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

by Evanna Lynch

But eating disorders are not problems with eating (at least not initially); those are the superficial symptoms that make their way to the surface. Anorexia had been there before anyone could see it. It was an invisible condition and could not be treated by visible means.

it really felt at that moment like it didn’t matter to anybody, anywhere, whether I existed or not. What was the actual point of my life?

How could I justify eating all this food? How could I pay for all the space I inhabited?

It wasn’t deliberate, a vindictive operation to thwart the loving efforts of my parents and everyone who’d invested their energy in my recovery. It was just the only way I knew to get by in life by now, the tools I’d picked up to arm myself against the inevitable pain of existing, because nobody had managed to teach me an alternative.

I did not want to be at war with her but the more she scrutinised me, trying to catch the anorexia, the more I dug my heels in and vigorously protected it.

I’d eat my dinner without complaint (though not without guilt) and remind myself that I was doing this for her.

you cannot incentivise recovery. You don’t get better to please anybody else, be they your parents, your partner or J. K. Rowling. None of those people, no matter how wonderful they are, can take away the pain that caused you to reach for your disorder in the first place. You only begin to let go of your eating disorder when you find something worth living for.

But he is a man. What would he know? He’s strong and sturdy, not soft and vulnerable like I am.

It’s not just my freedom I’m fighting for now, because I don’t know what will happen in this place. I’m fighting for my life.

Many were the times I wondered bitterly if the nurses were deriving some kind of sick sexual gratification from watching us eat.

They looked so intently for the anorexia that they didn’t really see us. In the eyes of the Peaceful Pastures staff, we looked like anorexics, we spoke like anorexics, we acted like anorexics. To them, we were anorexics.

This first day at the Farm was then, and still remains, hands-down, the worst day of my life. I’ve never been in so much intense emotional pain. I’ve never felt so heartbroken, abandoned and hopeless.

Why do they all talk to us like we are naughty children having a strop? Do they think anorexia is a mere childish bid for attention?

But the thing about anorexia – or maybe it’s just self-loathing in general – is that it likes to push people away. It bites and spits and lashes out until, eventually, the other person gives up their kindness, stalks away in disgust, and you sit back, perversely satisfied that they, too, have recognised your worthlessness. It gives a strange sense of power and safety when you keep love out.

It felt like the entire purpose of our lives was eating. No sooner had your belly stopped hurting and whining from the last ambush, than another meal or snack time was launched. And as you sat there, chewing your way through hunks of chocolate and caramel, you couldn’t help but frantically calculate the river of calories consumed, especially compared to the meagre amount that had previously sustained you.

‘It will get easier’ is probably the most offensive thing you can say to someone in the grip of pain. You are borrowing from a future that isn’t promised, a future that depends entirely on their endurance of the pain. You are taking for granted a well of strength within them that they may not possess, fast-forwarding through the ugly bits that you don’t want to watch but they must live through, nonetheless.

Sometimes things are just unremittingly shit and the only respectful thing to do is to stand next to the person going through it and scream along with them.

And when you declare war on anorexia in a ward full of furious teenagers, you inevitably create an army of anorexic warriors.

Much like prison making masterminds out of petty criminals, the Farm made everyone better at anorexia.

the only method I know for riding waves of pain and periods of intense stress is unravelling rapidly beneath my fingertips.

But to me, there is something deeply unethical about a scared twelve-year-old begging for help and crying ‘I can’t do this,’ only to be met with a blank chorus of ‘Sure you can.’

Personally, when it comes to anorexia recovery, I don’t approve of solely treating the body and turning a deaf ear to the soul crying out for help. A soul can still drown in a healthy body.

But another significant schism has occurred here, one that nobody notices. A schism between my mind and my body. It is too painful to sit there in my body and feel it, to acknowledge her expanding and changing without my consent. She is not mine anymore. She is not someone to be trusted. She is repulsive and only getting bigger. There is everything wrong with her.

fleshless, with my paperclip in hand, tracing a white line back and forth. I remember how I looked at my wrists and I couldn’t help but see my future. I wanted to hurt, I wanted to bleed. I knew my body was disgusting, shameful and totally unlovable, but somewhere in the very distant future, I dreamed that maybe I could be something more than just thin. I saw myself working and dancing and acting and performing – and I saw myself doing so with pale, unblemished wrists.

in eating disorder recovery, you’re literally trying to recover a whole person, the one who was there before the eating disorder, the one you didn’t like and tried to bury, the one who fades into the background and who people stop seeing the more the anorexia intensifies.

People don’t develop anorexia without a deep-seated sense that they are inherently worthless. They find solace from their worthlessness in anorexia because it is gruelling and relentless, a punishing way of life that aligns with their opinion of themselves, and then they find that thinness – the sweet bonus of their self-flagellation – is prized and praised by society in an intoxicating manner.

I think it starts with nurturing the dreamer. Dreaming is underrated, I think, so often dismissed as a fanciful, childish, passive activity for immature people not rooted in reality. But sometimes, reality is truly unbearable, not worth enduring, and dreaming offers the only way out of it: a light in impenetrable darkness, even if it’s an illusory one you conjured by your imagination. And that’s the great thing about dreaming; you don’t have to have a shred of self-worth to do it, you only have to have imagination.

To me, recovery felt much more like surrendering, like giving up the fight, like turning my back on a trusted friend, like lying down on the ground and finally conceding, ‘Yes, I am worthless.’ But that’s not an empowering narrative either. To live, to succeed, to thrive in this meritocratic society, we are compelled to deny and disprove our own worthlessness.

I know that people like the fairy tales, and they can lend us a certain degree of strength, and I know that those are the simple, stark, uncomplicated narratives that gain clicks, but where recovery is concerned, I’m keen to dismantle this myth, because when other people are going through their own eating disorder recovery and it doesn’t feel heroic or epic or mythical, I want to let you know that it shouldn’t. Recovery is not a comfortable or straightforward process.

The thing about friendships founded on anorexia is that the only way those bonds can ever remain so tight is if you continue to court your eating disorder aggressively, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that anymore.

My theory on this is that you can’t ever actually beat anorexia: you can only abandon it. If you’re a fighter, a determined, wilful person, it’s tempting to stay in its company and meet its constant goading and challenges. But in my opinion, anorexia is the ultimate fighter, the challenger, the energy that’s always trembling with the need to dominate, to overcome, to beat out all the competition and be better than everyone else. I think that perhaps the only way to defeat anorexia is to defeat the feeling of worthlessness,

So, in recovery, when you’re losing your grip on thinness and it sometimes feels like you’re dying, I think it’s because part of you is dying. And there are many elements of having anorexia with which you have identified yourself, and losing each one of those feels like a small death.

Human beings of flesh and blood are not meant to be evaluated via numbers and charts and measurements. Metrics are for robots and outer space. They’re not a good assessment of a person.

Therapy is not a simple, linear journey, and there’s no quick fix to eating disorders.

As with everything, though, there were good days and bad days in therapy.

Inevitably, one of the most devastating losses of recovery is gaining weight.

Animals have a stilling power.

I think it must be stated for the sake of honesty, integrity and solidarity with others going through it, that recovery doesn’t feel at all like strength. It feels like giving up, like failing.

Essentially, I’d lost two years of self-development in every area of my life:

I was soothed by the fact that if I couldn’t control and curtail my own body, at least I wasn’t eating someone else’s. It also felt good to take a stance on something greater than myself, and to have developed what felt almost like an interesting personality trait.