To err is human

It’s a well known adage: ‘we all make mistakes.’ It a fact of human life. To err is, as they say, human. So, when did making mistakes become something that I became so pathologically afraid of? Something that became so unacceptable that I would do almost anything to avoid making one? Something that became so bound up with my sense of self-worth that I very nearly killed myself trying to accomplish a mistake free life.

I guess you may be wondering if I am one of those unbearably smug people who get everything right and sail through life slightly detached from the ordinariness of normal life? The irony is, whilst I don’t deny that some people might think that of me, the reality of every day living for me is totally at odds with this: I am terrified of making mistakes, yet I feel that everything I do compounds the many mistakes that I constantly make. And with each mistake I make, my self-esteem plummets further. It comes as a surprise to me that anyone would see me as a success; that anyone would find me attractive; that anyone would feel envy or jealousy towards me as I feel like such a failure. Even those very words “I feel like such a failure” are emotionally loaded: they make me feel pathetic, like I shouldn’t say them out loud, as they are full so of a self-pity that I don’t have the right to express. The problem is that, for all my supposed ‘insight’ – I can’t help but feel that somehow, somewhere along the line, I really am a failure and not worthy. Of anything.

Doctors and psychologists call this clinical perfectionism. I call it the pain of living daily with someone I can’t bear: myself. The diagnosis goes further than that; my way of dealing with this self-loathing, my way of processing these painfully difficult emotions is to live by set rules, to engage in eating disordered behaviour. I am anorexic. I am an anorexic. Or perhaps, more appropriately, I have anorexia nervosa. 

I should not be defined by this illness. But, at times, it defines me. I should not be consumed by its rules and regulations. But, at times, it’s the only way I can function. I should not be this selfish. But, at times, I seem to only be able to think about it, as a way to avoid thinking about myself. I do not, like some others, choose to personify my illness. I do not, like doctors encourage me to, accept that this is an illness like any other; cancer, diabetes or a broken limb. I believe that it is part of my personality. I am not two people, nor do I have multiple personalities; I am me, I am Hannah, I have anorexia, perhaps I have an illness, but then again, perhaps that illness is a part of my personality.

It is over fifteen years since I began my disordered relationship with food and eating. Fifteen is the sanitised number. Really I wonder if that number should be more like seventeen. Maybe longer. Mum tells of awkward behaviour around food almost from birth. I have an eating disorder. Have I had this since birth? Was a born unable to eat normally? In which case, perhaps it is not just part of my personality, but an integral part of what makes me Hannah. 

So, letting go, learning to be human, is something that is long overdue, but that makes it no less difficult to consider, to do and put into practice. How vast the gap between my internal values and belief structure imposed upon myself, and my external expectations of others. My behaviour is almost completely externally regulated, whilst my feelings are almost completely internally regulated. Finding a happy medium is the goal, but the path to get there is so hidden by the weeds of years of denial, that the easier, less challenging, but ultimately more damaging, paths seem far more clear cut.