The Time In Between: A Memoir of Hunger and Hope is an amazing personal account by the author, Nancy Tucker, about their experiences during their youth as someone with anorexia, bulimia, anxiety and more. It is a work which is written in a thoughtful and poetic style with play style interludes depicting scenes from her life as a sufferer. As a reader it shocked me how much Nancy’s experienced were like my own. Both born in 1993, our perspectives on our bodies, our need for perfection and our isolation led to us developing eating disorders around 2006-2007. Like her I was hospitalised for it that year in addition to depression, self harm and suicidal thoughts.
Nancy traces possible causes of her condition to things like the distance of her father, the need to perform ,fostered in her by the fact her father and grandparents both worked in entertainment, and her need to be perfect. It is often this feeling that one must be faultless that leaves a person distraught if they fail to be and results in behaviours like controlling one’s eating or starving oneself which eventually leads to a person developing an eating disorder. For myself it was things like a need to be perfect, bullying centred around my above average weight and even things such as my aunt criticising me if I took too much food at a family meal that slowly blossomed into an eating problem. It coupled with my mental illness led me deeper and deeper within a pit of despair. Like her around the age of ten or eleven I recognised that my weight gain could not be seen as cute anymore and that it was something indecent and gross which put people off being friends with me. A voice I had in my head since the age of eleven was intrusive and instilled compulsions in me to stop the anxiety it caused. It grew into the voice which propelled me further and further into ill health. It told me I was a fat ugly piece of shit even as the weight dropped off me leaving neds completing me in gym. I too felt both an obscene joy and disgusted fury in relation to my body’s changing shape. At my worst I was eating simply 500 calories a day which involved a weight watchers ready meal for dinner, a piece of bread to accompany it and something worth 100 calories for my lunch or breakfast. I felt pure even as my stomach snarled as if eating itself.
Accompanying this experience however was a sudden feeling of excessive coldness all the time. My extremities were blotchy and constantly a variety of blue, purple, red and white shades like Tucker and I could never feel warm. Whenever I had a bath or shower I glowed bright red in the same places and felt extremely faint. Due to my eating problems I had developed raynauds syndrome, a condition affecting circulation, something I still have today which might have contributed to a connective tissue disease I might now have.
Being an inpatient was terrifying for me and overwhelming in the same way Tucker describes with friendships being made with fellow youths desperate to starve, kill or hurt themselves. Structure and routine was enforced and trips to supermarkets become akin to holidays when we got to go to them. In the two hospitals I was a patient at I attended school and since then one memory has stuck with me of a girl in an English hospital called huntercombe where I stayed for a week. She was miniscule, likely under six stone, and could hardly hold herself up. The girl’s head in comparison to her body was huge and after extremely brief periods she had to leave to lie down as her anorexia was stopping her ability to even sit. At my thinnest I was 8 or 9 stone so I was underweight for my height but not dangerously so. That girl played a part in my eventual decision to recover.
Nancy developed bulimia and binged excessively on food while recovering. I had bulimic tendencies as well and could do things like eat a whole loaf of bread at my worst. I would stuff it into my mouth making it hard to even breath as I ate. I slowly gained weight but my body dysphoria still made me view myself wrongly. In photos from the age of 16-18 I used to think I was a fat monster. When I look at those pictures now I’m shocked as I see what my illness stopped me noticing such as the yellow/grey jaundiced skin I sported due to my condition, the tiny wrists with protruding bones and the obscene contrast between my hips and waist. From 18 to about 21 I ended up at my largest weight of about fourteen stone as my body grabbed onto anything I ate. I am now eleven stone and I don’t care about it as long as I’m healthy not thin. I exercise and eat well. I am at my healthiest now ,both in mind, and body but like Nancy I will always have that voice that rips me apart if I change my structured eating patterns or indulge. In her own words its true that Anorexia can be fought but “can’t be forgotten”. Recovery is a continuous process and something that goes on for the rest of your life.
