My Secret Life (15 page)

I exchange glances with my sister. When her eyes meet mine, she fills up with tears again. She knows what I’m thinking because out of everyone in this room, she knows me best and can read me like a book. I can’t stand to look at her too long for fear of crying in front of everyone. Along with my aunt and uncle, my dad’s twin is also here. This is in addition to my mother, sister and brother. I have to hold it in for the time being at least. Besides, I’m distracted by the fresh scars I can see on my father’s body. His hospital gown is thrown awkwardly around him and falling off a little.

Poor Mum
, I think to myself.
She clearly tried to tidy him up for us
. When it’s time to leave, I feel a wounding thrash of guilt because in truth, I don’t want to be here anymore. I shouldn’t want to leave my Dad here all alone but I just can’t stand to be in this room anymore and I simply can’t stand to look at him any longer. One by one, we give him a hug and a kiss goodbye. I don’t want to hug him because I’m afraid of hurting him in some way. And when I kiss his cheek I want to cry because I have never kissed his cheek; he always kisses mine and it hurts me to know he physically can’t bring himself to do it right now.

Mum tries to approach the topic gently but you can only be so delicate with such matters before you merely obstruct the truth. She tells us that they’re not sure if Dad will make it and that she wants us to be prepared for the worst. That’s why the priest was there, I finally realise Dad was receiving the last rights.

As we make our way down the steps outside the hospital, I find that I suddenly hate this building. I want to kick it and spit on it for lying. Looking so beautiful on the outside, it stands as a lie to what really happens inside its walls. The beast that it cages is death and it hides it in that superficial beauty I first believed in. Within those walls lies our biggest fear. I saw it all over my father’s face. At the sight of him on that bed, I knew that what people fear the most is our own mortality. My father was now trapped in that fear, hidden behind these walls. He was living inside the beast.

Lying in bed, I can’t sleep. I have never felt this way before. It is the purest emotion I have ever experienced and roars inside me like a train. My chest feels tight and a dark cloud has descended over me. This is what sadness truly is. It is raw, invasive and unrelenting. I cry myself to sleep, hoping I won’t feel this sadness again when I wake.

***

I remember very little of that chapter in my life. The events prior to this memory and after it have surpassed a point of haziness and just don’t seem to exist anymore. My family can’t understand how I have memories from as young as five but cannot remember something from the age of 15. My father made a full recovery over time but still, I remember nothing of it. I have tried very hard but it seems everything surrounding this one memory has been lost in the archives of my memory. I don’t think I’ll ever know what happened in that time. But that day I visited my father in hospital remains a pivotal moment of my young life. It was the first time, I believe, that I truly felt the sensation of raw sadness. It was the most potent emotion I had ever experienced. I thought nothing could be worse than that, until I lost the capacity to feel more or less anything. My eating disorder caused me to slip into a deep depression and I remember during that time wishing I could once again feel the purity of human emotion, even sadness. I have never forgotten either sensation.

In the weeks that lead up to that faithful doctor’s appointment, my life – as well as the one I also shared unrestrictedly with my bulimia – entered a stage of complete turmoil. For one thing, the academia I once prided myself on and defined myself by, fell to shambles. The transition from secondary school to university had proved to be an extremely emotional upheaval. Everyone had talked to such extraordinary lengths about the difficulties in this changeover; so much so, that it almost felt too cliché to admit that I was struggling very badly. On a very basic level, I simply found that I could not keep up with the workload. In school, I had been top of my class in most subjects. Assignments were carried out with efficiency, as well as to a high standard. But in the realms of that campus and all the university had to offer, I found myself utterly lost.

Schoolwork had always consisted of studying facts and writing about them. Its demands extended only as far as regurgitating what you have read onto a page. My school had been in walking distance of my family home and I found a great deal of comfort in both the uniform which we wore every day – free from the inconvenience of having to select clothes each morning and unifying us in school spirit – as well as the Monday to Friday hours that had been so familiar for six years. In university, the demand for independent study reached new levels I had never before experienced. It was more than the study of facts and I think I began to panic right from the beginning when I realised that much of what I would learn in this place would have to be self-taught.

Most days, I barely made it to the campus, lecture halls or the shelved abyss they called the library. Indeed, I barely made it out of bed. The mornings were the worst; I had always been an early riser and while my peers struggled to wake before 1.00 pm, I always found I could never sleep far past 9.00 am. So by every measure, waking for college in the mornings should have been as easy as it had always been. But upon waking, I suffered something more than just the run of the mill tiredness, my body felt like it had been physically arrested by the might of lethargy and malnutrition. I would lie there with my eyes open, watching the clock as the minutes ticked by. I was not fighting sleep or anything else that would tempt most others to remain wrapped up beneath the covers; I simply couldn’t move. My legs and arms were weighed down by invisible chains. No matter how much weight I lost, I just could not lift my body up from the mattress. I felt like the pinnacle of where all the earth’s gravity travelled to. I was submerged under that weight and could not rise.

‘Are you going to college today, Leanne?’ my mother would ask from the door. To say she was concerned at this point was an understatement. More than my physical appearance and the changes in my personality she had witnessed and commented on regularly, she became most fearful with the development of my apparent lack of interest in my studies. This was not like me and could only be the result of something entirely horrendous. Sometimes it was as simple as telling her that a lecture had been cancelled, my timetable had been changed or just that this morning’s lecture wasn’t important at all. But on other occasions, I did not possess even the mental capacity to do this.

