My Secret Life (22 page)

I’m sure I must make this all sound terribly easy; of course it wasn’t. These processes were slow and I even doubted the likelihood of their success for the longest time. Blind hope was all that fuelled me. But having established a reasonable degree of reconciliation with my past and having worked through my quarrels with God, the time came when I was ready to put myself back together in some of the only ways I knew how. The first of these ways was through art. Having always had a flair when it came to wielding a pencil in my hand, my interest in the vast and eclectic world of art had grown steadily and healthily before I ever encountered such a thing as bulimia nervosa.

When I was about 14 years old, I recall working on a preparatory sheet for art class. It was something we were required to do for almost every piece of work we wished to submit and involved gathering personal sketches and perusing whatever images you could find to broaden the scope with which you drew. But that wasn’t always easy because the scope with which I saw art at the time was very limited. I remember how desperately I had tried to understand it all, but just couldn’t seem to get the grip of it; cubism, surrealism, impressionism or whatever other important sounding name they’d given it, I simply couldn’t comprehend the art behind a painting or drawing that resembled a mashed up picture, which could have been done by a child. For the sake of ‘knowing’ art, I had tried very hard indeed but the pieces of this puzzle just didn’t seem to fit with me for a very long time. Yet, amidst my internet searches and textbook page-flipping, I once came across a rather curious image. I kept returning to it again and again before finally looking at it properly, as if for the first time. Strangely disproportionate and unappealing to the eye, such an artwork was usually the very definition of the paintings I disliked the most. And yet, looking at that image in that moment, something caught me and consumed me entirely. The painting was entitled
St Francis Receiving the Stigmata
by an artist of the name El Greco.

The most striking thing in this painting was a most exuberant and shocking use of blue. There was something extraordinarily atmospheric about that blue, as if it was painted only from the artist’s imagination, or as if the colour had never even existed before this image was created. This man, El Greco, seemed to own that colour in such a way that its purpose was dependent wholly upon what the artist’s imagination dictated. As such, the blue could have easily been the sky, the mind, or even heaven, whatever the artist so wished of it. The painting was a vision of an internal and deeply spiritual event. Within this representation, it had a dreamlike quality that touched a part of me, which only came to life in my sleep. The imaginative portrayal depicted how St Francis
felt
in the given moment, rather than what was proportionally correct. The application of this emphasis added a new dynamic to what art – for me at least – was all about.

I looked at the figure of St Francis. His face was too gaunt, his belt tied too tightly to hold a body and his fingers bent themselves in such a manner that would surely have broken them in reality. Above him and shining down so gloriously was the light of the Holy Spirit, from whom the gaunt man – I momentarily – obsessed over was receiving the gift of the stigmata.

‘Freedom from death’, I remember reading beside the picture. The stigmata was a reminder of freedom from death. And yet in contrast to this, I gazed downwards at the ghostly saint where sat a skull as a reminder of mortality which plagues us all. While entranced by this visual, something about it shook me in a cold chill. Until that point, I had never known paintings could do that, not really. A painting – or any artwork for that matter – was something that imitated life alone and anything outside of those realms was most certainly just an excuse for what it should have been. In my own naive understandings of art before that point, paintings were about craftsmanship and not expression. This, I had been certain of.

But El Greco was very much a man who lived inside his own head, with figures that simply could not have existed anywhere else. He was known to sit in darkness, neither asleep nor painting, simply imagining. His painting retained the capacity to evoke strong feelings and allow the viewer to experience an extraordinary moment in another person’s life or perhaps even another world, as I believe I did that day. He was, in his own right, a revolutionary and changed my own personal ideology of what paintings should be.

As it turned out, El Greco would never go on to be an artist with whom I ever developed a particular interest or accord with. But I have never forgotten the day I stumbled across such a painting. It caused me to reconceptualise the purpose of art and the ways in which it may be best executed. In terms of my bulimia, art became a key factor in my attempts to rid myself of that voice that persisted in my head. I needed a distraction from her and the filthy thoughts with which she still haunted me. Rediscovering a then lost passion for art became one of the major stepping stones as I attempted to rebuild the person I had left behind so long before her. By the end of my time spent in therapy, I couldn’t remember looking at a painting like that in about two or more years.

Passion, in this way, can feed the soul if allowed to erupt without constraint or restriction. It is more than just a notion or a belief. Passion is the rawest nerve within each of us that calls for expression in some form or another. I think I had forgotten what it was to be passionate about anything. Lethargy had long since riddled my understanding of the very word and stripped me of all its bearings. When the time was right, I finally sought to reignite that fervour, which lay dormant within the forgotten crevices of who I was beneath the bulimia.

A few months after therapy, I found myself sifting endlessly from image to image, in books that I had forgotten I had. But there they all were, as they had always been – Vermeer, Metsu, Renoir, Monet, Manet, Yeats – the list went on and on. They still had the glory that I first viewed each with. Every painting, shadow, curved line, hue of colour, texture of surface, impression and tone was met with an internal and emotional enthusiasm that only art itself could provoke. I couldn’t remember fully why I started refreshing the visual memories of these artworks in my head but it didn’t matter anyway because purpose always had very little to do with it.

While this process of ‘rediscovering’ myself through the realms of art was by and large a slow one, I do recall that one defining moment when I felt I had truly found myself once more. I have one artist in mind, whose visuals reflect raw emotion; both that of the artist himself and of whomever the given viewer fortunate enough to gaze at such work. I remember trying to say his name, as if saying it in just the right way would connect me to the person, as the painting had connected me to his art.

‘Go,’ I pronounced. ‘Van Gooo.’ No, it wasn’t right.

‘Goff’, I started again. ‘Van Goff, Van Gow.’ Still not right.

‘Vincent.’

