My Secret Life by Leanne Waters

ourselves now and best keep to the matter at hand. At that point, they were in the dark about the illness and I was too. So I suppose, I had a substantial degree of freedom. A simple, ‘I already ate’, would usually suffice for a while.
    My family has never really been one functioning unit. We tended to unite only in crisis, like when a loved one died and a funeral would follow or when my sister and I fought. But in general, we were simply a collection of five individuals who happened to be tied every now and again by this notion of blood. We slept, worked and operated all at different times and would, in a sense, merely bump into one another along our daily journeys. My father was a labourer who toiled more than he rested and was almost always in the National Rehabilitation Hospital, where he worked. My mother, the binding gel of this collection of parties, appeared to live on another planet most of the time. From working part-time to managing finances, shopping and the overall upkeep of the household, she lived in a world I was happy to be ignorant to. My older brother and sister were both employed and living the usual lifestyles of twenty-somethings, in one way or another. With a new son on the way and his desperation to lay down solid roots, my brother Peter featured very little in this time of my life and lived an hour’s drive away from the family home. In the context of my bulimia alone, what all this meant was that we never ate dinner together. The concept of all these people sitting down together united around a kitchen table to share food was, and still is, a foreign one.
    All this noted, dinners were still rather tricky. The temptation to eat would peak in the moments my mother was dishing up a meal, which she would usually prepare for everyone and leave in the oven to be eaten when convenient. I was never spurned by hunger alone, as I knew I could overcome the feeling with relatively little effort. No, I was spurned mostly by guilt. I hated letting my mother down and subsequently would become disgusted with myself for letting her hard work go to waste. At the same time, however, I felt I didn’t deserve the fruits of her dinner time efforts. My father would eat after a heavy day of lifting and being on his feet and thus, had earned his meal when he came home at night. Similarly, my sister and mother were slim-figured and as a result deserved the food in front of them. I, on the other hand, couldn’t seem to contend with these justifications and so resolved to the idea that I just wasn’t worthy enough for these meals as they were.
    I’m sure you’re thinking that this is surely the most distorted logic you’ve ever heard and yes, it is. But it was my logic nonetheless and so blindly real that I could do nothing but behave under its dictation. Trying to figure out an escape route from all these thoughts was near impossible. And the only thing left to do would be the most obvious; escape the house itself and eat out. Of course, I didn’t do this. It was as simple as informing my unsuspecting family that I was going out with friends for something to eat and would be home later. Often I was given money for these outings, which I saved to buy cigarettes and to pay into nightclubs when the occasion arose. I would call to a friend’s house, claiming I had just eaten dinner and would proceed with my evening as planned. In the beginning, it was flawless and worked under perfect timing and execution. Naturally, though, it didn’t last. There are only so many times you can tell your mother that you’re not eating at home and only so many times you can bother a friend at home during dinner time. Even without the knowledge of my strange eating habits, others were still mildly suspicious. Or if not suspicious, they were at least curious about the growing eccentricities in my behaviour.
    One peculiarity to be seen was my increasing need to be alone. In one sense, constantly being around others was just too