How I became an addict, addicted to an eating disorder and to being wanted and needed

I was the daughter of the Indian ambassador to Paris, living in a palatial home situated alongside the Eiffel Tower, a four-storey establishment called an hotel particulier. It was the type of house occupied by aristocrats in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. My university, the American University of Paris, scattered amongst various buildings and annexes both old and new, was a short walk away, across the beautiful park that skirted the Eiffel Tower. Between my home and university I lived two brilliant lives, an illusion I established for the world around me but not one that I believed in the graves of my mind and soul, where I hid my secrets and the truth roamed free. I fabricated new personalities to support that illusion, becoming more distant from myself than I had ever been while trying to find the nourishment my ego craved...

My apology is to myself, to the child born on August 26, 1974, named Diya, a little one full of innocence and showered with love... but in 1989, on the eve of turning 16, that child was no longer innocent. She was shameful and when she found herself in danger of being exposed as an anorexic, she adopted the convenient camouflage of bulimia — she became, what is known as, an anorexic-bulimic. I ate when I had to, in public; I ate as little as I could for the purpose of my dangerous game of pretend, all the while plotting my escape to the nearest bathroom. I used two fingers roughly pushed down my throat until I gagged and vomited. And if I sensed anything remaining in my digestive system, I would drink as much tap water as I could to flush it out. Eventually, when my body got used to this routine of punishment following any nourishment, I no longer had to use my fingers. I would merely bend over and my body would be completely submissive to the purging, to the self-flagellation that induced a kind of levitation where I could neither be harnessed nor harmed.

Very soon bulimia evolved into much more than a front that obscured anorexia; it became my primary purpose — to escape my loneliness by foraging for food and to suffocate my feelings by eating indiscriminately. I didn’t taste anything I ate, but I would eat feverishly until I could bear no more and was forced to vomit for physical release from the prison of my reality. It has not been underlined sufficiently in literature on eating disorders, or by authorities on the subject, that both the denial and purging of nourishment generate a powerful high.

It is the same high that desensitises every addict and it is also the cunning trap of anorexia-bulimia — not the skeletal frame that the disease engenders. No one in the throes of the illness is able to see the real shape of their own body. No one in the throes of the illness is ever thin enough, until perhaps on their deathbed, and in most cases, not even then...

I went to the college cafeteria and, indiscriminately, I gathered as much food as I could. I put some on a tray and hid the rest in my handbag and pockets. I returned to my room where I ate with a punishing force, so violent it nearly choked me. Then I went to the bathroom and vomited, gagged, vomited again and again until I could barely lift my head. When I did, it was back, that lightness of being which silenced the noises in my head and decelerated the beating of my tormented heart... I could not see that the appreciation by others was maturing into one of a sexual nature... I was introduced to cocaine and then crack... There was a time when we indulged in the radical abuse of those drugs, when the nights did not end, daylight never came and all boundaries were stretched and broken. But finally, on one of those occasions, the night did end. I was an addict, addicted to an eating disorder and to being wanted and needed.

I was an addict who had prostituted herself in exchange for preservation in a world that was itself a whore of chemicals. It was a world in which love, laughter, celebration and control were hallucinations — they were counterfeit. But I did not permit any sorrow to rise to the surface. I granted myself another decree of shame...

(This article first appeared in India Today Woman.)