Yes, that was correct. The world-renowned Vincent Van Gogh was, to me, just Vincent. And with that, I knew him and what’s more, I knew myself in his reflection and in his art. Before his paintings, I temporarily stopped being everything I had known of myself. I stopped being a victim of bullying, I stopped being a fat little girl, I stopped being the production of rejection, I stopped being a student, writer and author, I even stopped being a bulimic. All cauterization and need for self-definition faded away. Yes, standing before his paintings, I was finally just Leanne.

During this period, as I continued to piece back together all the fragments of who I was – and without the crutch of Michelle and our weekly meetings – I also had to undergo a personal phase of evolution. What it entailed was accepting responsibility for my own illness. This isn’t to say, accepting that it had all been my fault. Rather, it encompassed the idea of
owning
my disease. Only this way could I live with its many consequences. Part of owning my bulimia was facing, without hesitation or fear, the third parties it had hurt the most. These were my family and friends.

In terms of my friends, I felt like I owed them something of titanic measure. It was as if they had signed a contract of friendship, so many years ago, to a person who ultimately didn’t uphold their end of the deal. The person they knew by the time my bulimia had fully consumed me was not the person they had signed up for so long ago. And while I acknowledge that people change, I had compromised my given path with these people by growing away from them instead of with them. I had broken our agreement and thus, owed them more than I thought I could give. One of my closest friends put it quite simply to me one day, she said, ‘We don’t want anything from you, Leanne. We just want you. We want you to just come back.’ This was all I had to repay in all my debts. How very mind-boggling it was to me at the time. It was like I had taken out loan after loan on my personality and now that the time came to repay it all, my friends had simply defaulted the situation and allowed me to start from scratch again, with all the credit I had possessed before.

I sought to remember who I was in the context of these women and why we had been friends in the first place. I traced back through all the memories we had shared; every laugh, every summer day, every tear and every word we had uttered to one another. These women were more than friends; they were my soul mates, my comrades and all the goodness left in my heart. I took what was left of that heart and very gradually, they nurtured it once more. I paid my debt to them simply by letting them back in. It’s still a miracle to me.

The hurt I had caused my family was irrevocable and worst of all, it was something I did not always witness or even know of. There could be no default with my family because relationships with our kin are just never that simple. For the most part, reconstructing my life within the family unit required a major shift in each of the relationships. All of them were in desperate need of open communication and a new awareness of the individuals that made up this one entity. This transition was never better seen than between my mother and I. In the beginning, the awkwardness that persisted was almost intolerable. We knew far too much about each other now. I had let her deep into my hidden shadows and she had shared things I was never sure I even wanted to hear. The entire episode once made me think of the parent-child sex talk.
That
is the level of awkwardness we are discussing here, only spread out over an excruciatingly long period of time. What it has resulted in since that time, simply, is a relationships based around honesty. With this in hand, most other things seem to fall into place, or at least this is what we always hope for anyway. It’s a never-ending process because relationships themselves are ever changing. But the things we have both learned from this horror known as bulimia have – if nothing else – armed us for whatever is to come in future.

More than this, in some cases, I found I had to
start
relationships within my family too. My brother, who was seven years my senior, had featured very little in this part of my life and in my puberty-stricken years before then. Largely, this was just a result of age and circumstance; we would just never be on the same page because we each lived a different life until the other. And it would take years for that gap to even start balancing out. I still have only one image in my memory of my brother as a child and even at that, it’s a most blurry one.

***

I am very young, too young to even know I have an age at all or what that means. I’m crying in my room but don’t entirely know why. I share a bedroom with Natalie. Squashed into our tiny abode are a set of bunk beds. I sleep on the top bed, while my sister sleeps on the one below. But our room is different now because there is a mattress on the floor. Mum has made it up with pillows and bed sheets. This is because my brother Peter must sleep in our bedroom, while his is being used for a student living with us for a month.

I don’t remember Peter walking into the room, but in the middle of my crying, suddenly his face is an inch away from mine. He is pulling silly faces. He crosses his eyes back and forth, raises his brow up and down and stretches his mouth as wide as it can go, bearing all his teeth. He drops down on all fours and pretends to be
Scooby Doo
. At this, I start to laugh through my dying tears.

When I wipe the last of them away, Peter switches from dog to horse. He starts to neigh like a horse as loud as he can and I laugh uncontrollably. He plonks me atop his back and starts to trot around the tiny floor space, still neighing like a horse and shaking his head every time. I laugh until I fall off his back and onto the mattress on the floor, clutching my sides through the hysteria.

I can’t remember Peter ever doing something like this before. Then again, I can’t remember much of Peter at all before now. But as always, his presence is so familiar. I know him well somehow.

***

Though my brother was never completely out of my life, it was only around the time of my illness that we even began a coherent relationship with one another. Before that point, our relationship had been one of blood and very little else; or maybe I just can’t remember. I often wondered whether my big brother would have preferred the old me or the me he was getting then. It didn’t matter anyway because I couldn’t change it, but it always lingered in the back of my head. It’s a strange place to be when you begin getting to know a person you thought you knew your entire life.

The issue of my studies was another hurdle that I had to face throughout my ‘regeneration.’ I had never known that world without my bulimia and began my second year as a person not with an eating disorder, but as a ‘bulimic in recovery.’ It was only slightly more appealing than the former title at the time. I had a lot of making up to do in this area and threw myself into regaining some of my former academic glory. It was as if I had to teach myself all over again how one goes about learning and studying. It’s still something I’m working on. But the hopes I once held so high in terms of my education remain what they had always been. I hadn’t lost those ambitions as it would turn out, merely forgotten them for a while. Knowledge is empowering and with my education, I know that eventually, I may even hold the key to destroying her forever.