I have long puzzled what had made my experiences so painful to me sometimes. So much so that I found it difficult to move on. In many cases, I believe, I have not yet quite gotten to the core of it. I feel inside myself, I might still be focusing on the one thing to distract myself from something else. Would my experiences in psychiatry really have been so painful if I had entered a different person, better prepared somehow, able to validate my own needs and state my boundaries?

I wasn’t and I’m not quite sure why or how yet. But recently, I realized what I was looking and longing for before I entered the first clinic, as if it was absent in my life, in my being, and I needed to feel it: being sacred.

As I told you in my last story, I started fasting as a way to preserve myself in circumstances that felt threatening to me. It was not a conscious choice, to preserve myself this way. It was simply a longing I felt inside. I had been overweight most of my childhood and so fasting started as simply losing a bit of weight to become more like the others. To be able to wear nice clothes and look nice. I had never worn a bikini, never felt somebody looking at me and considering me beautiful, including me looking in the mirror. I was not cool like the other kids, I felt different. Mostly, people noticed about me that I was intelligent and supposedly insecure and I hated it.

I turned out to be good at losing weight. And I was very sensible about it too: eat my meals, nothing crazy, just snack less. After some months I felt a lot better, more energized. People made me compliments. It felt really good and I wanted to go a little further still. I could become the most beautiful girl in the room.

I guess at some point, simply losing some weight, getting fitter, turned into fasting. Maybe following any kind of diet is always a way of fasting, but what I mean is that I started to feel differently about it, in the sense that it became a religious practice. It did not just make me feel energized, it made me feel special, loved, sacred, alive, in a way that I had not felt in a very long time. Now, I believe, performing on a stage, singing, acting, and also, feeling loved by a man, make me feel the same. Back then, I had no other way to feel like that. And I wanted it more than anything else.

Fasting made me feel lighter, less burdened by the ties that were wearing me down within my family, their expectations, but also beliefs and expectations other people had about me. Fasting gave me a purpose, showed them a different side of me, that they wouldn’t be able to deny now. Or, at least, it gave me a private world, in which all that I wanted and felt and yet could never want and feel, existed.

Fasting gave me a space to be and feel myself. And in that, I felt connected, to the world and all that is alive and has lived. I was in a very sacred place. I felt attractive, even if I was very unattractive at the time, the flesh around my bones, my own blood and aliveness decreasing. I felt protected and there was something sexy about it. Though I was not practising any religion, maybe it had similarities to living like a nun, married to God.

I felt peace within the storm. Before I started fasting I was hitting myself in the face for feeling so worthless, making everybody sad. Numbing the pain of that I suspect. When fasting, I could stop hurting myself this way. It was a different, more bearable, kind of self-castigation. I was already punishing myself, so I wouldn’t have to feel anymore, that others’ punishment, their reproaches and judgements, that they were justified. I could and allowed myself to defend myself towards them, while being in control of my own “correction”.

At the same time, everything about me was screaming for help, for love, for being seen, for a safe place to be without punishment, a place to rest and recover, without expectations. To feel free, make mistakes, get to know myself, establish myself in the world, taking care of myself, protecting myself. I was exhausted.

In this state, exhausted but not in any direct medical danger, I entered an inpatient youth clinic. In this state, I went through all the examinations, observing me, measuring me, screening me. Conclusions came in clinical diagnoses, anorexia nervosa of the non-purging type was only one of them, and harmful personality traits. I also remember a problematic gap between different kinds of intelligences. It must still be gaping there, waiting for me to fall in.

Virtually no interest in my family, my home situation, my heritage, my life, my passions. In that clinic, I felt first and foremost data and information. Brains on legs. The foundation of the treatment was force feeding, a set pace for gaining weight at the punishment of (more) restriction of freedom, more surveillance, more patronising. I ate because I wanted to go home. That’s it.

By the end of it, I felt disgusted with myself. My face was all puffed up from the fast weight gain without any substantial exercise or guided physical training to support my recovery. I felt like I had been forced on extra body that was not mine and I wanted to take a sable to slice the flesh off and become me again. (Don’t worry, I did not, thankfully.) Never in my life, had I felt so horrid and disgusted with myself.

All the years before, I had been able to protect my body and soul from being invaded, I had been able to create a space for them to keep my something sacred inside. Now it had been forcefully pulled out and smashed against the wall, like it was a piece of worthless shit. Meaningless. And I believe to the people there, it was meaningless, or maybe rather, invisible. Otherwise, I’m sure they would have been more careful with it. I don’t believe they were bad people, just irresponsible maybe, blind. Unable to see where I was hurting, because they were protecting themselves from their own pain, like we all are.

I’m not sure how to conclude this story. Maybe just to say, that I believe it is important to consider ourselves sacred beings, part of something sacred that weaves the whole universe together, and everything alive in it. That we are individual, in the responsibility of our own little piece, our little patch, of sacredness, trusted to the care of our bodies and our souls. And that we are, at the same time, connected in our shared sacredness and that of the world.

I hope you feel special and loved and part of what keeps the whole world together, just for your being here.

Sending you my warmest wishes,
Sophie