My Secret Life by Leanne Waters

I’ve lost track of time and it’s dark outside so I can’t see anything properly. I wipe my mouth where a bit of drool had been trickling down and am suddenly aware that something isn’t right. Grabbing a nearby hand-mirror, I can just about make out my face in a ray of light, the source of which I do not know. As if an apocalypse has decided to take place in my head, all horrors of the world seem to crash down on top of me, igniting trepidation and hysteria. All my teeth have fallen out. I open my mouth just wide enough to see big pink gums and my tongue falling around in my mouth, no teeth to keep it fenced in.
    ‘Mum!’ I start screaming, but to little avail because it sounds too muffled for anyone to hear. ‘Mum! Come in here, Mum! My teeth, I need help!’
    ***

    When I finally woke up, I was temporarily still convinced that there wasn’t a tooth left in my head. After a few moments of lingering distress, I slumped back on my pillow, reassured that it had just been a dream. But my uneasiness was always difficult to shake off and these nightmares usually left a moody and irritable residue to each new day’s premiere. They were quite common by that point in my life. Perhaps they had even become nightly occurrence but thankfully I didn’t always remember them. They were more or less the same from night to night; I would start bingeing on food in whatever the given circumstance and would somehow finish the dream with no teeth and an alarmingly realistic foreboding that would persist long after waking.
    They were only dreams and given I had never read too deeply into them in the past I wasn’t about to start doing so now, regardless of the context. Besides, I had little interest in dwelling upon the subconscious when my conscious reality had begun to reach such a point of turmoil. An eating disorder comes about as a consequence of a great number of varying factors, as we have seen and continue to explore. What enables it to persevere and adopt new manifestations is often subject to the ongoing lifestyle of the given individual. As well as feeding on the person whose body it inhabits, an eating disorder feeds on the environment in which it lives. It is mutable in this way. Its ability to bend and contort as a means of fitting the necessary mould is both skilful and an absolute requirement to guarantee its further existence.
    I suppose, it is this faculty that determined my eating disorder as bulimia as opposed to anything else. It took a measure of time though; I suffered an eating disorder long before I acted out any bulimic behaviours. The problem is that these words, phrases and concepts to which we attribute such mental illnesses are too ambiguous in their meaning. They are umbrella terms that have been generalised to a point of mild obscurity, if not total equivocation. Moreover, our understanding of them is usually very primitive, perhaps even completely ignorant, in comparison to the complexity of the particular disease. An acquaintance of mine, with whom intellect had not graced and who was aware that I’d struggled in this way, once highlighted my point perfectly.
    ‘Aren’t you, like, anorexic or something?’ he said to me. Yes, he executed his question exactly like that. Needless to say, I was unimpressed. But there seemed little point in lying; I had only recently written an article for my university newspaper in which I detailed my story, hoping to God some good may come out of it. Instead, I got this guy.
    ‘No. I’m bulimic’ I told him.
    ‘Oh right, yeah. That’s the one where you make yourself sick, isn’t it?’
    ‘That’s the one.’ If monotone sarcasm ever had a moment of prodigious notoriety, that would have been it. Well this is just brilliant , I thought to myself. Two years of emotional and psychological depravity and in one sentence, this guy had defined what it is to be a bulimic, convinced himself of whatever meaning he gave it and I imagine that in his own head, the matter