To look at me, you would never know. Or maybe you would, I have never seen myself from the outside. Only ever as a hyper-critical squint at a photograph, highlighting jiggly bits that aren’t there, and more recently, lines and wrinkles that have appeared around the windows to my soul. What does someone with an underlying eating disorder look like? I have friends that I know are like me; members of an unenviable club that was so popular back in the day but is now frowned upon as we embrace the age of empowerment, body love and the enlightenment of our personalities versus the size of our backsides. I don’t see it when I look at them, so they see it when they look at me? When they see me eating, do they remember? Or are they just like me; struggling with their own ageing demons that although may have quietened slightly since their time, will never really ever be completely silenced.

I was a teenager of the nineties, a time where eating disorders were rife and glamorised by the media. If you had an eating disorder, you must have been thin, and if you thin, you were beautiful. If you were slightly on the chubby side, or downright fat, you weren’t doing it right! Stick thin models paraded the perceived appeal of a size 6 and girls aspired to shop in kid’s clothing stores well into their late teens, so I jumped on the band wagon and began a diet. And I was good at it! The slightly anal, hyperactive control freak I would eventually become as an adult sprouted her wings when I saw how I could control how my body looked and felt; all just by controlling what went into my mouth and how much exercise I could fit into my day. My addictive personality took over, I took everything to the extremes; I exercised on Christmas Day and ate only salad at the festive table. But I was still a kid, and when my parents noticed the changes in me, they started to push against my new-found defiance.

So what does a self-conscious, angry, hormonal teenager do when her parents tell her she can no longer only eat like a bird and train like an army cadet? She takes enough laxatives to shit like she just ate a stage 12 curry and learns exactly how long she can wait after eating a meal before it can be silently thrown up everyday. Every time I made myself sick I would feel relief wash over me, the toilet bowl and I were the best of friends. I spent half my life either sitting on it or bent over it. What started as defiance became a coping mechanism for just about everything.

I found I missed food, so I ate it, a lot of it, and I began to put on the weight that my body so desperately needed but, to me, just resembled failure. So much of my life has been about the scales and the toilet and just how many hand lengths it takes to cover the expanse of my upper thigh. It’s really quite sad how much of not just my teenage years, but quite a few of my adult years I have been so consumed with it all, but it’s been around for so long, it’s always been a part of me.

I often wonder how long it would’ve gone on for, to that extreme, if I hadn’t have gotten bored with it all, moved onto something else more rewarding, less painful. I never got help, I never acknowledged that I even had an eating disorder until I was much older and the bingeing and purging had reared its ugly head in an attempt to gain some stability over a life that was rapidly spinning out of control. Because I had ‘self-cured’, I never thought it was an issue, but it always will be. I still look through the cupboard for the laxatives when I’ve over-indulged, only to find my husband has found my stash and, knowing my history and resulting kidney problems, has thrown them out. I still feel a sense of achievement when I can make myself be sick when I’ve had too much to drink. I am not suffering from it today, but I will always have an eating disorder. It will always sit at the back of my mind, along with that hyper-critical, nasty teenage voice telling me I could be so much better, life could be so much easier, everything would be perfect…… if I wasn’t me.