Yesterday I talked about what the family ski holidays meant in the early years of my illness. 2003, when I was 21, was something of a turning point. I'd just split up with my boyfriend of four years (at least in part because of my being ill), and was teaching in Germany for a year, as part of my degree; I was lonely and miserable and not eating was a way of dulling the pain, stopping me feeling anything much. It was difficult making the transition from a solitary, completely controlled, at least superficially adult life, and being with my parents, being a daughter again, and a daughter to be worried about.
This year we went to the Dolomites instead of the Alps, stopping over in Venice on the way. In the hotel in the mountains, I shared a room with my mother, and, sitting in bed on the first evening, I wrote of how I was dreading the first real skiing breakfast - the first breakfast at which I really will have to eat something, or they'll shout or cry or not let me ski or something (16.02.03). After the first half-day's skiing we'd been graced with a mountain-top sunset, and I'd toasted it with hot chocolate. And at dinner we'd talked of happiness/contentment, how easy it is to be the former and hard the latter - and of course I'm neither, but only just keeping my head above misery - and hoping they didn't see it.
Just before dinner I was still hoping - but I sensed my head had sunk below the surface. I came in and bathed and dozed. And then cried. Silently, so as not to wake S., and painfully and briefly. The day had been terrible and should have been wonderful: Have I destroyed for myself the only physical fun I have ever been able to have? Through starvation and illness? All I could think of, all day, was the cold, was the next opportunity of becoming slightly less cold. I could barely speak, barely move my muscles, barely ski, barely function on any level except the most basic. And I felt sick - physically, from slight constipation and the discomfort of having all muscles, including stomach ones, perpetually clenched in frozen stiffness - and psychosomatically, from the thought of the breakfast, the chocolate, already consumed, all the meals that had still to be consumed. After my bath I felt weak, dizzy, hardly capable of staggering to bed. I feel uglier, weaker, duller, than ever before. And almost twenty-one - ought to be a high point of my life. And my obsession with thinness, or more deeply, with a frail illusion of control, has ruined it for me. I feel so guilty for not being able to enjoy all this. So guilty and so stupid. And guilty, too, for not, on one level, caring enough. Wanting M. [my ex-boyfriend] to fill the emptiness inside me, not really health and pleasure and exercise. Just him. And fear - they want to buy me new skis and boots for my birthday tomorrow. I felt fear because I didn't deserve it, because I didn't know whether I'd be able to ski tomorrow, because I knew I didn't want to. I knew that the idea of sitting on more cold lifts, feeling face and fingers and bones turn to painful then painless, aching ice, terrifies me. I want to say this all to them and don't know how or where or when to start.
The feelings of guilt and stupidity and fear were half for myself and half for my parents, partly social and partly of a deeper grain. I felt guilt at spoiling their pleasure by not sharing it, and, more deeply, for not wanting to share it - which was my own stupidity, my own loss, but which must be defended like a right. I felt fear of ingratitude but greater fear of the cold - and fear of telling them everything and of not being able to.
Me, trying and failing to keep warm
But after dinner I wrote of how I'd stopped trying to keep up appearances:
Found a way and a place and a time to say it - in tears, in the restaurant, after dinner - it all came out. And it all feels better now. Less terrifying, less constricting. What happens tomorrow seems less critical. Though I have to weigh myself, it may decrease rather than increase the obsessionality.
That hope turned out a vain one. I weighed myself in my nightie before breakfast, S. [my mother] peering over my shoulder - 41.5 kg. Less, I think, than I ever was before; below, I think, the level at which Dr. S [a child psychiatrist I saw for two years] used to say one ought to be hospitalized (17.02.03). All these boundaries and points of no return seem often hard to take seriously, though - too negligent of the individual, I suppose. A year later, I took many of my Finals exams at Oxford hovering around that level - should I have been lying in a hospital bed instead of consummating my successes?
No one made a great fuss at first - but I felt that whenever I wasn't with them they were talking about me, scared and concerned - and by teatime T. [my father] was saying I shouldn't go back to Germany, but to Bristol with them, stay at S.'s and be looked after. I was frightened that he - and she too - thinks it necessary. I suppose I've got used to a slow depletion of strength - hadn't realized how far my weight had dropped, though knew it had to some extent... The weighing was meant to be a way to render all this painful, tedious discussion unnecessary - but I suppose no one was expecting the numbers that turned up.
Ate lots of dinner, was made to cry again by T. saying I'd eaten nothing, that this amount of food was just a joke, pointless - and by S.'s valiant defence of me and my minor achievement. The evening ended in a somewhat uneasy, half-antagonistic, half-regretful silence. I'm frightened now of everything - of weighing myself tomorrow, of having gained weight, of not having gained weight, of T., of skiing, of not being able to ski... No more talk of deportation back to Bristol, though, at least.
My father rapidly lost all sense of proportion. He'd cry out that I must be rescued, with apparently no thought for the risks attendant on such shock therapy - perhaps he didn't even mean it as therapy, meant only to express his own fear, not induce it in me. But how could he have thought - if he had thought - that calling my meal a joke could serve any purpose at all? He lost, too, the ability to admit ignorance. He had no idea what numbers of calories were here being expended and consumed. He assumed skiing was infinitely more taxing than life in Dresden. He forgot the admirable efficiency of the half-starved body.
And then he'd so quickly flip to the opposite extreme: he'd soon visit me in Dresden and be delighted to see me eat, not realizing that every day I spent with him, eating to his applause, I was losing the weight I'd gained in my solitary self-discipline born of desperation, because I was eating only with him and nothing more. And then, later still, he'd reproach me for those visits, for his ensnarement in my manipulative wiles. It took me a long time to forgive him - as, no doubt, it did him to forgive me.
The day after this weigh-in, we all skied together, and for far too long, till it was all empty of the littlest of pleasures - I couldn't think of a single reason for my being here at all, or at least dreamt of sitting around in the hotel with a book all day, taking a little walk and a little swim and little meals, soaking up the sun without the exhausting dullness of real protracted exercise (18.02.03). The skiing was so oppressive because it was, calorifically, an unknown quantity that I gauged to be less energy-consuming than they did; but being unsure of it, I was unsure, too, of the other crucial quantity dependent on it: food. My dreams of days with a little walk and a little swim and little meals were dreams of knowing how little I could safely eat. I would walk as I did in Dresden; then I could eat as I did there. And instead of that simplicity of the familiar and the minimal there was all too much - to be eaten and fretted over: too much crying on my mother's shoulder after breakfast - knowing that these excesses of being here were only the beginning of what would have to become those of life in general, that this wasn't a holiday from life but the return to and resolution of it.
