Once, long ago ....
I knew this girl ...
who tried to make a break for freedom
by making herself thin.
Small ...
...inconsequential, so tiny she'd be able to slip through nets and weave escape ...
...like tuna.
That was the idea.
I was going up and down in weight.
I would be 9 stone, and then I'd be 7 stone, and then I'd be 5 stone
but it got to a point, where, I think even I realised that ...
... that this perhaps couldn't go on much longer, that this was really quite bad.
I think there was one moment where I was standing in my parents' kitchen,
because of course, I lived with my parents.
Your average 18-21 year old is out in the world doing great things,
and I was living with my parents.
I was making up my usual bizarre, ritualistic concotion
of what I would allow myself to eat,
which consisted of peeling potatoes
and pushing them under a grill - the peelings...
and burning them until they were literally bits of charcoal
and then attempting to eat them with gravy.
My rituals were so important to me.
I would be absolutely horrible to them, to maintain them.
I would insist that I wasn't disturbed in the kitchen.
They couldn't come in while I was cooking...
whatever I was cooking.
I remember my legs feeling freezing cold
and feeling that they weren't going to hold me up anymore,
feeling dizzy, like I wasn't able to see properly and thinking,
'This isn't very good. It hasn't gone this far before',
So I was doing that,
and then I'd go and throw up after that.
There are things that happened within my family
my brother had cancer when I was younger,
so you can see straight away that if one child is getting all the attention,
the other child is seeking it.
One way to get it is to give themselves an illness.
There was nothing they could do.
They thought the solution was getting me to eat,
but an eating disorder is never just about eating.
It's not about eating at all.
It's about retreating from the world
and the depression and the anxiety...
it's very difficult to speak to someone who's feeling those things.
There would be rows, hysteria.
It was like a living house of hell.
The straw, I think, that broke my back,
was when I started at college and was doing my A Levels,
and just the academic pressure of that period,
that was when the anorexia really started to cut in.
The turning point for me was when I was finally hospitalised
It was mainly because I kept on going out,
on epic 20 mile walks, little jogs with my bones,
to the local ASDA - well not local - next city ASDA,
to get a marrow, because I read that it was one calorie less than a swede.
That was the level of obsession.
I was a danger to myself and the world
because I'd go on these trips and a gust of wind would blow me over,
and I've got a scar on my chin when that happened.
When I was in hospital with anorexia, I was there for 24 hours
and then I had a breakdown.
I became pyschotic and that was because my routine had been disrupted.
For me, that represented the worst possible thing,
like not being able to go home, a Section means you can't leave.
I remember time moving backwards, flashes of things like that.
I thought that the whole world was engaged in a game
and that I was in the centre of it.
I thought I could fly. I thought I could speak to God.
I thought some very strange things and it's all in flashes.
I felt fractured. Everything felt like it had broken apart.
I literally thought things had,
so I had to literally go and find missing parts of myself
and put them back together.
I remember going round the ward, asking the staff and patients
if they could list a quality about me that they could see,
and I had loads of writing I was doing while I was psychotic,
and I've never actually looked at that writing, because it's quite mad,
but the experience of writing it,
the experience of trying to self-assemble again,
that stayed with me.
I came out with this awareness that yes there are things about me
that I'm not so happy with and there are things that are really good.
Now I want to explore them further.
I had been at art school in this period of eating disorders
and I'd gone to Brighton University.
I started out as a visual artist, but I'd always used lots of words.
So, as I was recovering I was naturally writing quite a lot,
to express what was going on and it was quite therapeutic
I met this poet while I was recovering,
and he encouraged me to go to an open mic night in Leicester,
and share some of that work, and I did.
I want an apology ...
... for the gloss wrapped varnish of women's magazines
... for the fish slick pages of fake dreams
models like cars with their sleek red gloss and beguiling charms
come over here with your children's jeans.
I want an apology.
It became a motive for my recovery, it became a way of expressing myself.
It doesn't matter how far I get.
This poetry is something I have to sustain me.
It's something I have - a quiet place I have to turn to
in the middle of the night, when things are feeling tough.
I suppose it's always there as a possibility.
I'd be lying if I said it wasn't.
But, I hope that I won't,
because I hope that I've built up a life now that works.