I am Rachel, final year psychology student, the cheeky one in an amazing group of slightly mad friends, big sister to Madeleine, and when at home I care for my mum.  I’m an avid mental health campaigner and ( very!) Well-practised cocktail drinker. I am the coordinator of two student-led mental health groups at university, and known as ‘monkeybrain’ to some people. I love going out and I love film nights.

 I also used to be anorexic.

I was diagnosed at 14 when anorexia came crashing into my life and spent the best part of 4-5 years in and out of treatment for the disease. Anorexia was an isolating and excluding presence; I left my teenage years without having many deep friendships I felt I could rely on. This was due to time in hospital and an inability to switch off from the anorexic thoughts. I didn’t know anybody at all who had recovered from an eating disorder that lived nearby and I was too shy to look for online support.

 It was all very lonely.

I wish I had somebody I could easily relate to who had come out the other side. It’s so hard to stay strong sometimes and this is why I am happy to share my recovery story with others. A personal representation of recovery can offer a bit of light at the end of the tunnel.  To know that somebody just like you, (without the use of any superhuman powers!) has pushed through it all and moved on can be really reassuring.  

Recovery is a sudden revival of life; everything is so fresh, so exciting and so colourful now. Life is no longer empty and hollow; instead it’s vibrant, fast-moving and I enjoy the challenges and the fun presented to me every day.

You achieve recovery step by step and sometimes it feels like you’re going backwards. But every now and then you get a little sense of ‘wow, look how far I’ve come.’ It’s an incredible journey; a chance to explore your personality and try different identities til you find the one that fits.

 Imagine you have fallen off a boat and you’re trapped in the ocean; there is a massive cruise ship with lifeboats, people dancing and laughing on board but it’s quite far away from you. Right next to you is a stick floating about that you could hang on to for a while but you don’t know how long for. Do you risk swimming over to the ship or just stay put and cling to the stick?’

Recovery is represented by the ship; it’s further away and harder to get to but it promises a safe trip back to shore amongst laughter and people. The stick conveniently placed right next to you represents anorexia; easy to reach, comforting in the short-term but it offers you no chance of getting out of the ocean. What do you pick?

It takes a while to fully commit to recovery and accept whilst it’s the most challenging option, it is also the most rewarding and fulfilling.

I am Rachel. I am recovered and most of the time I am happy. Recovery doesn’t mean everything is suddenly perfect; sometimes I cry, sometimes I laugh and I get angry sometimes. But I love being myself now; I love my relationships and I love all the things I able to do now that I am better. 

Hello! My name is Rebecca, and I would like to share my story with you…

I developed anorexia whilst I was at secondary school, and my battle with the disorder lasted for just over 3 years. I began the journey of recovery by myself: a decision that I decided I had the strength to make shortly before taking my GCSE exams. A routine hospital appointment that I had had confirmed that if I didn’t begin to take steps towards eating again, I would be hospitalised, and before this point, I had not admitted to anyone, not even my friends or family, that I had an eating disorder (even though it was very obvious) and the thought of being admitted to hospital would clearly mean that people would ‘know’ that there was something very wrong with me. So I began the long journey of self-recovery, gradually taking big steps and little ones toward gaining control over the disorder that had dominated my life for so long.

Right now I am currently in the process of finishing my Master’s degree dissertation in the field of the Creative Arts in Education, having worked in Education in Peru, Haiti and London upon graduating from University.  These days my main passion is for the expressive arts: dance, drama, music and art, and these interests blossomed out of my recovery from anorexia, and have remained incredibly important to me ever since.

I found that once I had made the enormous mental leap from being controlled by my eating disorder, to wanting to take control over it, the creative arts were very powerful tools in helping me to understand the array of emotions that anorexia had tried so hard to supress. Through my engagement with dance and drama in particular, I felt like I could be someone else, almost speak another language to the one that had been dominated by anorexia. Although the arts didn’t give me all of my sought-after answers to my emotional and mental confusions, they did provide me with an outlet, a release, a vital escape from my own mind for a blissful few hours. Like many sufferers who have now recovered have expressed, when you have an eating disorder it is such an all-encompassing experience that it often becomes impossible to separate your individual sense of self from the disorder, which when you are going through the recovery process can leave a hole in the way that you are defined as a person, as the grip of the disorder is lessened. Having an involvement with the expressive arts, for me, helped to fill that void with enriching, confident, inspiring and positive versions of myself that I liked very much, and was proud of. 

