Sacha Jones (2009)

[Sydney City Ballet: Coppelia (1983)]

Hunger

To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of non-understanding, was impossible ...

- Franz Kafka, “A hunger artist” (1924)

Prologue

When you regurgitate an entire packet of Hundreds and Thousands into the toilet, a multiplicity of brightly coloured sugar specks merge to create a lumpy pink-brown slush, just a few of the most valiant specks flashing and darting to the surface, fighting against the swollen river like doomed swimmers, eventually being swallowed up and washed away in the tidal flush ...

The word ‘bulimia’ is Greek for ‘ravenous hunger’. Although we all come into the world ravenous, some turn out to be much more ravenous than others ...

For eight years I was a committed bulimic driven by a rapacious hunger to eat and eradicate, eat and eradicate, over and over in a cycle that exposed me to a distinctly unglamorous side of life in some of the most glamorous cities of the world. Every day began with a firm resolution to deny my hunger, to starve my way to recovery and redemption. But the longer I held to my resolve, the more urgent the hunger grew so that when the resolve not to eat inevitably collapsed, the hunger was so fierce in its outrage, that it drove me to even greater extremes of binge-eating and aggressive purging that eventually drew blood from the lining of my stomach, throat, and heart ...

No matter how greedily I ate I remained hungry. On the surface this hunger was for the ballet figure and career that had driven me to extremes of food-denial in the past, which had delayed the onset of puberty for several years, and which eventually, had unravelled in London on the other side of the world from my home in Sydney partly due to my increasing food consumption. It is easy enough to blame the rigorous demands for physical perfection that ballet entails for this cycle of self-destruction that ensnares so many dancers. But living in this world, one learns a deeper truth about ballet and art in general, a truth which suggests that sacrifices of the body – of mere physical pleasure – are an inherent part of the artist’s pursuit of a higher purpose and understanding.

Today, some twenty years on, I neither diet or binge or purge. Nor do I dance. However I do continue to hunger for the understanding that Kafka’s ‘artist’ died for lack of. I have children to look after, to nourish, to grow, and to believe in...I cannot afford to give up even for art’s sake. But neither can I properly nourish others until I have been nourished myself...

•

Sydney, August 16th, 1982:
Somehow the senna powder solution I’d forced down my throat in the bathroom last night hadn’t worked. At 6am I woke with the alarm and lying there in the top bunk, with my heart beating as if I’d been running, I realised the food I’d eaten before going to bed was still inside me.

Tears of panic and anger began to well up as I grappled around in my head for a way out. I could hear my sister breathing from the lower bunk and knew she and the rest of my family would be awake soon. Normally the senna, which was the strongest laxative in my arsenal, would wake me well before dawn and I’d have to be careful not to clamber too hastily down the bunk ladder to get to the toilet in time without waking my sister. Often it got me up more than once in the night and by morning I felt positively virtuous having thoroughly cleansed my body of the devil calories; my family none the wiser. No harm done. It seemed a good system, when it worked.
So what had gone wrong this time? Lying there in the dark, my child’s body painfully bloated, but not the usual reassuring pressure in my bowel, I dismissed the possibility I’d become immune to the laxatives, as I’d read eventually happens. Surely I hadn’t been taking them long enough? Perhaps the few stolen morsels of mince pie scraped from the sides of the dish discarded by the family last night hadn’t been enough for the laxative to work with. I dismissed this too, preferring an explanation I could do something to fix. I decided I can’t have taken enough of the powder. I hated it so much. The dark green glug it became when mixed with water caused me to gag just to look at it ...

It was ironic, I guess, that in these early days I clung to a distinction between what I did, occasionally taking laxatives and only as a last resort ... and what the die-hard bulimics did on a regular basis, which I saw as cheating, pure and simple.
Still in the dark, I got up and silently retrieved the box of powder from its hiding place at the back of the drawer on my side of the wardrobe. I headed quickly to our bathroom cursing, yet again, its close proximity to the rest of the family’s bedrooms. I locked the door, reassured by its solid, familiar sound. Without giving myself time to chicken out, and assiduously avoiding the large mirror over the vanity, I sat down on the closed lid of the toilet and scooped a generous spoonful of black powder into a glass, adding the smallest amount of water to keep to a minimum the quantity to be swallowed. Taking a deep breath of courage, I downed the dark lumpy potion in two gulps and several gags. It was not unlike swallowing shit...in one end and out the other ...

