But while it was all going on, my obsession with diets offered welcome relief to the thoughts running through my head—that James was going to die. And if not James, someone else. Possibly me. I didn’t want to think about it, yet I couldn’t seem to stop.
What began as a fairly standard, but quite secret diet of low-fat food and obsessive calorie counting soon morphed into something quite unique, and queer. A game, of sorts, to see how far I could push things and still not get caught. Some days I ate only four crackers, pickles, mustard and a small slice of cheese. Other days, when I made myself a sandwich for lunch, I would cut off the crusts, chop the sandwich into quarters, and throw three of those quarters away. These practices left me hungry—sometimes starving—and horrifically vulnerable to the kind of rebound overeating that inevitably leads to a binge. Whatever was in the house would do when I binged: white flour with butter and sugar, or oodles of toast. Given the circumstances, bingeing strikes me now as one of the smartest things my body could have done. I was growing, and I was trying to starve myself. Of course, my body was going to prompt me to eat whatever food was available.
At the time, however, I took my bingeing as a sign I was weak and bad, and I would need to try a whole lot harder if I was going to avoid getting fat again. The voice in my head kept me company during this time, and it also grew much harsher, now saying things like: Pull up your socks, you fucking fat loser. I thought that talking to myself like this made perfect sense and was the only thing that would keep me on track.
My transition from the small pond of Sacred Heart Primary School to the much larger Star of the Sea Catholic Ladies College was, in short, not smooth.
I was nearly thirteen by then and, yep, I thought I knew what was what. I could swear and everything. I thought I understood the lay of the land. I started high school feeling bright and confident and quietly up myself, but I soon fell victim to the familiar pull of wanting to belong and longing to be accepted by the bitchy girls who seemed to hold the invisible keys to power.
At some point, someone who didn’t like me very much, who wanted my best friend to be her best friend, discovered my Achilles heel—my worry about my weight—and she did not hesitate to put in the boot. In those days, schools used to weigh and measure their students, and write this information on cards to be filed. This girl somehow got access to the filing cupboard, found out my weight and yelled it across the schoolyard. I was mortified. Too big. Too big. Too big, said my head. From there, the teasing grew violent. My head was smashed against a heater, my wallet thrown away, yoghurt poured on my school dress, hate letters planted in my desk. I got told that if I looked at that girl one more time she was going to kick my face in.
As a result, I learned once again that the best way to fit in was to join in.
By Year Nine, I’d drunk all the drinks, smoked all the smokes, told all the lies and done things with boys on the sand at Half Moon Bay Surf Life Saving Club at night that I didn’t like thinking about the next day. All up, I made quite a fucking job of my teenage years.
The one positive from this time is that I began the habit of writing in my diary—writing down my feelings, and my worries, and my drama. In there, I also wrote my diets. Writing down my meal plan in my diary each night was one of the things that made me feel safe, and sane. From these records, I can see that although my weight went up and down on the scales, I had not yet twigged that my sudden changes in weight reflected a problem with anything other than my size, and neither had anyone else. The same cycle of positive attention that I had gone through when I lost weight at ten repeated itself as I lost and gained weight at thirteen, fourteen and fifteen. When I was thin, I felt powerful, but exposed. Wrong. When I was fat, I felt belittled, but safer. Wrong, but also right, because I wasn’t buying into the stories of the world, or so I told myself.
Regardless of where I stood on the scale, the one thing I refused to do was swim in public. It could be a thirty-nine-degree day, I could be at the beach with my friends, and I still would not take off my clothes. It’s not that I didn’t want to swim, it’s that I didn’t want to give anyone the chance to comment on my exposed body. Never again. No fucking way.
Looking back, it’s clear that there were lots of things I wanted to do around this time, but didn’t let myself. Surfing, for example. I worked in a surf shop and I wanted to surf, like my boyfriends. But, back then, girls weren’t encouraged to go surfing, and I was so desperate to fit in that I did not back myself. I told myself to shush, it was enough to be on the shore with a thermos full of Milo for when the boys came in. It was enough just to be there at all.
One Saturday night I got drunk at the beach with my friends, then we went to Maccas. As I leaned in the doorway with a Big Mac in one hand and a cigarette in the other, I heard