In my free time at the moment, I enjoy spending time with my family and friends, volunteering for arts organisations, and when relaxing in the evenings, depending on my mood I can either be found curled up with a good book, or in a dance studio somewhere! It makes me happy to think that the arts will always be a huge part of my life, and I hope that my future career in this field can inspire others to find their own form of expression, understanding and voice.

When I think back to my eating disorder what strikes me is the amount of time I lost thinking about food and weight. Since then I have built things into my life that mean more to me than my eating disorder, and I’m not prepared to lose any more of my life to it.

I started restricting my food intake when I was fourteen and was referred to an eating disorders service. I soon gained weight but hadn’t addressed the issues surrounding my eating behaviours and consequently developed bulimia. I spent several years engaging in numerous eating plans, medications and therapies, and even dabbled with hypnotherapy.

I don’t recall any ‘click’ moment when I decided that I was going to recover from my eating disorder. For me it was a gradual process of building positive and exciting opportunities into my life that were more important than rigidly controlling eating.

I have chosen to share my story because I am passionate about raising awareness of eating disorders, and through this I have been able to find meaning in my suffering. Although it was a painful experience I have learned a lot, and hope that I can use this to provide some positive and constructive advice that will help others. As part of this I conceived and co-ordinated Body Gossip On Tour, a body image campaign that encourages students to talk openly about their bodies so that in future they will worry about them less.

I am now also a mental health campaigner working with local secondary schools to recognise those that have made a substantial effort to support their student’s emotional wellbeing. Through this I have had the opportunity to make presentations to both students and teachers to raise awareness of mental illness in young people. I also work with CAMHS teams to develop participation services and training materials. Furthermore I have developed a CAMHS inpatient workshop that I have been delivering locally to support young people in psychiatric units. I am currently collaborating with local and metropolitan police forces to extend the training that officers receive on mental health awareness.

Contemplating recovery was scary. I wasn’t sure what type of person I would be without my eating disorder; it felt part of my identity. What I have now realised is that I’m so many more things; a campaigner, a student, a girlfriend. I didn’t have the energy, time or enthusiasm to be any of these things when I was in the midst of my eating disorder. Recovery didn’t happen overnight, and I definitely had a few wobbles on the way. Only when I look back to how I was a few years ago do I realise how far I’ve come, and how much more I now have in my life.  

Maybe I am who you think of when you think of someone with an eating disorder, but I’m not sure who people think of. I am happy though for the world to know that I have had an eating disorder. I am happy for you to know this for two reasons. First, I wish when I had been ill, I had seen recovery first hand. I wish I had had a picture in mind of the recovered anorexic. Second, I know the process of recovery made me a stronger person today. Recovery is not a process of regressing back to the person you were before the illness. It is a process of rebuilding a new life. If I don’t acknowledge my mental health problems, I ignore a vast part of who I am. 

Recovery for me, as for many people, was not easy. It is probably the hardest thing I have done. It took a lot of strength and courage. Unsure of myself before the eating disorder, I had let my eating disorder become my personality, “I was anorexic.” I was not beautiful, or clever or funny or sociable. Though I may have been any of these things, I was just anorexic. This is what defined me. This was my personality. Recovery required the courage to cast aside everything that I felt defined me and be brave enough to let life fashion me anew.

Just think about it, think about how you define yourself and think then of what you would do if you chose to stop defining yourself in that way; how hard would it be to spin a new identity? How hard would it be to face the world while you were unsure of your identity, while you were working out what this new personality was? I made these first steps very slowly. I spent time drawing mind maps of who I was and who I wanted to be. I thought about what it would take to get me to where I wanted to be and debated whether a personality is in built or innate. I listened to music and decided that I had musical preferences that might have set me apart as different from others and took this as a starting point to building a new me; a me that had real likes and dislikes, preferences and opinions.

Today I am in my final year at the University of Oxford, finishing a PhD in psychology. I love books, particularly magical realism such as Haruki Marukami and Louis de Bernies. I am happiest outdoors and love walking and gardening, though I am still better at killing plants than making them grow. I love food and I love cooking – truly I know from my experience that an anorexic can reach a point where they are relaxed around food and able to let food, and more importantly eating, put a smile on their face. My boyfriend wowed me with his culinary skills – he makes fantastic curies! Am I happy? I think happiness is a fleeting concept – try and catch it and it will slip away, but, I love my life, I am grateful for every day.