Elizabeth

Restricting food is like restricting pleasure and it’s like a compensation for any kind of fun. So the kind of example I use is this sort of holiday periods where I feel I can’t control what I’m eating and I feel like having the freedom to wander off around Europe and like see loads of different countries and visit loads of different places that had to be compensated for by not eating. And to kind of punish myself for that, for that freedom. And that experience. I had to like I had to kind of dampen the pleasure of, the enjoyment of that by making it really hard and making it, making myself feel like I was gonna faint the entire time because I was too weak, and yeah just, yeah being self-disciplined and I kind of feel, believe quite strongly that people don’t really deserve to have like, I felt that people just didn’t deserve to have any pleasure in their life. Like why? Why would you? Like why should you? You have to earn stuff and if you haven’t done anything to earn eating nice food, then why should you?

I can always like, you can make, one glass like if you forced into those situations where there’s, everyone is holding a glass of wine, you can make one glass like last a long time. And you can like, yeah I find it quite hard to kind of, getting drunk it’s kind of letting go of your body and I find that really hard. Because I’m so used to like utter control over my body, and so getting drunk is quite hard. I feel really disgusting like in, most people feel pretty awful when they’re hungover, but I feel like gross with myself. I feel disgusted by myself. Which I find quite hard, and I’m genuinely not very good at coping with alcohol either because I, for a long time like if I wasn’t eating much then that would be really hard. But even if I have a good meal now I’m just not very used to it. Somehow I’m not very good at coping with the alcohol.

Teachers, some teachers were amazing, other teachers were horrible. Some, yeah my form tutor was brilliant. She took me under her wing almost, and kind of cared for me. As you would do a kind of to a child almost I guess, as a daughter. I was, she was a biology teacher, I don’t know if that meant she understood any better or not, but she just seemed to kind of empathise and support. Other teachers were horrible, they were like “Oh, she’s not been here for a whole year, so we’re just going to give her a C because,” and I was a straight A student. Like I, you know, this was, before that I was like got A’s in everything. And so, “Oh, we’re just going to give her a C because she’s not really been here. So we don’t know what she’s like, so we’re just gonna like, we’re just gonna give the average,” really dismissive. Which I found really hard to deal with because it was like well they really obviously don’t care, and it made me feel like an even more of an outsider.