. I was light-headed and my vision had blurred slightly, but still I could make out small chunks of food that swished around the basin. Watery noodles were still sliding their way downwards, while my mother’s chocolate cake had sunk under the water surface at the bottom. That had been rather painful to regurgitate. The spongy texture of it kept getting caught in my throat and landed with a
plonk
when it hit the base of the toilet. But by now, I was a pro at this. Knowing that I had limited time before someone knocked on the bathroom door, I put my index finger in my mouth, wet it with saliva and slid it back down my throat.

Purging had become the most important part of my day. Depending on circumstance and opportunity, sometimes I could only purge once or twice a day. This meant that when the time came to expel the food that riddled my weak body, I would commit to the moment entirely. I knew that it would be hours before I could do it again. I suppose this is why I never stopped fasting completely. I usually only ate when I was sure I could purge afterwards. In the beginning, breaking my fasts was an almost involuntary act. Overpowered by the hunger sirens that sent electric shocks up and down my body, I would binge purely out of desperation. After the first bite – no matter how small it may have been – I told myself that I’d ruined everything already and thus gorge until I thought I would burst.

Now, however, I was more strategic and meticulous about my eating. I had the tune down to a note and played it with flawless execution. An ideal day would see me fasting until dinner time, when it was nearly impossible to get out of eating the family meal. I would eat as was expected, all the while washing it down with buckets of water. After dinner, I would take my daily shower. While most people showered in the mornings, my parents had simply accepted that I just preferred to wash up after tea time. It suited everyone because nobody took as long in a shower as I did; sometimes I’d be in there for almost 40 minutes. But it was routine now and little to no questions were ever asked. Even 40 minutes never seemed like enough time. I would purge for anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes, saving time at the end to give myself a quick wash over.

Such a day was a rarity though; I grew up in a house that was always busy with people coming and going. The key was balance and timing. Most of my days at that time were spent as a trapeze artist on a tightrope, never putting a foot out of place and always fastidiously coordinated. I hated eating in front of people but for the sake of proving a point, I usually began a binge not long before my family left the house for their various errands, jobs and social coffees. Once alone, the binge would kick into full swing and I would blitz the entire ordeal to the point of a ravenous blackout, leaving myself just enough time to vomit before they came home. In this way, I was reassured that they would see the used pots and pans, the chocolate wrappers, the milky cereal bowls and whatever else I had used to feed myself. I wouldn’t have to eat again until dinner, which could be remedied during my usual shower or bath.

The purge was not always intended. I remember once or twice starting a binge with a fruit salad, convinced that I would merely eat healthily for the day. But once in the momentum of my feeding frenzy, I usually consoled myself with the knowledge that the food would not stay in my stomach. I couldn’t just leave it there. And, on occasion, I started regurgitating before I’d even finished my binge. For the most part, however – and certainly quite late into my bulimia – the act of purging was premeditated, enabling me to plan for it in advance.

I avoided meat while bingeing because I knew it would be very painful to vomit back up. Similarly, pizzas and chips were always a struggle for me. That’s not to say I didn’t binge on them though; I ate whatever my fingers touched but consciously aimed to eat more water-based foods that wouldn’t hurt me while purging. Noodles and eggs seemed to just slip right out with the correct push and they always featured in my binge if the purge was calculated. If this wasn’t the case, I would have to just accept what needed to come up and get on with it.

Snapping back to the task at hand, I hadn’t finished my purge yet. I checked the time on my phone and saw that I only had about ten minutes left until I would have to wash up and return to the world outside the bathroom door.

Hurry up you fat cow!
, she roared in my head. If I didn’t do it now, I knew I would have to listen to that unforgiving voice for the rest of the night. The soft whispers that she graced me with before had long since disappeared and were replaced with screams of abuse and filthy words. She had poisoned my thoughts with words and phrases I never envisioned myself ever thinking, let alone using in reference to myself. Finger down my throat and the blood rushing to my face; this was her moment of glory and when she was most alive in my life.

