My conflict with food began before I was born. According to family lore, I couldn’t be sated, even in utero. I consumed everything, apparently putting my twin at such risk that we were delivered prematurely. There are even stories of me climbing into my twin’s crib late at night and stealing their milk bottle, swapping it out with my empty one. I’ve always felt hunger, but I soon learned to associate “want” with shame.
In 2020, I started working on a novel about mother and daughter cannibals, who lure lost souls to their rural forest homestead and bake them into pies and stews. It wasn’t a conscious choice to write about women with a carnal desire to feast, but slowly, deep into drafting – which is a very physical act for me because I write by longhand – I realised that my relationship with food and consumption was changing. Exposure to these women, who binged without guilt or inhibition, forced me to confront my fraught relationship with food, and in turn, eventually, heal it.
As long as I can remember, I’ve always been hungry. Unbeknownst to the adults around me, I was a child with undiagnosed autism and ADHD, which meant my behaviour around food was inherently complex and difficult. At a sleepover, I remember coveting my friends’ unopened Advent calendar. It was on her windowsill, filled to the brim with sweet, delicious things that didn’t belong to me, but she’d had the impulse control to keep it fully intact before December began. I reached and pulled it from the windowsill and while the other girls forged the early bonds of lifelong friendships in the front room, I slipped under her bed and ate every single chocolate. I stayed there, hidden beneath her mattress. The guilt set in, but teeth aching and lips sweet, there was only one thing I knew for certain: I wanted more.
For years I bounced between binge-eating everything I could see, and starving myself. Food became more complicated as I grew up. Not only did I want things I wasn’t supposed to, I started having opinions and rituals around food. I became the worst thing a little girl can be (apart from greedy): fussy. I had systems for my food, orders in which I ate things, specific temperatures I needed my food to be, and textures I loved and loathed. I counted out the chips to make sure they were exactly the same in size and number as my twin’s portion.
Sometimes, I would sit at the dinner table for hours on end, staring at a full plate of food, watching it go cold and congealed, unable to eat because it wasn’t the way I wanted it. My behaviour often resulted in being sent to bed with no tea and an empty belly. For being greedy. For answering back or being fussy. For midnight snacking when I was hungry after lights out. My identity was becoming shaped around my relationship to food.
I was a girl with no friends and a hole in my chest that couldn’t be filled. At that age, you begin to see the world differently. Suddenly, you feel an impulse to be thinner. Smaller. To take up less space and be self-conscious in every way you possibly can. But you’re not sure why, because you haven’t learned terms like patriarchy or body dysmorphia or eating disorder yet. You just feel it inside your body – that calling to be smaller in every way you can possibly make yourself.
I vividly remember floating between friend groups in the school cafeteria, having no real gravity and desperately wanting to be accepted by someone. Anyone. So that place, where people came together to eat their lunch, became a space I felt lonely and empty.
I spent most of my free time in the school bathroom where I’d throw up all that hunger. It felt good because whatever that bad feeling was inside my body, it was gone. The hunger had been sated. Food felt like a means of bargaining – taking back control and autonomy when I felt powerless.
