American poet and essayist Cynthia Cruz writes generously in her work about her experience of anorexia nervosa. It is a brutal mental illness not unlike an addiction but one in which the recovering sufferer does not have the advantage of being able to avoid her triggers. Rather, she must face the anxiety that drives her habit (self-starvation) three times daily in order to get well. The anorectic’s substance is starvation. To starve is to prevent the anxiety that would attend eating, the same way an alcoholic avoids anxiety by drinking.

As a recovering anorectic myself, it was relieving to read Cruz’s denunciation of assumptions made by the media that eating disorders are the vain indulgence of upper-middle-class white women. The prospect that ‘eating disorders are nothing but diets and diets are for people who are vain and have no real concerns’ is not only a dangerous trivialization of the mental illness with the highest mortality rate of all mental health issues but one which also excludes from the conversation the most vulnerable, i.e., those unable to afford (adequate/timely) treatment.

My own anorexia took root the term I started GCSEs and worsened until I left school and started recovery. I had two significant relapses, the first when I started sixth form and the second during the first year of my undergraduate degree. Reflecting, I have interpreted this pattern as a symptom of a Freudian desire to regress or ‘grow down’, to renounce the impedimenta of adulthood and return to my old, safe, pre-pubescent body and to a time when I was not my own responsibility. However, reading Cruz’s personal essay on her flirtation with death has quite transformed my understanding of my own. That is not to say my previous understanding was wrong, only that eating disorders are multifaceted beasts and are likely the product of layers upon layers of social, cultural, and biological factors.

In her analysis of Isabelle Meuret’s Writing Size Zero, Cruz lingers on Meuret’s idea that anorexia ‘is a means to express the pain of the space between [the sufferer] and other people, which occurs to those experiencing hybridity.’ This reminded me of an old journal article from The CAPA Quarterly (Journal of the Counsellors and Psychotherapists Association of New South Wales) entitled ‘Eating Disorders: A Search for Wholeness’.

The article, by psychotherapist Jodie Gale, opens with this epigraph:

‘At the heart of every eating disorder…there is a cry from the deepest part of our souls that must be heard. It is a cry to awaken, to embrace our whole selves… It is a cry to deepen our understanding of who we really are. It is a longing to know ourselves in mind, body, and spirit. (Normandi & Roark 1998: 119).’

Meuret suggests that anorexia is the result of a perceived lack of belonging, of feeling separated from one’s social surroundings. What Gale’s epigraph emphasizes is that this separateness is experienced within as well as without. The anorectic is removed from themselves, and the disorder is an attempt to reconnect, to make whole a jumble sale of parts.

There is a religious undertone that I believe persists in this idea which is the damaging implication that by attempting to erase/radically reduce the corporeal element of the body/spirit divide via self-starvation, we move closer to being wholly spiritual beings. Early Christian author Tertullian said in the early third century: ‘an emaciated body will more readily pass through the narrow gate of Paradise, a light body will resurrect more rapidly, and in the grave, a wasted body will be preserved best.’

Whilst these are obsolete and frankly daft claims, the idea about the body/spirit divide intrigues me. Meuret claims that anorexia can occur to those ‘experiencing hybridity’ (like myself, for example, a working-class person assimilating into a middle-class social field) while Gale suggests that it is linked to a desire to know our ‘whole selves’, and Tertullian posits that self-starvation i.e., the slow destruction of the body brings us closer to being spiritually free. Aren’t these claims eerily similar? Anorexia: the physical manifestation of a desire to become fully one thing instead of embodying conflicting parts. This idea made some sense for me.

I should reiterate here that eating disorders are multi-faceted and can be triggered by myriad factors that vary exponentially from sufferer to sufferer. This is one reason why they are so difficult to treat. For me, though, this idea of anorexia being a response to internal conflict or a sense of embodying two identities that often feel at odds with one another was not implausible. I reconsidered the pattern of my disorder, which began at a time when I felt like ‘a fish out of water’ amongst my working-class peers for being a ‘high-flyer’ (I have always hated that term) and returned in waves as I climbed the rungs of the higher education ladder and felt progressively like a ‘fish out of water’ in middle-class institutions I lacked the capital to feel at ease in. (Bourdieu)

In ‘Strangers in Paradise’? Working-class Students in Elite Universities’, researchers suggested that an early sense of being out of place in one’s working-class peer group ‘jolted these students out of ‘any sense of pre-reflexive ease and led to an acute sense of self-consciousness’’ (Diane Reay, quoting Crossley, 2001: 158).4 This premature reflexivity is a seed from which anorexia, a disorder characterized by intense self-monitoring, might unsurprisingly flourish.

I wrote in a poem recently an anecdote about getting a question right in class around the age of ten. My teacher congratulated me on this by announcing to the class that I was not ‘as daft as I look[ed].’ What I used to consider a badly timed, insensitive turn of phrase now strikes me as something more sinister. My teacher had been surprised that the kid with ‘budgies’ (a Geordie term for when your trousers are too short, in my case because we could not afford to replace items which for all intents and purposes still did the job), whose mother worked as a dinner lady, knew the answer to her question.

She had looked mortified after letting this slip and apologized immediately and in private afterwards, clearly concerned it would make it back to my parents who might interpret it the way I later came to. I think what I took from this as a child was that there was a gap between what was expected of me and what I was capable of, and that the gap had something to do with my appearance. That I would go on to make my appearance the focus of attempting to fuse those conflicting impressions and other internal conflicts that would arise does not surprise me now, in light of Cruz’s conclusions about anorexics as ‘in-between creature[s].’