Sharing my body with an inner Gargantua
My small flat in the glossy 16th district of Paris is my scene and I’m the actor, the director and the prop man of my own play. I know perfectly how to place the brimming garbage bags, empty crisp packets and candy sachets in an organized mess on the floor.
It is hours after the first act — the easy one. Going to grocery stores late to avoid as many people as possible, buying 30 euros worth of frozen pizzas, pastas and puff pastry snacks, always with a stock of cookie dough ice cream, biscuits and milk chocolate to please my sweet tooth. Back home, I start cooking my first meal and finish with a generous amount of melted emmental on everything. My rounded desk and dining table is still full of glossy magazines, random books and annotated sheets of paper, I push everything as far as I can until I have enough space to set my plate and glass of Coke Zero. The TV is on, it works as my anaesthetic. Within the first two bites, my body seeps into a listless state of unfeeling numbness. I am on autopilot now. For the next 45 minutes, I eat as much as possible, savoury then sweet. I don’t even feel myself chewing, I just know I need to finish everything.
The second act is when the rushes of feeling come hurtling. I cannot believe I have just ingested things that could easily feed four people in a row. The little voice I hear in my head that keeps telling me I’m a failure is angry as ever. This most evil and unmerciful voice insists on how my fat body does not fit outside. That I take too much space in the streets, metro, stairs, queues and so on. “Stay here. Don’t ruin people’s day by letting them see your fat face”. Nothing seems to make it stop so I just crawl into my bed in jeans and a sweater. I don’t have any energy left to brush my teeth or change. I feel like a whale. I try to fall asleep, but deep down I know it’s not going to happen. I just close my eyes and take deep breaths.
Around 2am, I muster the energy to get up and run to the shower. I’m always so disgusted with myself that I have the urge to wash the sin from my skin. I try to make myself vomit several times with my toothbrush but I’m a coward. Throwing up is painful, makes you cry, and is basically as intense as a session at the gym. So I keep everything inside, choosing the stomach aches and the diarrhoea over the vomiting. Nothing is clean and glossy in this play, it’s a dark and dirty story. But not hopeless.
When I’m half napping during the day, trying to recover, I hear my phone buzzing with texts and calls. My parents, sisters, friends or people from school have tried to reach me several times. But I always feel too ashamed to answer them. Disappearing puts me in some kind of comfort zone where I have to socialize with no one except the voice in my head. When my school partner writes a message on my Facebook wall to say she is worried, I panic and text her right away, begging her to delete it for fear that someone else may see it.
That is where the final act begins. My re-discovery of a normal way of life — and calling back everyone I ghosted because I’m an expert when it comes to avoidance and finding excuses to cancel plans. You see, no one knows about my episodes. I started having them around eleven years old, in the intimacy of my parent’s kitchen in the dark with a flashlight. I learned to live with them, until I met with a therapy group at the age of 23. I listened to their story and discovered what I was experiencing was not gluttony nor love of good food, but something they called a hyperphagia crisis, not an episode. I’m now learning to control it and no longer be afraid to speak of it. Because as my hero Hermione Granger would say: “Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself”.
This essay was originally written for the Cosmopolitan UK scholarship 2018.
