Late November 2003
I’m losing weight again.
I’m ‘winning’ though, I tell myself. I’m successfully skirting the impurity of life.
Regulating food intake, regulating exercise, regulated hard work and regulated social interactions.
“Never get too close” from where the flesh would expose its foolish core, and be tainted in another’s eyes in tones one doesn’t wanted to be tainted in.
I buy a bottle of Tia Maria, and allow myself a thin black line of liquid relief every evening.
The drink, the mere whiff of the numbness it promises, is like a forewarning of what will come, of what must replace anorexia’s unsustainable suspense of the ridiculous horror of ones mortal slab.
The bloated grotesqueness of beer drinking, of drinking on a full stomach, the mere dread from imagining feeling that, sitting there in self-disgust at my wretchedness.
But the earth pulls you back down in any way, no matter how peculiar. How ridiculous.
I started to crave 3 foods. Convenience store flapjacks, Pecan pie, and Cheese savoury sandwiches.
One day, a day before a day when nothing mattered anymore, I promised myself I would binge eat on all these things to a point of no return.
But the day came too soon…
…and I gave in, ‘failed’, as I saw it.
I ate too much the night before and woke up with a sense that all was ruined.
I didn’t go to university, and snuck out of the halls of residence with my hood up and hat on, desperate not to catch anyone’s face, and walked into the city.
I ate 4 flapjacks before dinner time. There was no going back. The floor had given way in this artificial world.
I walked and walked in a manner that would become habit in my 20s, hoping the city centre’s tall stone streets could continue indefinitely. I never wanted to face up to the fact one cannot escape being flesh, flesh that must account for itself in a world where one’s body must become something, must work, earn, buy, consume, eat, and defecate, all beneath the eyes of those one must occupy this world with.
September 2004.
6 months of no longer being in the anorexic’s world.
Back into the world of eros.
I long to return to the ice world of anorexia.
But my blood flows now the ice has receded, and I know I need to live.
In the most timely of happenings, I bump into an old friend, who has grown and changed into somebody who’s own desire to be ‘one of the faces’ encourages me to find a face for myself.
Because “I’m an artist, now, and I’m going to tell the world about it”.
This is is my new face. And upon this face I can sculpt a sense of differentiation from a sea of faces that I fear I would drown in.
Indie kids, proto-hipsters, thinking they’re in some ‘cool kid’ East London bubble, when in fact theyre in a former mining town still witnessing the unravelling of post-industrial traumas through 3 for 1 drink deals and nightclubs that opened far more often than they ought to.
I had to maintain a sense of being different, of exceptionalism, to fight the very same fears I had whilst anorexic: of being flesh in this earth, subordinary flesh, that must make its own body, and come forth, be something, and then….exist ones remaining mortal coil.
I wanted to escape a reality in which I was insufficient, feckless, weak, no good. A future in which no romantic partner would look at me twice, in which I would proceed to self medicate on beers in my parent’s house, a world in which teenagers would point and laugh, in the dark autumn streets, at my insufficiency as it aged and lost any of the youthful charm that affords sympathy.
All of this was before me, I told myself, unless I found an escape portal. And to do this I had to be an exceptional, unique individual, like no other. An artist, a song writer. To be airlifted up from a world where I would sink.
To chase with desperation, drinking on empty stomachs, through melodramatic fall outs, for validation, for granted access into the escape portal, out of world where the walls were closing in.
But it’s my early 20s, there is still time.
November 2023
I’ve gone to Leeds. I’ve been going to Leeds, Sheffield, Wakefield, etc, on the train for exactly 15 years. Never further, never the vision to.
Once my early drinking days were defunct, I had to properly find a future for myself, regardless of how I saw the world around me.
Things started well. The ‘project’ was going well. 24 years old, developing my art practice, expanding my breadth of knowledge.
I was genuinely at home in myself. It was momentary, but I was in my home time and space with friends who were also here with me.
Friends began to settle down, and do what seemed impossible to me, to know how to ‘be’, to own their adult selves and act accordingly.
The last ‘nights out’ slowly began to be replaced by a kind of endless night. A need to stay away from any place called ‘home’ as long as I could.
The train trips became more visibly vacant of purpose, yet increasingly necessary, to try to ‘get somewhere’. The artistic self a more urgent manifestation. The latent teenage dream of love a more dead-end pleasure-pursuit.
I blinked and it was the mid 2010s. I was in my 30s, suddenly struggling to go a day without needing a drink in the evening. I was dislocated in time, and desperately trying to find my way home.
But home wasn’t anywhere, because I didn’t know how to be. How could I seriously pursue a community to be part of, and career position to be able to afford it, if I didn’t know about to be, period?
Struggling to eat in the day, on my necessary meanders, relying more of drink to mask the burn out of the mental overtime of forever trying to get somewhere, a web was forming that was getting thicker and more tangled. Parental concern became part of this tangle, as the shame of being stuck in a life you’ve outgrown gets more persistent.
It became all to easy to miss a last bus into the dead of a night always too bleak to handle, and buy beers for the last train. The very 2010s collision of alcohol and smart phones began to convince me to self destructively pleasure seek in ways that harmed only myself, but proceeded to feed the insatiable hell hole that had been growing all these years, as if something in me was trying to ruin me, and make all the things I feared most come true.
When I see a bus stop, when I see a station, I see a promise of home.
But after looking back on the horror show of my 30s. My promise of home is not located elsewhere. At least not entirely.
I have been able to be, in fleeting moments, where ones pathos has converged with time and place, and one is temporarily ‘home’
But these ‘homes’ are lost to time. And trying to get back there means more of all I have just explained.
John B Ledger 