Q. What is my goal?
A. To become the healthiest person I know.
Q. What are my vices?
A. 1. Shit food and too much of it.
2. Animals—as in, eating them.
3. Cigarettes.
4. Coffee.
5. Tea.
6. Alcohol.
Q. What is my plan?
A. 1. Give up shit food. No more animals! (Only fish.)
2. No more coffee.
3. No more tea. (Go the herbal!)
4 Give up smoking and drinking forever.
As I wrote, the bad feeling gradually began to subside, and in its place I felt a sense of calm, a sense of hope. I could do this. I could do this.
Q. When will I begin my plan?
A. MIDNIGHT TONIGHT.
I added more detail at the bottom of the page, instructions. With each new directive, I felt that little bit better:
Also:
i. Drink large quantities of water.
ii. A minimum of 30 minutes exercise per day.
iii. 15 minutes of meditation per day.
iv. Only three meals per day plus two snacks.
Underneath that I wrote:
Goodbye binge drinking!
Goodbye cigarettes!
There. Better. I had made for myself an anchor, and now I could rest easy.
I don’t know quite what was different this time, perhaps the level of desperation, but I did stick to that plan. Through headaches, fluctuating emotions and dizziness, I gave up what some would call life’s pleasures but my mind at the time was calling vices. I’d given up coffee and tea, and, after limiting myself to three meals a day with such success, I’d even decided to cut it down to two meals a day. I just wanted this over and done with and so, I figured, the less I ate, the quicker we’d be sorted. I must have had some sense that this was a dangerous approach to take to food, because I joked in my diary that it was lucky I was too fat to be anorexic, otherwise I’d be worried right now! I didn’t know then that size isn’t actually an indication of whether or not you have an eating disorder. I didn’t know that an eating disorder is an illness of both the body, and the mind, and you can’t look just look at someone, and spot whether or not they have one.
All I knew was that I looked forward to fitting into normal-sized clothes bought from normal-people shops.
I looked forward to being thin.
The day before my twenty-first birthday, the phone rang at Phil’s place: a call for me.
It was Joffa, ringing to say happy birthday.
I couldn’t believe it—how had he got my number?
That day, his voice was light and happy; he sounded better than I’d ever heard him sound. I told him so, and he said that he had changed. He was turning his life around. He’d virtually given up dope now, he said. And then he just talked about all the stuff that was on his mind, like gigs that he’d been to and how he was looking for a job. He said life was a bit boring without dope but, then again, sitting on the couch watching TV all day sucking back cones wasn’t really that much fun either. I bit my tongue. It was so weird to hear him talk like this, as though … as though he really wanted to talk to me. It had been so long since I’d felt that from him. I got excited, I think. What if … ? What if we … ?
That night, I lay in bed reading The Little Prince, pondering the question of self-determination, and what kind of adult I wanted to be when I turned twenty-one (a truly grown-up age). In this famous book, the narrator (the Pilot) tells the story of his first drawing at age six, which he describes as a picture of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant. When he shows his masterpiece to the adults around him, they think it is a hat, and he has to re-draw his picture, with less mystery, so they understand it more clearly. That night, I thought hard on this concept—on whether it was possible to be both a grown-up with your shit together and, at the same time, continue to see past boring concepts like ‘a hat’, and into the possibility of a boa constrictor swallowing an elephant. Was it conceivable to retain the imagination of our childhoods, and be a successful grown-up at the same time? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was, I hadn’t had the easiest day of it. That morning I’d tried to cash a traveller’s cheque, the last of my money, but I’d been denied for some reason—the wrong ID or something—and I’d spent the rest of the day feeling like a pathetic LOSER with no money, trying to work out what I could eat that cost less than two pounds. I knew I could have asked Libby for help, but I didn’t want to.
I gave myself a big talking to. What the hell was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I ever seem to make anything work? Why had I even come to London in the first place? What did I think would change?
That night, I decided, things were going to change.
I was going to take more risks.
I was going to put myself out there.
And if the chance came up, I was going to do some more singing. Not just on my own in my bedroom, but out there, in the world.
The very next night, at a bar with Libby celebrating my twenty-first, that chance did come up. The singer of the three-piece band playing in the corner asked if anyone knew the words to this old jazz song—‘Summertime’—and, without thinking, I stood up and yelled, ‘Me! Me!’, ran to the stage, grabbed the mic and sang my little heart out. It felt so good. Libby took a photo of me afterwards, in the car park with the band, arms around each other’s shoulders, and I am smiling ear to ear.
At home,
