The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and The Glory of Growing Up: A Memoir

by Evanna Lynch

The cruelty of the words I’d written unsettled me but did not surprise me.

I knew it would be impossible to write a memoir about my journey towards self-love and acceptance without also writing an in-depth exploration of my self-hate.

We have this compulsion to turn every story into a fairy tale.

I think it’s because we’re afraid of our own darkness. We’re afraid that if we fully surrender to our darkness, we’ll never come back from it. We’re afraid our darkness will go on and on and on, that there is no end to it and that we will get lost in it. We’re afraid that if we show these ugly, unpalatable parts of ourselves, it will be too much for others; that nobody will love and accept us, and we’ll be left alone with only the worst parts of ourselves for company.

darkness is not infinite, that you do actually get to the other side of it, but first you have to submerge yourself in it.

You have to confront and accept this darkness in order to heal from it.

In so many ways, the anorexia was just a distraction.

I believe in the kind of fairy tales that have depth, complexity, profundity and moments of darkness that birth a fiercer belief in light; the kind where the endings are not endings but breakthroughs that lead to the next adventure. And my intention with this book was to shed light on a darkness that is most often obscured by myths, misunderstanding and sensationalism.

I’ve decided to omit any specific details of weight, calorie counting, and health statistics. I don’t feel they are relevant or necessary to tell this story, and any urge to include these details in any conversation around eating disorders is actually the voice of the eating disorder, which wants to provoke horror and awe, to be identified by a series of numbers and statistics, and to distract its audience from the deeper issues.

We need to stop playing so neatly into the hands of eating disorders by measuring people’s sickness and health by the numbers on the scale.

The idea that someone could crave and admire your very flesh so much that they would commit a criminal act was impossible to grasp, and I wondered how special you had to be to be so desired.

Your suffering is never in vain in Ireland; it’s almost like you’re providing a service.

My body has always just been there. I have used, inhabited, and sprung about in my body my whole life, seemingly unconsciously, because at the end of the day, it’s just . . . me. Up until this moment I hadn’t realised I could view it objectively as a separate entity, one that I can choose to love or hate, decline or accept. And though, in this moment, I don’t love or hate it, because it just is what it is, the more I look, the more ridiculous it seems that anyone else would ever admire and want this flesh vehicle.

It didn’t matter that I didn’t possess any beauty of my own, because my body was a conduit for beauty! Beauty and creativity. Its energy flowed through me and off my fingertips like rainwater.

Making things was how I communicated with the world around me.

More beauty I’d brought into the world. The beauty I made filled our kitchen walls and mantelpieces and dressers, and it made Mum beam.

I was a girl, and that meant that I’d grow up to be a woman. Woman. I let the word pass quickly and inconsequentially over me like a bad smell.

What daft law of nature insisted we must all live such dull, segregated lives?

I decided, in that moment, that I didn’t like science. It forced brutal, uncompromising restraints on my imagination that there was no coming back from.

Women. I didn’t hate them yet. I admired them.

Mum’s love was the centre of my whole universe. It was strange, then, to see the same quiet disappointment cross her face when she met her own reflection that I was beginning to feel when I met mine.

It was becoming clear that girls didn’t simply blossom one day into smooth-legged, clear-skinned, graceful women. Women weren’t born, sliding easily in a cloud of perfume and pollen from the inside of a flower; they were sculpted: by life, by their mothers, by misfortune, but mostly, pathetically, by the stupid, hapless girls they had been before.

Whatever way I braid my hair or paint my eyelids, I still see me poking out. I just can’t seem to cover her up or colour her in,

There is too much about me I need to fix.

It seems that, day by day, the older I get, the more people I meet, the more abundantly clear it is that I have nothing special, nothing exceptional, nothing that anchors me to life and love. Nothing for which anyone would want me.

I am weary (and wary) of these sensational accounts of the descent into eating disorders because during my recovery, these memoirs were triggering, and during my eating disorder, they were inspiring.

An eating disorder is not something that can be calculated or conjured when you feel like it. It just happens to some people.

