Publishing old articles to my Substack feels a bit cheeky but (a) it’s one of my favourite pieces, (b) the publication it was written for has not maintained its archives and I’d like there to be a public version and (c) it’s about five years since I wrote it. The sunnier sequel to this piece is here. What a long five years it’s been.
Sometime in January 2010 your boiler broke, and your London flat was painfully, miserably cold. When you got home from classes you turned on the oven and perched on a chair in front of it, toasting your hands and knees. The boiler was fixed within a week. It wasn’t a big deal. Plenty of people put up with far worse on a daily basis. Somehow, though, the cold remained. It had been seeped into your bones. For months, it was your close companion, and it would become your clearest memory of the year.
When you are malnourished and underweight you are cold all the time. There is nothing to fuel your metabolism, which slows to a crawl. Every breeze whips through your limbs. In the winter this is easy enough to rationalise. In the spring, though, when you shiver on a sunny day, or press yourself against a radiator on an April afternoon, it is difficult to explain or excuse.
The coldness is also psychological. That does not mean people are androids. They think. They feel. They hope. Still, in 2010 everything was chillier. Your passion, curiosity, and amusement had cooled. All you had was cold and sterile obsession.
You were in London studying creative writing. Within a couple of weeks of starting the course, you realised it was going to be an exercise in wasting time expensively. Hundreds of bright young kids were studying creative writing, or journalism, or media studies, at just one of the dozens of English universities that offered such courses, with the hope of finding work in industries where full-time jobs were disappearing like horses from city streets.
But more than that, you had decided that as kind and hard-working as the tutors were, creative writing is not something one can teach. One can give somebody pointers, naturally, but there is no systematic means of improving one’s prose, or poems, or scripts. Creative development depends on experience, and being penned into a segment of north London did not seem like a good way of getting it.
Besides, you had come to hate your own writing. Having dreamed throughout the last years of your secondary education of having unlimited time in which to write, you realized that you had no inspiration or ingenuity. What seemed competent was fake, and what seemed sincere was crap. With three years ahead of you, you had nothing to give and nothing to get.
Still, you had looked forward to the social life at university more than the actual work. You had thought that when you got to university you would be surrounded by people you shared a strange, almost spiritual connection with. Universities were the kind of places where Kingsley Amis met Philip Larkin, where John Cleese met Graham Chapman, where Charles Ryder met Sebastian Flyte.
You soon found the same anxious awkwardness that you had found in school. The common denominator? You. You were too sensitive, too analytical, too given to presenting eccentricity as interestingness and too liable to think that life was something which happened to you rather than something you were actively constructing.
Anorexia helped to make your life more meaningful. It was not a status symbol. It was order and achievement. It gave 24-hours structure and significance. It shrank your baggy, empty life into a cold, hard shell without space for introspection, anxiety, or despair.
Anorexia made you a one-man totalitarian state. Everything was subordinated to it. When you met people, you organised your meetings around meals. When you read, you focused ruthlessly on writing about food. Like a Stasi special agent you tracked what you ate, taking an austere kind of pleasure in how little you required.
You could control yourself. You could not control people around you. Your family and friends were kind enough to be concerned. While you thought you were disciplined, ascetic, and independent, you became the cause of heartache, nightmares, and tears. Your abstinence was self-indulgent, if accidentally. Your discipline had made you dependent on the undeserved kindness of your loved ones. Your strength had made you weak.
You decided to get better, but half-heartedly. So, you ate too much to die but not enough to live. You existed, with no desire to make a fuss but no desire for anything else. It was a bizarre train of thought that inspired you to commit to recovery. You realized that you were thinner than Christian Bale when he appeared in The Machinist, a role for which he starved himself with an apple and a can of tuna fish per day. Bale’s character was a miserable, paranoid wreck — an object of pity among his only friends, a waitress, and a prostitute. You had always wanted to be interesting. You had never wanted to be pitied. The next day you ate as much as you possibly could.
The next morning, you woke up and your heart felt strange. You could feel it beating in your chest, and not in a soothingly regular rhythm but in a staccato stutter. You remembered reading about something called “refeeding syndrome,” where a sudden intake of nutrients overwhelms the metabolism of the undernourished. Fuck.
At the doctor’s, they performed an EKG — a test which measures the activity of the heart. Taking off your shirt, you felt more like a child than a man, inconveniencing adults with your youthful folly. The doctor emerged looking serious, and told you to go to the hospital. “Now?” “Now.”
Your dad drove you there, doing a heroic job of not crashing on the way. You were rushed through the emergency department, which, in Britain, means that the doctors suspect that you are on the brink of death. You had heard of people who had been pouring blood and yet had had to wait for hours, holding the corners of their wounds together. You tried not to look at the people who were waiting.
On a bed, enclosed by curtains, you felt your heart thundering with such force that it was as if it was trying to leave your body. Was this death? You did not want to die. You had never thought about it. It had barely mattered. Now that the hooded cunt was knocking at the door, though, you wanted nothing to do with him. You wanted to be happy. You wanted to make other people happy. You wanted to live a life that meant anything more than this.
A nurse came in and asked if you wanted good or bad news. Bad news, of course. (Who wants the good news first?) They had to do some more blood tests. Okay, so what was the good news? Nothing is wrong with your heart, she said. The doctor’s assistant must have put the electrodes in the wrong positions when she did the EKG. It happens a lot, she said, with an embarrassed shrug
Your heartbeat grew slower and softer. Your dad pointed out that your blood pressure had declined. You wondered how many people have had heart attacks out of sheer terror after being misdiagnosed.
The farcical comedy of the situation was the first thing you had really laughed about in months. The absurd contrast between the startling existential threat and the everyday incompetence shook your fragile ribs. As you walked out into the sun, you felt a sudden warmth.
After a mortifying therapy session — before which you had gotten lost, and doubtless startled passers-by in running up to them, wild-eyed and out of breath, to ask for directions to the mental health centre — you resolved to go through recovery alone. (I would not recommend this to anyone.) Your progress was faltering and painful, and wasted youthful time and energy that you now mourn. Still, I am not sure you could have done it differently.
I spent much of the last decade doing my damnedest not to be the person that you were. I have tried — and often failed, but tried — to make something of life, and overcome neuroses, and be someone who supports others more than being supported. But I admire you. Now, I struggle to transcend my petty faults: to be organised at work; to be calm in arguments; to resist the temptation to have another drink. You struggled with almost everything that made you you. That is not exceptional, of course. A lot of people do it — many of them with more severe conditions, or without the blessing of supportive families. But I wanted to write down a word of thanks, 10 years on, because without you those 10 years would never have been.
Thanks for sharing Ben! Your life experiences and your self-reflection have made you a damn good writer…..
I'm so sorry you went through this. Youth can be almost unbearably lonely. The nurse's shrug made me furious.