The Stay

I saw some disturbing things too. At one point a woman in her 20’s was staying in our shared room and she was there voluntarily to treat her resistant depression with electroshock therapy. I remember chatting to her before her being taken for treatment. When she was returned, she was lying on her back on the bed; eyes vacant and staring into space; seemingly unable to communicate. I also witnessed another woman who may have been in her late 20’s or early 30’s but appeared much older due to her skeletal facial features. She was being force-fed via a nasogastric tube. She disappeared one day, and I never saw her again. I have no idea if she had died or had somehow gained enough weight to leave; though I seriously doubted the latter had occurred due to her level of emaciation. However, if seeing the misery on her face was not incentive for me to eat while I was there, I’m not sure what was. I kept myself happy while in hospital with simple things like listening to music on my Sony Walkman, which I played my then favourite song – December 1963 (Remix) by the Four Seasons – on over and over again. When I wasn’t on bedrest, one of the girls and I also sneaked away sometimes and wandered through the University of Sydney – where she was also studying – and down the streets of Newtown.

I was going well and had reached 52kg – with only 4kg to go – when I took a downward slide. A young adult male inpatient, who was being treated for depression, made what was really an innocuous comment about my weight. He said that it was noticeable that I had gained weight, but that I looked ‘fit’. I think the fact that someone had noticed a weight gain in me other than me, even though it was healthy, had triggered me. I simply wanted to cry and from that moment I almost stopped eating again. The next morning, I only had a banana at breakfast and waited out the rest of the 30 minutes. I pushed my food around at lunch and dinner; once again waiting it out. Within just a few days I had dropped to 47kg. The guy who had made the remark had noticed the change in me, as had everyone. He apologised and wrote me a beautiful poem, called Butterfly, which I have still kept to this day. However, the damage had been done. I never thought of it as his fault though. While his comments may have been insensitive given the circumstances and extreme fragility of all of us girls as we were gaining weight, I believed even then that he meant it as a strange type of compliment.

Word spread quickly of my weight loss in the unit, and the head doctor of the Eating Disorder program asked for a meeting with me where he asked me about my sudden weight loss and refusal to eat. He didn’t try to ask me to stay. He explained to me that because I was out of the danger zone, and also 18 years of age, I could not be kept in hospital against my will. He spoke in such a cool, detached, yet professional manner that I felt as though he didn’t care. Armed with that knowledge however, I decided to leave in the next day or so. What is fascinating about a prison, even a perceived prison, is that you adapt to it. Those enclosed walls can provide a strange comfort and safety net from the rest of the world and become like home. After those three months, my parents’ home now felt foreign to me. Nevertheless, I never returned to that hospital again – or any other – as a patient of anorexia nervosa.

Before I left, I was spoken to by one of the female health professionals there. She knew that I loved both classic and foreign films. She told me about a film that she had just seen by Roman Polanski called Bitter Moon, starring his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner. She said that it was a story of lust, passion and betrayal revolving around Seigner – a gorgeous, voluptuous and sensual woman who was also the central ‘black widow’ protagonist. She told me about this story to show me that beauty and sexuality are not always thin; that female power is not always starved. I absolutely loved the movie, and while it didn’t change my views on my own body in relation to size, it made me appreciate the female form in all sizes a lot more. It also made me fall in love more with foreign and independent films where realistic, unaltered (by plastic surgery) naked female forms – in addition to their unashamedly lustful sexuality – are celebrated rather than shamed.