The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up

by Evanna Lynch

For future reference, and to neatly summarise the message of this book, if you want to avoid all pain and trauma and growth and change, always choose the goats.

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. Whip out the appendix and watch the child’s health restore. Feed the child and watch the eating disorder melt away. Except it wasn’t that. It was more like: stuff the eating disorder with food so no one has to see it anymore. 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. Dr Nolan and his team hadn’t really concerned themselves with why the condition had taken root in the first place, and five weeks in, it was just simmering angrily, invisible once again, beneath all their food. So, was it my fault later on when it came screaming back?

Everyone feels sorry for sick people. Illness prompts a wave of sympathy and calls forth humanity’s most superior instinct: that of compassion, to nurture and protect the vulnerable. But that sympathy quickly turns to frustration when people realise that you are the one keeping you sick, that you are the sickness. People feel disrespected. They feel like their love has been thrown back in their faces.

Shall I tell you the origin of my intensely personal vendetta against tomatoes? Yes, I shall. I have never liked tomatoes; not in a sandwich, not on a pizza, and not mashed up deviously in tomato ketchup. Cold, slimy, evil bastards. I just didn’t like them; it was a simple sensory fact. But after my first meal at Peaceful Pastures Clinic, my aversion to tomatoes became suddenly, and forevermore, an intensely personal affair.

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 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. ‘It will get easier’ is not a helpful thing to say to someone for whom only the present moment can exist, so vivid, so intense that it’s not possible to imagine a moment beyond it. The future doesn’t matter to someone enduring an unimaginable pain, so let’s not entertain that childish fantasy. All that matters is the pain that is consuming you in this moment, that you grit your teeth and try to survive it. You invalidate the pain and the damage it inflicts when you hasten to skip past it to a brighter tomorrow. 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.