“Why the fuck am I here?”
Not exactly the most diplomatic opening to a therapy session, but diplomacy wasn’t particularly high on my list of priorities because once I awoken I knew why I was there. I understood what had happened, why people were concerned and why decisions had been made on my behalf. What I couldn’t quite comprehend was how, at thirty years old, I’d found myself in a position where everyone seemed to have more authority over my life than I did, it still angers me but I promise I’m working on it.
This generation we are told “my body, my choice”.. you think until someone decides otherwise.
And look, I get it, I really fucking get it. I understand why people intervened even though I have terrible regret it got to this. I know they are trying to protect me, and I recognise that my decisions had become dangerous. But understanding someone’s intentions doesn’t automatically make their actions painless. You can recognise that someone is trying to save your life and still resent them for taking control of it. You can understand the necessity of medical intervention while finding the experience utterly humiliating and also useless because you made your mind up.
I hadn’t chosen to be here and suddenly there were needles, blood tests, brain scans, physiotherapy I had absolutely no desire to participate in, and endless conversations about a body that seemed to have decided it was no longer particularly interested in cooperating. My heart was struggling, and people were understandably concerned about keeping it working, but “my body, my choice”. There is something rather sobering about being thirty and discovering that an organ you’ve never given much thought to has become everybody else’s primary concern.
Here’s the thing, two things can be true, I’ve spent years arguing that point about politics, history, religion and conflict (love it deep dow). BUT, I’m considerably less enthusiastic about nuance when I’m the subject of it.
Every night (Insomnia at this point) and morning I find myself asking when I could leave, not necessarily because I had anywhere particularly wonderful to go, but because I wanted the choice. I wanted to decide whether I stayed somewhere and participated in something. Whether I could have an ordinary day without needing somebody else’s approval. Instead, I am in a room where I can’t even charge my fucking phone because I’m not even allowed a cord.
Think about the absurdity of that for a moment……… I don’t want to sound uptight but I’ve spent years navigating borders, negotiating access to places most people are shit scared of and making decisions in complicated situations, and now I couldn’t be trusted with an iPhone charger. But I GET the safety reasoning, mainly because I look around but get it and I know it’s these peoples jobs and they deserve respect.
That is the most difficult part, I was expected to accept help while simultaneously confronting the consequences of needing it, which brings me to the therapist.
I don’t dislike the man.. honestly, under different circumstances, I suspect we might have enjoyed a rather entertaining conversation. He’s intelligent, (kinda cute), confident, considerably richer than me, and has the rather irritating advantage of being able to leave the building whenever he pleases. I wasn’t interested in having somebody walk into my room and explain me to myself, never done it, a hill I would have died on.
I didn’t want another person asking why I had problems, as though the origins of my entire existence were about to be uncovered somewhere between questions three and four. I wanted a conversation as a minimum. A proper one, between two people capable of thinking, disagreeing and, rather importantly, being wrong. I don’t care if you’re a therapist, a doctor, a CEO or the bloody King of England, you might have spent twenty years studying something I’ve spent twenty minutes chat gpt-ing. Fine. I respect that, but expertise isn’t perfection, and a qualification isn’t a personality.
I’ve always found power dynamics fascinating, particularly the ones people pretend don’t exist. Someone enters a room with a title and suddenly their observations become professional insight while your objections become symptoms. If he challenges me, he’s doing his job. If I challenge him, perhaps I’m being defensive. Convenient little arrangement, isn’t it?
Of course, sometimes I am defensive, okay a lot, I am difficult. Sometimes I would rather win an argument than admit somebody has made a perfectly reasonable point especially because I already felt small when he walked into that room.
I didn’t need someone making me feel smaller, at one point, he said, “I am here for you.”, I snapped back, “You’re paid to be here”. Not my finest contribution to the therapeutic process.
Although deep down for me it wasn’t really about money, I know he can walk into my room, examine the most painful parts of my life, challenge my decisions and then leave (even if I don’t share them). He would finish his shift and return to a life in which our conversation occupied perhaps an hour.
I would remain with everything we’d discussed, maybe resent it, like when you think of all the things you wish you could make up at the time. HOWEVER, when I challenged him, I didn’t want a speech about how much he cared, I wanted him to acknowledge the inequality. AND TO BE FAIR …..
“You’re right,” he said.
Well, fucking hell, a man with authority admitting I had a point and strangely enough, that was the first moment I actually felt like listening. Not because I’d won, but because he hadn’t insulted my intelligence by pretending we occupied the same position, he simply told me the truth.
Perhaps that was all I wanted from the beginning. The truth about why I’m here is considerably more complicated than a difficult conversation with a therapist and it has been a long time coming but one I was never going to lean into towards until he said that.
I was twelve when I was first diagnosed with anorexia.. twelve, which makes me sad, an age when you’re supposed to be worried about school, friendships and whether the person you fancy has noticed you exist. Instead, I was learning to negotiate with food, numbers and a body I had somehow decided was a problem requiring constant supervision. So i moved schools, slept in my car, ran way.
And the thing about an eating disorder is that it doesn’t necessarily disappear when your life becomes interesting, it can feel like it, it can become quieter. You can get older, travel, work, fall in love, have extraordinary experiences and convince yourself you’ve moved beyond it. You can build an entire identity around being adventurous, capable and independent while something much older continues operating beneath the surface.
Slowly, it came back, or perhaps it never entirely left.
