I think this will be the last post regarding my eating disorders. It was a mere summary as I don't want to drag out too many details. I might write other posts related to the topic, but under particular angles.
After the 1993-1994 annus horribilis, things slowly got better. I went and talked to a psychiatrist a couple of times, but as she kept saying: "We can't do anything as long as you're that skinny", I stopped going. I couldn't stand the non-sense of her having to help me get less skinny but waiting for me to get less skinny before she starts doing her job. I still have in mind the very aggressive yellow of her waiting room. I will always wonder if this was done on purpose...
I started studying at Sciences-Po Paris in fall 1994. My parents couldn't afford any student accomodation so I was lucky to have a very helpful cousin letting me sleep on her couch for a month or so. I remember the medical check we all went through at the start of the university course and that guy telling me with a weird accent: "Mais mademoiselle, il faut manger, il faut manger plus !" ("But Miss, you have to eat, you must eat more!"). I was hardly 40kg. I would eat according to own rules, avoiding fat mainly. But I wouldn't put on weight... After a month there, I got enough. I felt so out of place again. I had no clue what I was doing there. It was so French, it was so petit bourgeois. It was my former (Catholic) school "upgraded" to even worse. And to me, Paris was a dirty, dull, arrogant, grey city.
One morning I was sitting there on their weird wooden bench in the hallway and I looked at the doors wide open and I just flew out...
On the way back to my cousin's apartment I gave a few coins to a beggar sitting on the pavement. She said: "Oh, merci. Dieu vous le rendra" ("Oh thank you, God will give it back to you"). It baffled me to the utmost, to say the least...
I packed my stuff quickly. I left a note to my cousin on her kitchen table. I said bye to her Bowie vinyls (great collection!). And managed, not sure how, to go back "home" before midnight...
I hooked myself on correspondence studies and moved down to the South, by myself. I got a scholarship that paid the rent of my tiny studio in Avignon. All at once, I got where I belonged. The South. My eating disorders disappeared slowly but surely. I particularly remember the huge and delicious Passe-Crassane pears from the small shop in my street, rue Carreterie. Half a kilo per piece...
I went on with the correspondence tuition of several bigger universities. Four years later, I moved to Nice to get my final diploma (post graduate). I loved it. It smelled like Italy so much. I rented a small studio and from the balcony, I could see the sea. It was heaven. I lived with a lionhead rabbit called Clinton, that a neighbor had given a few years back when we were still in the North-East. He was born in a school and before the summer vacation, they had to get rid of the "school pets". Because he was black, noone wanted him. I gladly took him. He would be my best friend for 15 years...
From 1994 to now, I got "only" two relapses. One when I moved to Geneva, one when I moved to Stockholm. It never happened right away. Both times it went ok for a few years and then, something started to feel not right. Whatever the stake, I had to fly away... To the South.
My psychiatrist used to tell me: "Wherever you go, you will always take your problems with you". Well, as long as I head South, it seems I can cope.
I must admit I've never eaten "normally" again (I'm in a kind of permanent "orthorexia" or rather "organirexia"). But have I ever eaten "normally" in my whole life? I don't think so.
These days, with the vegan diet or the globalization of the way we eat, the definition of "normality" becomes more and more blurry anyway. I sure care about what I eat (to the point that I grow my food myself as much as I can).
If food is not important in this life, then I don't know what is...