‘No, I’m not,’ is all I would say; end of discussion. She would hover at the door a while, silently expressing both her disapproval and her undeniable worry. I didn’t care. If she felt what my body was feeling, she would leave me alone and not question my decision. Besides, I knew that even if I managed to physically present myself in the lecture theatres on campus, I would not be fully there anyway. If I wasn’t sleeping somewhere in the back, I would be scrawling notes at a very slow pace, mentally incapable of digesting what was being said because my brain was just working at too slow a pace to keep up. This was not the kind of student I was and I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind, I just thought it was a temporary phase that would pass once I became comfortable in my new surroundings. The problem was that I just couldn’t get comfortable here; I’d never known university without an eating disorder and it affected my perceptions of the place greatly. Everything about college became related to an ongoing sense of difficulty and a feeling of forever being behind.

More than this, the hardest thing in my transition from secondary school into third level education was having to accept how truly average I was. I had always excelled in one way or another and it defined me in my own head under certain terms as being a person who just did well instinctively. I was top of the class by nature, not nurturing. This had been who I was. Now, however, I was cast into a system whereby my student number was more recognisable than my own name. There was nothing about who I was that classified me as any different or any better than any other person in a lecture hall. In such a large group, I was guaranteed of the fact that many others were better than me. How I qualified what was ‘better’ came in a variety of forms; smarter, prettier, more dedicated, more ambitious, better dressed, or wealthier. It didn’t matter which because all it amounted to was that, whoever they were, they were a better version of me. What all this culminated to was feelings of total insufficiency and pressing mediocrity. Being average, as I then realised I had always been, further instilled the idea of my own worthlessness both in academia and in general.

The effect my bulimia would ultimately have on my studies was monumental. It drove away all ambition and more importantly, hindered my potential. Missing classes and lectures as a result of overpowering exhaustion was only part of it. It was like my brain had slowed down; like somebody had cut off the oxygen being fed to it and the cells had started to die off one by one. Processing information seemed an impossible endeavour. When it came to assignments, presentations or whatever else was being asked of me, I found that I simply could not mentally grasp the task at hand. It was beyond my scope and understanding by that time. This terrified me. I knew then that I had truly lost myself to my bulimia. We did not share a life anymore because if this was the case, holding on to what had always been of colossal significance would have remained a priority. No, ‘sharing’ was not in her vocabulary and instead, she now owned my life entirely. Along with my health, my personality, my faith and my happiness, she had now taken my education. It was among the saddest losses during my time being sick. To lose my education was to truly lose myself.

As time continued to drag on, the changes I experienced were of prodigious proportions in my life then and what it would go on to become. The biggest change occurred in my relationship with bulimia. Relationships, regardless of their context or the parties involved, revolve around a level of commitment from both sides. I was committed to my bulimia in a way that I had never been committed to anyone before. And yet, the dynamics of our relationship underwent a period of evolution in which it transformed to a commitment of absolute hatred. I had loved her once, I was sure of it. But during the course of a period that has since become the most blurred and distorted of my memories, I began to question her. This was the first step on a road which would ultimately lead me to hate her. And hate her I did. Her voice was no longer a source of comfort or encouragement or even reassurance. It was now a cage that kept me trapped in my own mind. It was the madness that now consumed my entire life and from which I could not escape. After a while, I sincerely thought I had gone mad.

For all this hatred and regret, however, I could not bring myself to destroy her. I could not be without her and for the life of me, I just couldn’t understand why. It didn’t matter how much we hated each other now – yes, she hated me with the same fervour and passion – because she remained the lifelong friend to whom I was tied to psychologically, spiritually, physically and emotionally. She was my friend. Life without her would surely be no life at all.

***

I am 12 years old. Valentine’s Day is one of the days I dread the most every year. When it comes around, Mum sends me a Valentine’s card in the post and then pretends that it’s not from her. When I was little, I genuinely believed I had a secret admirer because everyone played along. Then when I was a little bit older, Natalie had said to me, ‘You know they’re always from Mum, right?’ I remember feeling deceived and as if everyone pitied me and so, had it out with my Mum. She never sent me a card again.

What I dislike most about Valentine’s Day is when it falls on a weekday because everyone in school has to make a card during arts and crafts. Nobody really makes a card for anybody in particular but I don’t like doing it all the same because it reminds me of being little when everyone gave them to each other. I would never get a card and was embarrassed the entire day. Though we have to make our own cards, a boy in the class named John has brought in a real one from a shop. It’s white with a heart on the front and kisses along the interior. It looks as though someone put on loads of red lipstick and kissed the page from top to bottom. It hasn’t been written on and he says it’s not for anybody and that he doesn’t know why he has it. Now that it’s lunchtime, a few people take an interest in the card. We only have about ten minutes in the classroom before it’s yard time.

There’s a boy in my year called Emmet. Everyone in school knows I like him, including Emmet himself. When the girls in my class see that John has brought a real Valentine’s card today, they start to tell me that I should give John’s card to Emmet. I don’t want to because I know everyone will laugh at me if I do.

‘Nobody will laugh at you,’ one of the girls tell me. ‘It’s Valentine’s Day; it’s what you’re supposed to do.’

But I’m still not convinced. It’s a Friday and the school bullies have been nice to me this week. I don’t want this to end. Sometimes they decide they want to be friends with me and I am always grateful when they do because then everyone else is nice to me as well. I’m afraid not to do what they say because they might stop being friends with me again and then next week will be horrible. They tell me that it’s not like anything bad is going to happen and that it’s the end of the week anyway.

‘If something goes wrong,’ one interjects, ‘you won’t be in school until next Monday so it will be forgotten by then.’

‘Nothing will go wrong anyway,’ exclaims another, clearly impatient now. Since 5th class, she has been what Mum calls the ‘ringleader’ and when she says this, everyone is in agreement.

‘Besides, don’t you think it will be nice for Emmet to get a Valentine’s card? I mean, you do like him don’t you?’

I nod, afraid of the implications of this admission.