‘You can’t run or even walk and everything hurts and everyone is prodding your body and criticising it. “At least you’re not fat,” laughs a doctor.’

This essay discusses disordered eating. Please take care.

The wind is painful. It comes towards you and through you. Each gust is an army of splinters, a volley of glass. 

You are afraid of the wind. You have an intense fear of being cold. 

“Do you know you are skinny?” says an old woman at the bus stop. 

Do you know you are rude? you want to reply.

Instead, you say, “Yes, thank you, I do know that.”

You look around at people with different bodies. You are jealous. You watch them move so freely in the wind. They are not afraid of the cold. You are jealous of the safety of flesh. You are jealous of bare skin on sunny days.

You keep yourself covered. You are embarrassed by your skinny arms, your legs. You worry what people might think, your size, such smallness.  

You worry that the sun might disappear. The wind returning. That wind. 

“If you eat that, you’ll get fat,” says your grandma. 

You are eight years old. You look at the cake. You look at her, perched on the edge of her deckchair in the morning sun. You want the cake. You look away and close your eyes, tightly.  

“If you eat it, you’ll never be a marching girl.”

Your grandma likes marching girls. You watch them practising on the sports field in their short skirts. You want to be like them. You want to wear a short skirt. You won’t eat the cake. You won’t. You won’t. 

“A lower weight is beneficial,” says the doctor.

You are 14. You sit in the chair and fidget. He gives you a pamphlet on insulin resistance. You need to eat small amounts, he says. You shouldn’t eat dessert. 

“Stay slim,” he says as you stand to leave. You are wearing brown lacy sandals. You still remember those shoes. 

You do what he says: you stay slim. Slim teenager. Slimmer adult. You run. You don’t eat dessert. You live off brown rice at university. You don’t touch the cake your workmate brings to the office. I don’t have a sweet tooth, you tell her. You join a gym. 

Around you everyone’s bodies are changing. Workmates, friends, relatives get fatter, greyer. Skin wrinkles. Waists widen. You stay the same. You’re lucky, you are told. You’re so lucky to be slim.

And then you want a baby, and there’s IVF and pregnancies and sickness, and everything goes wrong again and again and more sickness, and months of bed-rest and nothing tastes good any more and you can’t run or even walk and everything hurts and everyone is prodding your body and criticising it. “At least you’re not fat,” laughs a doctor, and then there’s babies and busyness and seven years of breastfeeding (the one part of the whole conception-to-birth continuum that you can actually do right) and you forget to eat and when to eat and what to eat and suddenly you don’t feel hungry any more. 

When the dietician at the hospital asks, you say, “sandwich crusts and the bits of banana with bruises and half-eaten apple from the playcentre lunchboxes” and she says that’s not an appropriate diet for an adult, and you want to say I’m not an appropriate adult but don’t. And then there’s the doctor who prescribes antidepressants even though you say you’re not depressed and he says every mother he sees is depressed and you say, “Isn’t that part of the human condition and society’s expectations of parenthood?” and he looks at you like you’re crazy, and you stop talking in case he decides to take your kids off you and lock you up. 

Everything in your body hurts. Your head aches. You feel each bruise. Your hair is brittle. You are constantly afraid of getting hurt. A trip. A cricket ball in the playground. Anxious. Anxious. 

Your skinniness makes you feel like nothing. You are afraid of crowds. Of new foods. Of strange smells. Of shouting. Of all the ways of getting lost. You are afraid of the weather. 

You feel like nothing. Like dust. 

Still, people praise you. “You’re so tiny!” As if this is a good thing. “Look at you!” says a nurse in the hospital the day after your second child is born. “You’re skinny! At least you have ugly legs.” She laughs, as if this makes it OK. She comes back with a group of nurses who want to look at you and prod you. This body, this tiny miracle of endurance, prod, prod, prod. They wear masks and gloves because you have had shingles and they seem to believe, two weeks later, this is still contagious. You shouldn’t have had children, they say, it looks like it just about killed you. They are right: it almost did. You want to punch them, or yell at them to leave. 

And now you are a mother and invisible. There are new rules. Your life is about your kids. You must be a good mother. You must also do all the other things – career, clean house, smile, be slim but not too slim, talk clearly but not shout. You must not take up too much space.  

“How do I gain weight?” you ask Google. Google suggests you meant, “How do I lose weight?”

You eat lots of nuts. You add cheese to things that shouldn’t have cheese. You try protein powder. You try a bite of cake. A square of chocolate. The sweetness is overwhelming. You don’t remember what sugar tastes like. Do people really like this stuff? you wonder. How can you eat a whole piece? A whole chocolate bar? How does that work?

You go out to cafes. You watch people eating. Big portions. Sandwiches. Pies. Do you feel sick? you want to know. How can you eat so much and not feel like exploding? How can you sit there around all this food and feel OK? How can you talk and eat as if nothing is wrong? As if this is normal, adult behaviour?

You have friends who hate wearing togs. They don’t go to the pool. You hate wearing togs. But you still go to the pool. You make yourself. Because it’s hard; and you want your kids to know you’re not afraid.  

You stand in the changing room and worry about what people will think. But you don’t want to let your kids down. You put on your togs. You get into the pool. 

There’s a bouncy water slide. Your preschooler wants to go on it but he’s too little. The lifeguard says no. Your child starts to cry. 

“Can I go on it with him?” you ask the lifeguard.

“Only kids allowed,” he says. “Adults are too big.”

“I’m not an adult,” you tell him. 

He looks at you, a moment of confusion. You grab your child’s hand and run onto the slide. You go down together. You laugh. Your child is laughing. You laugh and laugh. 

“Mum,” says your child later (once you are out of the pool and changed and a safe distance from the lifeguard), “are you not a real adult?”

“It’s complicated,” you tell him. “Sometimes we pretend things.”

You don’t want to tell him the truth: aren’t we all, at some level, just pretending?

You don’t give up. You keep trying, again and again and again. One bite at a time. 

Will you get better? Are you ever really, truly cured?

Maybe. Maybe not. Everyone, at some level, lives with a void, something missing. A body that isn’t quite right. A missing limb. A shadow. 

Some days are sunny and some days are cold. But one day, you hope, the wind might feel a little less intense. And you might be a little less frightened.