With the dastardly deed done, I rested briefly, ignoring the scales that eyed me from the shadows beneath the vanity where they lay in wait for me every morning like a troll. The daily weigh-in was mandatory self-discipline, but I couldn’t face it this morning, knowing I’d be at least a pound over Tuesday’s target weight of 40.5kgs (39kgs by Friday). My diet since leaving school at 14 to join the Sydney City Ballet Company as one of the company’s two principal dancers was a strict weekly programme of one meal a day – breakfast – Monday to Friday, and ‘normal’ eating/binging on the weekends.

As punishment for last night’s lapse, I decided to forgo this only meal for the day. I went to the fridge anyway, and took several swigs of TAB (diet coke) from the bottle to try to wash away the foul taste of senna. The remaining shepherd’s pie looked so tantalising beneath a skimpy piece of plastic wrap I swallowed down hard on tears of frustration beginning to threaten my resolve. The pressure in my bowel was already a deep twisted pain that I knew would get worse before there was any relief. I thought of the eisteddfod coming up in a month. This year I had to win. I deserved to win after last year’s second place. People were counting on me. I needed the prize money to get to London. I’d wanted to go to London ever since I was a small child; since before my mother put me into ballet, aged six. Pictures and films suggested something splendid and magical about the place; a magic I felt was so patently lacking in the bland ruggedness of the bush and sand-clad suburbs of Sydney’s North Shore where I grew up. The vision was fortifying.

I slammed the fridge door shut, relieved to have won that round. Returning to the bedroom where my younger sister slept on, I quietly dressed before arranging my long hair in a painfully meticulous bun in the half-light of the darkly curtained room. Finally, heaving my bag weighed down with several pairs of pointe shoes and Correspondence School books over my shoulder, I headed out to catch the 7.10 bus to Chatswood. From there, as usual, I would take the 7.40 train to Central Station and walk the half-hour distance through the seedy Ultimo tunnel to arrive at the studio in enough time to warm-up before class at 9am ...

Walking down the hill to the bus stop my bowel was gripped by a violent spasm. I knew I didn’t have long before I’d have to get to the bathroom. I almost turned around rather than board the bus that would trap me for at least half an hour. If the bus was running late, or the morning traffic to the city was heavier than usual, I probably wouldn’t make it ...

•

My mother’s diary records that some time later that day I collapsed in the bathrooms of the company’s Ultimo studios and ended up in intensive care at Sydney Hospital. I remember feeling dizzy and nauseous as I sat on the toilet while the rest of the Company rehearsed Coppelia, praying nobody would disturb me before I’d finished; before the putrid smell of my guts emptied out could shock the other dancers who looked up to me – the principal dancer – or so I thought ...

Later that year, on the magnificent Concert Hall stage of the Sydney Opera House, I stood weeping uncontrollably, mascara staining my not-quite-thin-enough cheeks, the second-place trophy slumped heavily in my trembling hands, as the gazelle-like winner of the Peter Stuyvesant Cultural Foundation Scholarship was announced...
My determination returned with a vengeance. For the next six months I worked even more relentlessly on my body and technique and in May I won the Society of Dance Arts Scholarship; a lesser prize, but enough to get me to London ...

•

London, February, 1984:
I wake with the realisation of last night’s binge strangling my heart with giant fat fingers. It’s still night, but I can tell it’s too late to get rid of the food I fell asleep on and can now imagine spreading to every inch of my expanding body, making a messy meal of the sculptured form I’ve put so many exhausting hours into fine-tuning and disciplining.

I realise also there is no possibility of taking a ballet class today, of showing my bloated body to the wall of mirrors or the world of watchers reflected in it. Falling asleep on a binge is the worst of this miserable life, I hate myself in multiple, pointless ways. Rolling over to hide from the glare of the room, I begin the daily wrestle with my consciousness to decide what I’m supposed to do now.
Karen, my room-mate, a skinny girl from Camden, not much older than me and working in the city as an apprentice stock-broker – a million miles from any reality I’ve ever known – lies peacefully sleeping across the other side of the room. I know she isn’t the slightest bit bothered by me and never will be...I long for the freedom I imagine that skinny indifference gives her, and yet, I don’t long to be her at all ... I long to be me ...