Although I need to make this clear because everyone thinks I have just snapped now because the people i have in Sydney have known me for 5 minutes, but it wasn’t just anorexia that brought me here. That’s the part I want people to understand.
It was depression too, and depression is a remarkably difficult thing to explain to someone who has never experienced the particular exhaustion of being alive while struggling to feel connected to your own life.
I don’t mean ordinary sadness. I don’t mean having a bad week or disliking your job. I mean understanding that the world contains beautiful things while feeling increasingly unable to experience them as beautiful.
You can know intellectually that life is worth living and still struggle to feel why, and I feel this so much. You can laugh at dinner, enjoy a conversation, put on a beautiful outfit, dance until three in the morning and wake up the following day with the same heaviness waiting for you.
For roughly eight years, much of my life revolved around the Middle East and the countries surrounding it. I travelled and worked in places that gave me an extraordinary sense of purpose. Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq. Places where I had to think quickly, trust my judgement and occasionally make things happen with very little information.
I learnt an enormous amount about people and the most beautiful generosity from strangers, resilience from communities and that human beings… but I also learnt to distrust people, actually before the Middle East.
To question motives, anticipate disappointment and notice inconsistencies between what somebody said and what they actually did. In some circumstances, those instincts served me well but in others, I suspect they made me exhausting to know.
I can want somebody desperately and still search for reasons they might leave, I can be offered kindness and wonder what is expected in return, which I know is bad because we shouldn’t expect anything but I know return… I have started to learn nothing is for free so I can become so frightened of trusting someone that I destroy the possibility of closeness before it has the opportunity to disappoint me.
A brilliant system, really because if nobody gets the chance to abandon you if you’ve already done the administrative work for them.
I used to think what I did actually did something and maybe it did… I hope so bad.
I’ve never believed I was saving the world and I’ve always been suspicious of people who arrive in another country announcing their intention to do that. But I believed my work had meaning and isn’t that what most of us want?
To do good things, to matter, to believe our lives amount to something beyond paying rent, answering emails and eventually becoming a collection of photographs somebody else has to sort through.
Then I came home and I don’t think I’ve ever properly recovered from the strange grief of returning somewhere that’s supposed to be yours and discovering you no longer feel you belong there. I know I sound like a broken record but I truly recognise the extraordinary privilege of living somewhere safe, comfortable and full of opportunity.
I think the problem coming back is I look at people around me who seem genuinely happy with their jobs, apartments, relationships and weekends. People who find joy in brunch, social events, dinner reservations and discussing renovations and I want to be them.
I wanted to be the girl who is satisfied with a nice dinner, a boyfriend, a good job and something to look forward to on Saturday. I want happiness that doesn’t require a plane ticket, a new country or the anticipation of something extraordinary. But I can’t make myself feel it especially when my whole WhatsApp is people from desperate places asking where I am, can I help them, did I abandon them as I was their only hope. I resent myself for that.
Because what sort of ungrateful person spends years witnessing the difficulties other people endure, returns to one of the most comfortable cities in the world and finds herself miserable?
But I tried to fit in, the parties, the dinners, the influencers, the events and strange little hierarchy of who was invited where and who was considered interesting enough to be seen with. I participated in it.
I wore the clothes, drank too much, made people laugh and occasionally enjoyed the idea that my life looked considerably more glamorous than it actually felt, I wanted to be cool not just the girl who went to dark places.
I could imitate the life around me without ever feeling comfortable inside it and I could go to the same places, wear the same clothes and laugh at the same jokes, but I couldn’t make myself want the same things. Sometimes I just want to wear my headscarf and believe in something again.
I don’t think I’m better than those people, quite the opposite (doctors reports now to prove it). I envy actually that’s not even through I love their ability to find contentment in things I struggle to appreciate. People who love their routines, know what they want and don’t feel the need to question and just want a good night and good story.
But apparently that’s me, Cluster B traits, which was another delightful addition to an already rather underwhelming fortnight. I don’t know if its confronting or comforting about hearing your personality discussed when you already feel you’ve lost control of your life.
Your anger, relationships, difficulty trusting people, fear of abandonment and tendency to run when somebody gets too close. Suddenly, things you’ve spent thirty years believing were simply you become open to interpretation.
I don’t yet know exactly what the assessment means in my case, and I have no intention of turning a clinical description into my entire identity. But I can recognise patterns.
Although, I will tell you what, it makes sense because what has hurt most over the past two weeks isn’t the medical procedures, the loss of authority or the conversations about my personality, It’s the silence. You think you have an extraordinary number of friends, people you party with, laughed with, drank with, appeared in photographs with. People who knew where I was on a Friday night. Yet, none of those people have come to visit. Your own brother takes the dog to the vet but doesn’t come and see you.
I know there may be reasons, one might not know what to say, one may not understand and some may simply have their own difficulties.
But I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t hurt… really hurt.
Because I’ve spent years believing my worth came from what I could offer other people, I’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time believing something dangerously close to it about myself. I tried to end my life because I was in pain. Surviving has not automatically resolved that pain, and now there are moments when it has felt worse, when you really have no one.
I need to be able to say that without it becoming an argument that surviving was a mistake and that is the work I’m only beginning to understand. Maybe I want to be ordinary and not hate myself for it.
In this ward I have everyone bonding and nurses keep saying I have a talent, so maybe that’s my talent.
And on that rather philosophical note, I’m going to attempt to get some sleep.
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