Cream Buns And Meltdowns.
We all have those moments in life when something just breaks us, for me it was a simple cream bun.
I was 16, and by that stage had already been clinically diagosable as having Anorexia Nervosa for a period of 8 years. The illness had waxed and waned in that time, but whenever I questioned my abnormal thoughts and behaviours around food and weight, those questions would soon be quashed by a well constructed wall of denial - I was just on a 'health kick', being overweight is bad for your health, prevention is better than cure, and so on and so forth.
At the start of my last year of high school my eating disorder, which I had managed to keep well hidden, became noticeable to several of my teachers. My parents were contacted regarding their observations of my sharp drop in weight and the fact that during a school camp I had barely eaten. I was encouraged to see a Doctor, but steadfastly refused, for a while at least. By this stage not only was I severely restricting my caloric intake I was also clinically emaciated, and had begun to alternate between period of near starvation followed by cycles of bingeing and purging. Eventually I decided to see someone, even if it was just to get folks off my back so I could return to my eating disorder in peace. So I headed down to the local medical centre and booked in an appointment, fully intending to hide my disordered thoughts and behaviours, and give my usual spiel about how I was fine, really, and people had no reason to be concerned.
For some reason, which to this day I still can't adequately explain, as soon as I sat down on that chair in the Doctor's office, everything came pouring out - my obsession with weight, my food restriction, my cycles of bingeing and purging, all of the rituals around the preparation and consumption of food. And instead of being offered any form of help I was simply told that it was just a phase teenage girls go through, and there was no need to worry. Of course my eating disorder had a field day with that.
As the months went on though, and the cycles of starvation, bingeing, purging, massive overdoses of laxatives on a daily basis, and all of the accompanying rituals around food and weight continued to worsen I began to ask myself, "Why can't I just be normal about food? Eating is one of the most fundamental survival drives for the human body, and yet for me there's something that is just so abnormal about it, and I don't understand why." I would watch other people eat, watch them buying food at the school canteen, sitting down to pull a pie out if its brown paper bag and tuck in without a care in the world, and for the life of me I could not figure out why I couldn't just do the same.
And then it dawned on me - of course, I was simply 'choosing' to be the way I was. Restricting food, and all the accompanying rituals helped to relieve stress and anxiety, so the anorexia wasn't some sort of problem that needed to be dealt with, it was more like a really old friend that just popped by to say hello when it was needed. Great, problem solved, there was no problem.
Of course if I had chosen to be anorexic, then all I had to do was simply unchoose it. Sure, I could do that, I could totally choose not to be anorexic on any given day of the week, pick a day, any day. So that's what I did.
At lunchtime I fronted up to the school canteen and purchased a Kitchener bun (a cream bun coated with sugar), fully intending to eat it without another thought. I carried that bun up to the Science block where I was still attempting to work on a project I had due in, and placed it on the bench in front of me. This was the moment of truth, this was the moment I was going to prove to myself that I did not have a problem, and everything I did was out of pure choice.
I couldn't do it. I studied that bun from every conceivable angle, I paced around it like an animal stalking its prey, I poked and prodded at it, I even got out a dissection scalpel and began to cut it into tiny quartered layers: and then I collapsed to the floor and broke down sobbing. This one, innocuous looking little cream bun had completely broken me with the overwhelming realisation that I really wasn't the one in control, I couldn't eat even when I wanted to - and I really wanted to.
I'd like to say this was the ultimate moment of truth that lead me to the promised land of recovery. Unfortunately this story doesn't have a happy ending, or at least not a happy recovery beginning for another sixteen or so years. But I like to think this one day, of cream buns and meltdowns, at least planted something of a seed.