A few days ago, for example, I went to a late-afternoon Nietzsche seminar, arrived quite late, when the discussion was already in full swing, and found myself trying to ask a question - about Nietzsche's rhetorical strategies for eliding unresolved oppositions, or something like that - and not managing at all to find the right words to formulate it comprehensibly. It trailed off in a garbled fashion, and the visiting professor did his best to give a generalised response, and I felt ashamed and out of place for the half hour till it finished. I came home quite unsettled by it, and needed a few hours of calmer reflection until I was able to unpick the many strands of invalid reasoning that made me so upset by it.

Firstly, there was classic anxiety thinking. I imagined the worst - assuming everyone else thought me stupid, thought I shouldn't be there, would remember me forever as the woman who'd messed up her question - and imagined all the awful consequences this would have: someone there would just happen to be on some future committee deciding whether to give me a job, and would remember this moment, and argue I was unworthy. I attributed the ‘failure' to a fundamental inadequacy in me as an academic - a lack of intelligence of the required sort - instead of to a combination of contingent factors: having had an afternoon nap before the Nietzsche seminar and woken up feeling dazed, arriving late because of said nap and feeling slightly flustered, being nervous at speaking as a modern linguist in front of a room full of philosophers, and not having thought about Nietzsche (or read anything of his) for months.

Then there was a lack of self-esteem manifesting itself in far too great a preoccupation with what others think of me (or what I think they think of me): if these people see in me an intellectual fraud, that is what I must be. The reserves of personal confidence are very easily blown apart by these little incidents which (to continue the military metaphors) have happened even before I've realised I need to erect my defences against them. I think it's a very common, even ubiquitous, feeling for academics to labour under: that everyone else is truly intellectual, and that they alone are the fraud who hasn't yet been found out, but will be some day soon. This is what makes it so rare an occurrence, the conference/lecture question that descends into inarticulacy: much better not to say anything if there's the slightest danger of not being eloquent and learned. Thus the myth is perpetuated that we're all clever, all on top of every argument, and that mistakes never really occur, and are not acceptable when they do.

Perfectionism is of course one of the most common traits concomitant with anorexia (see a 2005 review of research on perfectionism and eating disorders), and a discipline in which submitting a journal article requires reading through a 100-page style guide to check reference formats and capitalisation of adverbs in subtitles doesn't exactly help emancipate one from perfectionism. Perfectionism is also difficult to separate from overworking: if mistakes are unacceptable, but output also has to be sustained, the only option is to work very, very hard. This is the problem I encounter most often in my daily life since recovering from anorexia: the sense that I should be working all the time, and that if I'm not, I'm not being a proper academic, not keeping up, not doing what I'm paid to do. I resist counting hours worked, and I resist feeling that taking weekends off is a guilty rather than a healthy practice, but the general ethos, more than in many other professions (as far as I know), equates life with work, mental life with intellectual life, identity with intellect. Of course there are plenty of people who, as I do, like watching trashy TV, reading lightweight novels, but these same people will spend all evening working, or think it an unacceptably indulgent luxury to have a whole weekend off. This is exacerbated by the way that in Oxford, the distinction between work and ‘play' is already blurred by mealtimes being such a crucial context for professional ‘networking'. This is nice in many ways: it means lunch isn't a sandwich at one's desk, but is a chance to talk to people outside one's own field, and that dinners can be wine-fuelled ways of ‘relaxing', but with the people one works with. On the other hand, it's a very clear symbol of how distant the academic life is from a 9-5 career. We don't leave the office, and leave the work there - we take it to dinner with us, take it home with us, and have it always in our heads.

Partly this is because many academics love what they do, are excited by the ideas they have, and would like no other career better, but partly it's also because of the less happy consequence of this: that one comes to define oneself primarily in terms of one's intellect. As the daughter of two academic parents, this is a tendency very deeply instilled in me, and very hard to uproot. Round the dinner table as a child, conversation was about the chemistry of global warming and the brain areas subserving visual perception as often as it was about what we did at school that day, and mistakes were usually pounced on unhesitatingly, not for the sake of being cruel, but because, I suppose, that's the only way one learns to think clearly and precisely. My mother in particular was also a role model for the academic who never stops - even when she was confined to bed for a year with chronic fatigue, she wrote in her head the book that became her most successful. These sorts of formative influences made intellect, and intellectual achievement, self-evidently prime values.

Anorexia helped to confirm that nothing much else in life mattered: just intellect and its results, and complete control over food. Controlling food completely, which meant controlling my day completely, which meant excluding most of the things that make life rich and varied, allowed me to work extremely long hours, uninterrupted, at night, and so academic achievement became part of the illness, a way of earning food, the most important thing in life, but not really important at all, because it was merely a filler of the hours till I could eat at last.

My BA graduation in the midst of anorexia, 2004

My BA graduation in the midst of anorexia, 2004