•

Thin Ice

Eat
Till the skin on your fine dancer’s legs
Stretches –
Tight and red
And your eighteen-year-old heart
Strains –
To lift you off
The far-from-home bed
To get you up...to bring back
The ice-cream cake swallowed whole
With pus-like custard – and
Snow White cream

Whipped, as art must be
To make a meal of it
To satiate ... to suffocate ...
The artless cravings ...

“Havin a party are ya luv?”
The bouncy lady at Sainsbury’s probed
Perhaps thinking it was your sweet sixteenth ...

The simplest answer is always “Yes”

“Ah, that’s nice in’it?”
She kept on merrily, as you watched your cake
Melt a hole in its thin-skinned box

Smuggling salty tears
Behind dry eyes of green glass –

A dancer on thin ice now ...

•

London, September, 1985:
I am working at an all-night restaurant in Finchley Road, Hampstead. Celebrities visit regularly. In the six weeks I’ve been working there I have served George Michael, Boy George and Samantha Fox (famous for having big boobs). I have a new room-mate called Jen who got me the job at the restaurant and who also works there. We share one of twelve rooms in a well-appointed girl’s dormitory not far from Hampstead Heath. We are friends; fellow Aussies. On the surface, my life has changed dramatically. I am no longer taking dance classes and I have resolved to go home. I am booked on a flight to Sydney on October 20th and feel confident of making it. My mother has called me home for my brother’s 21st on November 2nd. I have cancelled several flights home before. I am determined to make it this time ... provided I lose the weight. I’ve already failed in my ambition to make it in London as a dancer, I can’t face the cliché of returning home a failure and fat ...

Working through the night with Jen, who is sleeping with one of the cooks called Ali, suits me perfectly. After work, when she goes back to Ali’s for sex (strictly no boys allowed in our dorm), I can binge in private. Jen knows about my own grubby little habit and doesn’t disapprove as much as some would, but she doesn’t know the extent of it, the lengths I go to, the quantities I consume. And she doesn’t understand. Occasionally she embarrasses me into not skulking off to the bathroom to puke after we’ve eaten a feast of junk food. I secretly and deeply resent her for this. She is much more voluptuous than I am and makes me feel petty and vain for obsessing about my weight. I don’t like to look at myself from her point of view and resent her for making me look.

I focus doggedly on my goal. With five weeks to go I am about 7 pounds off target. Working from 7pm to 7am, Wednesday through Sunday, I’m able to reduce considerably the number of possible binging hours. For the twelve hours I wait on tables, I eat a single pita-pocket with tabouli and lettuce. But on the way back to the dormitory along Finchley Road, most mornings I am so ravenous my resolve to go straight home and to bed caves at the first shop and I begin my serial purchasing of chocolate bars, visiting maybe five different shops, lined up all too conveniently along the route back to the dorm, careful never to buy more than two at any one shop to avoid raising suspicion.

Sometimes I venture further afield to the supermarket for a more serious binge. There, I buy a loaf of fresh white bread, several pieces of roast chicken, a packet or two of cream cakes, and head back to the dorm to devour the unlikely breakfast all before nine o’clock in the morning. The supermarket provides more choice and anonymity than the High Street, but it takes longer to get there and back to the dorm, which risks delays I can’t afford. After working all night I need some sleep before the next shift, plus time to do my exercises. Somewhere in the back of my mind I still cling to the hope of resurrecting my dance career back in Sydney, which has started to look a better option now from the vantage point of the de-glamorised London I’ve come to know. As well, bread is so slow to break down; I have to give it time before I’m able to regurgitate it back.

My body, still trying to develop and grow (even at the age of nineteen), craves substance and bulk; protein and savoury food in general. But the ex-dieter continues to want sugar – especially chocolate, the most ‘forbidden’ food of all. Chocolate is easier to regurgitate, but much faster to convert from sugar to fat. I know this from experience, from the extreme body-heat generated whenever I consume large quantities of chocolate in a short space of time, and from the weight that piles on if I don’t get to the bathroom in time. But if I get back to the dorm before the other girls have left for their day jobs, it’s unlikely there will be a bathroom free (in which to purge in peace). Even a chocolate binge takes me a while to regurgitate and I’m not quiet about it. I’m still an apprentice bulimic. The girl who taught me how, an African-English girl called Yanyi, who had learnt the trick from her own mother when she was eleven, seemed to manage it without tools or fuss. But I needed both. Using a pen I’d bought especially for the purpose, I’d spend up to an hour each time shoving this thing down my throat making loud, involuntary choking sounds with every jab.

