Mum was not impressed. The next day, when she called me into her room to talk it over, I saw in her face that my actions were breaking her heart. But when she asked me what was wrong, I didn’t know what to say. All I could tell her was that I was sick and tired of being fat. I cried as I told her that all I really wanted was for someone to admit me to some hospital somewhere and put me to sleep for six months so I could just wake up thin, and this hell would be over.
The story I had been telling myself was the story I had been sold, the story I had read about in the girls’ magazines, the story that I knew—if only momentarily—to have been true for me: that when I was thin, I was happy. But by the time I was fifteen, the misery of willing that story to come true and of failing again and again had all become too much for me to carry. I think, more than anything, I was just exhausted.
Mum looked in my face and told me it was going to be okay. We were going to get me some help.
That week, Mum stuck a postcard to the fridge—a black-and-white picture of an early-twentieth-century woman: a big-boned, flowing-haired, strong woman in a ball gown flexing her exposed biceps. She wanted me to know that even though they were hard to find, there were role models out there. I was an Amazon, she said. I was not born to be like other girls. I was going to be my own kind of girl.
My first psychologist was a woman called Annika. She’d been recommended to Mum by a hospital that treated children with eating disorders.
‘She isn’t Catholic,’ Mum told me, ‘but she is Dutch, so that’s a start.’
When I walked into Annika’s office by myself for the first time, I didn’t really know why I was there, but I assumed the terms of this engagement were pretty clear. I was there because I was fat, and Annika was going to help me get thin again.
During that first consultation, however, Annika said she didn’t want to put me on a diet, she just wanted to talk. I thought she was holding out on me, but I played along and answered all her questions.
She asked about my dieting, and I told her. She asked me when I first remembered overeating, and then she asked about Rowie, and the hospital, so I told her.
That took most of the session.
While I spoke, I did a thing I’ve always done. I pressed my fingers lightly above my top lip. There was a rhythm in my head that had always been there, like an invisible pattern under my skin calling me to play it. I don’t think I would have even noticed I was doing it if Annika hadn’t asked, ‘What are you doing with your hands?’
I told her I wasn’t doing anything, just making some patterns.
‘Do you do that often?’ she asked.
‘Always,’ I replied.
She asked if I had any other habits like that, habits that I repeated, and I thought about it and said, ‘I don’t think so.’
She smiled and encouraged me to keep an eye out for them. She wanted me to write them down.
This was an important moment. Annika was teaching me what it felt like to be open to enquiry, to ask questions from a gentle place. She was asking me to observe myself, without judgement. She was telling me I didn’t need to have it all worked out: that we had time. That this was a process.
During the next week, as I observed myself, I was surprised to notice that, yes, I did have a few funny little habits. I’d been doing them for so long, they just seemed like second nature.
I wrote a list, which I read out to Annika at our next session.
FUNNY HABITS by Clare Bowditch
1. I do a pattern with my hands—1/3/5 and 2/4, then back again, and I sing a song to go with it.
2. I play games in my head like:
A. ‘Tap Tap’, where I tap my feet every time I pass a telephone pole in the car.
B. ‘The Typewriter’, where I type and retype words in my head, forwards and backwards.
C. I imagine my hands playing songs again and again on the piano, until I get it absolutely perfect, which is rare.
3. I play number games to help me sleep at night—ones where I count backwards in various mathematical increments, like nines or sixes.
4. When I hear music, I see colours; each instrument is a differently coloured ribbon that streams out in front of me. I am not sure this technically qualifies as a habit, but it is, perhaps, a little odd.
5. I stand under the cold water in the shower for exactly six seconds at the end of every shower. No idea why, except six is my lucky number. That was my number in basketball.
6. I have not walked on a crack in almost a decade, to my knowledge.
7. When I see a crack, I always need to step over it with my left foot.
8. At night, I need to check at least twice that the back door is locked, otherwise I can’t sleep. Sometimes I need to get up from bed to check again, just in case.
9. I like counting calories in my head before I go to sleep, adding them up, and I like converting pounds and kilos from one to the other as a game.
10. Even though I do track my calories, I never feel I am tracking them well enough. Sometimes I have to re-track them three or four times at the end
