Actor Robyn Cruze-Harrington looks back on the moment that changed the course of her 18-year battle with food.
“You are the big fat liar!” I declared, holding my fork mid-air. “I will eat this chicken. I will not purge, starve, binge, or harm myself any more!” Stabbing it with conviction, I began to chew with a half-smile, half-snarl. And just like that, 10 years ago, after many attempts to tackle my problem, my recovery began.
As a model and actor I knew the manipulation that went with the industry. I knew that most of the “glamour” was smoke and mirrors, but I wanted to be the exception. I was seeking perfection.
My friend Rebecca said to me one day, after I’d spent a Christmas holiday alone in a blackout from diet pills, “The difference between you and me, Robyn, is that I am not willing to kill myself to look good.” I was. I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t care how close I came to death if it gave me a chance to be at the weight I believed I “should” be.
I vacillated between binge eating and bulimia, with a brief stop at anorexia. I was trying to create a sense of empowerment, a distraction from the reality that I had so little control in my life – over my mum’s health, over my parents’ rocky relationship and, most of all, over how other people felt about me.
If I starved, I binged to medicate. If I binged, I purged to medicate. Each time I binged, purged or starved, the aftermath was the same. My skin would crawl. My heart would race. I felt as if I were about to lose my mind. It made me want to spit on my own face and punch it unmercifully. Sometimes I’d just lie there – bloated, conquered, ashamed. Then I’d get angry. I’d promise myself I’d never do it again. It was the same every time; only the location differed.
I believed that being thinner made me more lovable. Everyone said it wasn’t true, but I saw how my friends got more attention for being thinner. Or did I?
Looking back, what I really saw were women who appeared comfortable in their own skin – and that was stunning to me. I had never known what that felt like. I believed that if I could just reach an ideal, then I could start living. But life was happening without me. I had wasted so much time.
This created an anxiety that made me scramble for quick fixes. I imagined the time it would take to wade through my illness and seek recovery. I floundered in that torturous sea for years, my head bobbing up and down as glimpses of the shores of recovery teased me.
It was not a particularly special day when I declared defeat. The night before, I had binged on marshmallows. I awoke covered in sweat. I’d given myself food poisoning and was vomiting in the bathroom of a friend of a friend, someone who’d graciously allowed an aspiring Aussie actor to stay in her Los Angeles home. I had lost my dignity to an illness that promised me perfection.
I started to review what had happened. I was 29, severely depressed, broke and clueless as to who I really was. And I was exhausted. After all, I had been fighting since I was 11 years old. I sat, breathless. And then, on that bathroom floor, I had a new thought: what if I just said no to my eating disorder?
There, sitting on a kind stranger’s floor, I understood for the first time that I could walk away. I didn’t know how I would achieve the happiness I longed for, but I realised that my eating disorder wouldn’t get me there.
This article first appeared in the July 20, 2014 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald
This blog post was written by Robyn Cruze-Harrington, co-author of MAKING PEACE WITH YOUR PLATE