Some mornings a further dilemma presented itself. His name was Saed. He was an Iraqi kitchen-hand working at the restaurant; he’d make me my pita bread every night. He was a friend of Ali’s, but younger, or so it seemed to me, it was hard to tell behind the moustaches they both wore like masks or badges. On nights when I was feeling good about myself – about my weight – I’d wonder about Saed, and consider reaching out beyond my comfort zone to get to know him better. Jen had said he was interested. I thought it might have been fun to get together with him so the four of us could see the sights of London, other than the restaurants I frequented on my days off – always alone. I had to admit to myself I had a desire to see behind the moustache ...

One morning our boss, Muhammad, who drove a large gold Mercedes which he parked pretentiously outside the restaurant all night, suggested we head out for breakfast. I glanced across at Saed to find him gazing intently at me and my heart gave a surprised leap. I was starving and had already begun to anticipate my assault on the High Street’s sweet shops. The thought of taking the first bite of a chilled bar of chocolate was so vivid in my mind I could practically hear the snap as it broke into my mouth. Of course, eating more than a morsel of any kind of food in front of others was out of the question. I couldn’t stand people watching me eat; they might as well have been watching me shit for all the anxiety and paralysing self-consciousness it gave me.

But Muhammad was persuasive ... Saed and I sat next to each other in the back seat, our thighs almost meeting. I’d been partnered by various male dancers, but I’d never been, or felt, this close to a man before; a man who wasn’t a dancer and who didn’t see me as a dancer ...

I sat by the window looking out upon a clear autumn morning feeling something new, something unrecognisable and good, as this magnificent beast of a car swept me along the tree-lined streets of Hampstead. And for a blissful moment or two I forgot my hunger ...

Jen and Ali were seated on the other side of Saed. Another waitress called Sonya – Muhammad’s mistress, or so Jen had been told – sat up front with Muhammad – three girls and three boys ...

In another moment, I looked over to see Jen kiss Ali. I turned back to the window, embarrassed. Saed chuckled.

As if stepping out of a cinema into the harsh glare of the (real) world, my crippling self-consciousness returned and in that moment the thought of intimacy with this, or any, man seemed suddenly entirely absurd ...

I endured breakfast, sipping half a glass of orange juice, watching the others enjoy themselves, pretending not to care. All the while I was willing for the moment to arrive when I could politely excuse myself, go home, binge, vomit, and – finally – sleep ...

•

Binge
Body
Bone

Beauty

Bullshit

•

Auckland 1989-1993:
In the early years after I let go of the dream to dance – or it let go of me – I made a classified secret of my ballet past and came to think of my passion for dance in much the same way as my father had always done – as a somewhat childish and frivolous pursuit to be grown out of and forgotten. My body in a way seemed to agree with this view, as it finally emerged in its full womanly form with lumps and bumps that could not and would not ever express themselves in a balletic manner ...

However, I was far from happy. I was frustrated and confused by this ordinary-looking person I found myself to be without art or grace. I struggled to accept and understand my changed reality throughout most of my twenties. Twice I was directed by well-meaning people to get ‘treatment’ for the bulimia that if anything intensified during these post-dancing years. The first time, I was sent to a psychiatrist who prescribed anti-depressants. These failed profoundly. I remember the somewhat overweight man’s blank stare as I sat in his plush office feeling more out of place than ever, mortified at having to disclose what I thought at the time to be both trivial and deeply private habits to this complete stranger, to a person who I could see, from that blank disinterest, hadn’t a hope of understanding, much less of helping me.

The second time, now married and living in Auckland, was a little more successful. I’d just started university, aged 23, and was struggling to make it to lectures on account of the ongoing urge to binge. Eating options were not only abundantly provided for on campus but the multitude of young people focused on things of the mind more than the body – or so I imagined then – provided a perfect environment for a now seasoned bulimic to operate unnoticed.

As ever, I’d head out for the day with the best of intentions, my modest lunch packed and no money in my pocket. But most days I’d have eaten my ‘lunch’ within the first hour and within the second, extracted funds from the on-campus bank. Typically this meant having to use cunning and complicated methods (short of robbery), as I’d have deliberately left all means of identification at home, knowing better than to trust myself by now ...