I’d gotten most of it up by now but had to continue until I was sure I’d left nothing in my stomach. The noise of the shower was thunderous and blasted overhead, while the scalding water steamed up the tiny room. I was sweating from my head to my toes and could feel droplets of perspiration running through my hair and down my neck. Even without the hot shower turning the bathroom into a 40 minute sauna, I probably would have been sweating anyway. After a few minutes of purging, my adrenaline would pump up a gear and make the blood that ran in my veins sizzle.

I no longer knew what was running down my face. It was a mixture of sweat from my brow, mucus running from my nose and flooding tears from my eyes as I gagged. Taking a breather for a few seconds, I would look at myself in the mirror, dazed and breathless. Vomit and spit traced the corners of my mouth, while my cheeks puffed out red and swollen. Everything about my face seemed to puff like that when I purged. My eyes bulged and I swore on several occasions that I could see a vein about to burst open on my forehead. Splashing my face with cold water, I couldn’t lose momentum or else I would be too exhausted to finish. I knelt back over, my knees buckling beneath me and a fresh piece of tissue in my left hand. I caressed my index finger in my mouth for a while, warming it and sufficiently lubricating it. Ready for the next round, I shoved it down my throat.

I wonder sometimes if my gag reflex had become in some way desensitised. More and more, my finger down my throat would have little effect on me and I was forced to wiggle it around and violently reef it from side to side. Only then would I gag, usually holding my breath at the same time. I would retch several times before giving my stomach that extra push to expel the food. With each episode of regurgitation, I arched my neck and my jaw would lock open. If I’d consumed all the right kinds of food, it would spew out effortlessly and in huge amounts. In other cases – like that of the aforementioned chocolate cake – it would hit the toilet bowl in large chunks, clogging my throat along the way and leaving me gasping for air.

Every time I choked, my throat would sting. In the frenzy of trying to retch, I had scraped the back of my throat with my fingernail. Every time I vomited, it prickled as if a needle was being jabbed into it. I had to be quick about removing my finger again; several times when I wasn’t, vomit, bile and pieces of food would eject out onto my hand and cover my fingers. The smell that lined them would give me a headache and I’d have to wash my hands, costing me more of my precious time in the bathroom.

I was certain I could have done it even without the shower running in the background but never wanted to take that chance. If the secrecy I enjoyed in that room was ever compromised, I knew my relationship with her would change forever. Still, I endeavoured to be as quiet as possible and by this stage, had mastered it. Despite the ease of vomiting up liquid-based foods, there was little I could do to prevent the sharp clap one could hear when they splashed into the toilet. I knelt to the side of the bowl and aimed for its inner wall, hoping the noise would be lessened. Four or five retches later and a flood of orange liquid and chunks splashed against the basin at such velocity that I was thankful for the noisy shower. The later into the purge I got, my stomach heaved and made a most distinct noise along with it. I once compared the sound to that of an animal squeezing out its last breaths. By the end of my self-induced vomiting, when finally nothing was left to come out, the sound was usually very loud and, to a large extent, mentally satisfying. Job done; the sound of emptiness had confirmed it.

Nevertheless, I was very quiet. I couldn’t control what happened once the food had come up but demanding a solid command over myself was a necessity in these endeavours and I did so perfectly, most of the time. Every time I retched and heaved another spell from the pit of my stomach and up to my throat, with it I suppressed every noise by holding my breath and tensing every muscle that ran from my abdomen to my face. With every gag and each spew of vomit, my body lifted a heavy weight of skilled silence. I read on one of my beloved pro-ED websites, that sometimes it was effective to simply never remove your finger from your throat and thus allow for an uninterrupted continuation of purging. I could never do this. If I did, I would almost certainly pass out from a lack of oxygen.

As it was, breathing was a strain and most of the time, I thought I would collapse anyway. All the blood that pumped through my veins hurtled its way to my face until I felt like the skin encasing it would burst. My legs often fell slightly numb and in those moments when I was unsure that they still stood below me, I just knew it would not be too long before they cracked and left me crashing to the bathroom tiles.

