fiona wright small acts of disappearance

I’d come home from classes and sit in my bedroom with the lights off, crying silently in the dark. It wasn’t until years later that I recognised that the way I’d been feeling, when I was nineteen, in the year that I first became ill, that leaden sadness, that despair, was depression – my family and I didn’t have the language for it then, even though it seems obvious now. I didn’t, until years later, recognise it from primary school, where I’d never really fit in, where I didn’t understand the rules of friendship, where I even then didn’t know who or how to be. I remembered it from high school, but I’d joked then that I was just teen-angsting with the best of them. I remembered it from university, but I’d claimed then that I was working too hard, taking extra subjects and working part-time on top of studying with this extra load. It wasn’t until years later that I realised that I have always been, a little bit, on edge.

In hindsight, I know that this acute malnutrition was certainly contributing to how frantic and beleaguered I always felt, but it had been so long since I had felt any differently that it was hard to recognise that anything at all was wrong. I was so underweight, and I hated this, but I didn’t know to do. I was anxious, so highly-strung that I could barely sit still, that I couldn’t bear to have a night in, without plans and alone, that I found myself, one Saturday afternoon, feeling hot and nauseous and dizzy on a city street because I’d forgotten exactly how to breathe. The first time I ever saw any kind of psychologist, it was because I suspected I was anxious. Fiona says co-morbidity was one of the defining features of her eating disorder, so we asked her to share a little more. She also shared some of her journey with us here. Fiona wrote Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays in Hunger (2015) based on her personal experience of an eating disorder.

Fiona wright small acts of disappearance