The author has nothing but compassion for those devastated parents who look on helplessly as their child self-destructs At one stage, Freeman’s mother was told to prepare for her death. She would spend the next three years in and out of psychiatric institutions where she and her fellow patients would go toe-to-toe with staff over food. She stopped eating, exercised obsessively and lost her capacity to feel joy. After that fateful PE lesson, Freeman’s fall was “instantaneous and vertiginous”. They are impossible to predict and, in isolation, cannot be held responsible for the illness taking hold because, as Freeman notes, “anorexia was a bomb inside us, just waiting for the right time, the single flame, the trigger”. Normal was nothing.”ĭoctors often call the moments that set off anorexia in patients the “precipitant”. ‘Normal.’ Not ‘slim’, not ‘thin’ – ‘normal’. “I wish I was normal like you.” At this, Freeman writes, “a black tunnel yawned open inside me, and I tumbled down it, Alice into Nowhereland. Noting Lizzie’s skinny legs, and her own “matronly trunks”, she asked Lizzie if it was hard to find clothes when you’re small. On this particular day, Freeman was in a PE lesson at school, sitting on the floor, legs outstretched, next to a girl named Lizzie.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2023
Categories |