So often, I considered even giving in and just relinquishing my efforts in trying to satisfy that harrowing voice in my mind. My stomach was being shredded in two directions and left at an abrupt and painfully misguided standstill. A vile image to imagine, I have no doubt, but the truth is that sometimes I fought my body’s natural urges for fear of it disrupting my very important purge. I hated having to leave a meal too long in my body because it meant that eventually, my system would attempt to digest it and ultimately, of course, rid itself of it at some stage. I couldn’t let this happen before I’d purged. If I did, it meant that every fatty component of that meal would be fully absorbed and broken down before finally leaving; the damage would have already been done.

Instead, I was faced with an urgency like no other, whereby I had to purge before I ever needed to use the toilet. If I thought I was in need of it, I would vomit until the very sensation had finally disappeared. As if doing so would somehow shove a hand down to my stomach, into my digestive system and reef it all out before it had time to complete its task of poisoning my body. Even if I couldn’t get it all, by God, I would get most.

I measured the short-lived progress in a number of ways. All of which required my eyes open and alert to what was happening before me. Colouration was always the most obvious form of mental documentation; chocolate, brown; yoghurt, pink; carbohydrates, usually yellow. It was simple. Depending on what I’d eaten, I knew what had been cleared from my body. Rarely were the colours so vibrant as they had been on entering my mouth, but nonetheless I became accustomed to what certain foods looked like upon regurgitation and thus, was always aware of what was left to be purged. This knowledge was developed only over time and as a result of many purges because food – subject to how long it has been in your stomach – can look different when it makes its return in the opposite direction.

It also influenced my binge to a great extent because it meant having to take mental snapshots of what I was eating. In such a short space of time, as well such an inflamed process of thinking, taking note of what I was consuming was sometimes impossible. It was almost like an out-of-body experience and meant that disciplining myself to plan ahead for my purge was a conscious effort.

Taste was another form of accurate chronicling. This was dependent on how soon after a binge I could proceed with the purge. But if straight away – or even very soon after – the food I’d ingested would still resemble the taste with which it infiltrated my body. Therefore, distinguishing between the entire pizza I’d eaten, the bowl of pasta, the multiple chocolate bars and the four or more slices of crumble became all too easy. The real trick was making sure I had gotten all liquids up. Having a terrible weakness for milk, I often chose to wash it all down with a cold pint glass of the stuff rather than water. I hoped that it would somehow cling to the various foods in my inflated stomach and make an appearance along with their debut. If the chocolate wasn’t quite so brown or tasted a little watery while vomiting, I was sure that it had absorbed all the milk thus easing its somewhat violent exit.

Usually, my mouth would dry out as I spat into the toilet bowl. After each splatter of food into the basin, a trail of spit would surely follow, dangling from my lips, refusing to disconnect itself from my exhausted mouth. This is why I kept a bundle of tissue paper gripped in my left hand; if not to simply dry my lips off, then to break the wet string that stuck to them. The tissue was eventually drowned in no time and feeling disgusted with myself enough, I hated holding a used one and discarded it mid-way through my session. With my nose stinging from the mucus circling around it, my face heating up and my heartbeat pulsing in each temple, all sensations would at some point direct themselves back to my chest. It was as if I could fully feel the strain being put on my heart. From there, it bled out onto the bones that encased it. They ached like someone had taken a bat to them.

I’m
bruising
my bones
, I thought. If my chest bones weren’t about to rupture, at the very least the spindly bone and cartilage of my neck was about to snap and crack out, splitting my skin along the way. I’ve had images of myself walking out of the bathroom with a bone protruding somewhere between my jaw and collar bone.

Knowing when to stop was obvious by every measure. For one thing, my attempted silence could no longer prevail. Struggling to lift anything from my now empty stomach, a ball in the base of my throat would gag involuntarily and produce a sound similar to a cough but a little more sudden. Moreover, the substance released from my mouth no longer resembled anything of food in smell, taste or texture. It was yellow and off-coloured orange bile from the pit of my gut that tasted like poison and stung my nostrils when the smell filtered upwards. I once mentally compared it to urine, as if I was now vomiting my own urine. It was time to stop.