The woman psychologist I saw during these undergraduate years talked and listened to me, giving emphasis to what she saw as the positive aspects of my life, such as my early achievements at university, and expressing her opinion that my weight (of approximately 60 kilograms by then) was ‘normal’ and healthy for a woman of my height. I enjoyed these sessions with this woman who was willing to discuss with me her own ‘problem with anger’, as she put it. However, I couldn’t take seriously her view that I wasn’t overweight and after she left to go into private practice, I abandoned counselling and returned, once again, to face my ‘problem with food’ alone.
The binging and vomiting continued. I enjoyed and did well at university in spite of this but kept pretty much to myself and never disclosed my dancing history – much less my disorder – to anybody. I hid my body beneath oversized clothes and sat at the back of the lecture theatre sneaking morsels of cake from a bag within a bag sat beside me – where a friend might have been.

•

I began to want a baby. In one of life’s little ironies, when so many people had gravely forecast my own infertility due to all the childhood dieting (and they didn’t know the half of it!), it was my husband who was diagnosed ‘sub-fertile’. After the top fertility expert in Auckland put in writing his view that we would never conceive a child ‘naturally’, I became obsessed with proving him wrong. I read many books about alternative treatments for male infertility. We visited a naturopath. Time passed. All the while I continued binging on mostly sweet foods. If anything, my addiction intensified over time as I became increasingly frustrated with my inability to lose weight, to stop binging, and, now, to conceive a child.
In my final year of undergraduate study I took a paper in medical sociology. Researching for an essay on eating disorders I came across an article that linked high sugar consumption and infertility (male and female). I stopped binging from that moment on and within three months had conceived my first child. What do doctors know ...?

Finding this precious information buried in an obscure medical journal, that would turn out not only to provide a cure for our infertility but a cure for my eating disorder, made me feel lucky. The desire for a child – for life itself – was my escape from my life of guilt and deception. It gave me hope and a sense of control. When you can’t find the understanding or the strength within yourself, hope and luck help.

In another of life’s ironies, after the birth of my son I lost quite a bit of weight, and in the best way – by not trying to. The pressure to be thin is lessened for a woman around pregnancy and motherhood, and without this pressure, I relaxed around food and the weight fell away. Today, with my youngest child now ten years old, my weight has stabilised at a healthy size ‘average’, and unlike the majority of women I know, I never diet or really worry about my weight and haven’t weighed myself in years ...

•

[SwanHilda in Coppelia]
Epilogue

June 5, 2009:
It’s telling, I think, that tears of joy flow just as wet and salty; just as plentiful as tears of sorrow and despair...I think this means these emotions are much more alike than we imagine, just as our passions for things apparently ‘bad’ for us – like sugary treats – often stem from a lust for more of the good in life. A lust or hunger for more sincerity, more meaning, more purpose, and more understanding ... More of things that are essentially denied us in the quantities at least some us seem to need to survive ... and to thrive ...

Thinking back on all that self-destruction, I wonder if in fact there was a purpose to it. I wonder if for some people the so called ‘normal’ channels of development and growth are never going to deliver the self-understanding necessary to achieve any lasting kind of success and happiness. In particular, I think back on my dancing years and the intensity of feelings caught up with the desire to succeed and the frustration I felt when I failed to achieve the heights of success I aspired to.

The red ribbon in 1982 has always symbolised the frustrations and limitations of my endeavours as a ballet dancer. Until now, I have been stubbornly reluctant to reflect on that event with anything other than bitterness, regret, and shame. I remain convinced that this loss, which felt like betrayal; like injustice; like misunderstanding, was what it felt like and did contribute substantially to subsequent unhappiness, frustration, and wilful self-destruction. But I have also begun to realise that an understanding of self, at least for me, has to be forged through frustrations faced, the letting go of bitterness, and the banishing of blame ...

•

Today, as I sit here warmed by the winter sun, watched by the gentle green leaves, I can recall the intense pleasure of the dance...the control in every precision movement, the joy taken – and given – in the music that melted and soared so poignantly, only an artist could bring to life ...

If I dig a little deeper I can recover a resilient pride felt in the applause of an auditorium full of ballet enthusiasts – including (once) my less than enthusiastic father – as it thunders out from the cavernous dark, a sound reminiscent of understanding ...

© Sacha Jones