This is all so far from relevant to me. Sure, they were accurate, historically documented health risks associated with under-eating to cite and perhaps she was obliged to draw my attention to them but as a child you don’t really think of a future beyond the next Christmas season

I am suggesting that the medical system got it wrong in their methods of treating the superficial symptoms of starvation to heal the eating disorder, and I’m not sure their approach has evolved much since.

A fat person and a fat cell were two entirely different things; one was just an abstract social construct; the other one I loathed and wanted to scourge from my body.

But creativity, she doesn’t fit in a box. She’s a wild, fluid, uncontrollable energy that spreads out sensuously from a curious, wide open mind, in large expanses of aimless time on dreamy liminal train journeys or in subtle moments between waking and sleep.

an eating disorder is a mental condition, and that the physical problems that occur are side effects, and so it will never work to use the strategy of trying to seize and pull apart the problem in one’s hands, by carefully monitoring a body, by trying to stuff that body with food and squash the eating disorder out. It was never simply an eating problem to begin with. What I am suggesting is that the more everyone zeroed in on my eating problem, measuring my body, monitoring my diet, balking at my compulsive exercising or the peculiar behaviours I collected as easily as Pokémon cards, the more my environment seemed to suit my eating disorder.

My ‘problem’ felt too much like my solution,

People see eating disorders as slow self-destruction, but the intention is quite the opposite. It’s a stab at life, at asserting oneself. It’s a fierce, warlike struggle to battle all the voices – internal and external – telling you you’d be better off dead.

And while, in some ways, they are right about that – I don’t have the space in my mind or my day to sit and think about other people or what they need, and this is an entirely selfish, isolated way to live – in another way, I’m not asking for anything at all, and isn’t that the opposite of selfish?

I still find it hard to say it, to even write it, like I’m in the presence of royalty, a mysterious darkness, a powerful force of which I’m not worthy.

Anorexia is a problem, not a person.

What would recovery look like when it would annihilate the thing I’d built my identity on? Was there anything worth salvaging, worth recovering about me beyond my disorder? I didn’t know at this point, and was not remotely curious to find out.

I want a different life, but I do not want to break this safe, familiar cycle. I want to be someone else, but I don’t believe I can be, and I don’t want to risk sacrificing my comforting state of thinness to try that out, only to realise that I’ve lost my armour and confirmed my worthlessness. Deep down, I want to be free of my obsession with thinness, but nothing in my reach seems worth it.

‘I want to address the root issue before we even mention food and weight. In my professional opinion, that’s the least of our problems.’

I don’t have a reason for being so difficult, that it was never anything more or less than the fact that I found being alive – the simple fact of existing – quite painful, and everyone already knows there is no cure for that.

I think dads often end up marginalised from their children’s mental health issues, confined to the peripheries of the situation, through no fault of their own. I think we’re just not socialised to trust our dads with these tender, irrational, complicated problems, and they’re not socialised to draw attention to them. So, maybe he really hadn’t had any idea what was going on.

A normally quiet and watchful person, this ruthless compression of me and my disorder had wrenched forth a vicious, foul-mouthed, vengeful protectress, an uncharacteristic, no-fucks-given, ferocious bitch.

I’d feel a deep, cloying humiliation set in, a desperate urge to move, a panicky need to quickly talk about something else. Not because I was ashamed of my eating disorder, though – quite the opposite. I was ashamed of ‘getting better’.

here is somebody who will not judge herself. She is not silly, it turns out. She is not ditzy or oblivious. She is deep and wise. Inalterable. She possesses this rare, wonderful and yet simple quality of total self-acceptance.

Why does she seem so . . . perfect? She isn’t perfect by my usual definition. It has nothing to do with beauty or bones or discipline. She isn’t exceptionally talented or super smart or shockingly thin. She is just completely, disarmingly, unabashedly herself, whatever that is. She isn’t trying to veil or enhance it. It is that simple and that radical.

I feel infuriated by her. I will never be able to just ‘be’ like her. I will never be able to risk that.

I believe that until you begin to see your way out, physical recovery will never be effective.

an ocean of painful transformation lay before me between this moment and that. I was not to know what lay beyond the darkness.

The problem was, they were treating a mental condition in the same way they’d approach any other purely physical ailment they saw in other children.