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At seventeen, I moved to Harare to attend college. For the first time in my life, I had real freedom. I was away from home, living in a girls' hostel in the city, surrounded by people my own age and able to make my own decisions. Unfortunately, I wasn't remotely equipped to make them. By then, bulimia already had a firm grip on my life. At home there had at least been some boundaries around me. Dad knew about the bulimia and would try to stop me disappearing to the bathroom a

If you had met me as a teenager, you probably wouldn't have recognised how much I was struggling. Like many young people in the 1980s, I laughed with my friends, obsessed over fashion, bleached my hair far more than was sensible, smoked cigarettes, fell in and out of relationships and tried to look as though life was unfolding exactly as it should. From the outside, I looked like I was simply growing up. The truth was very different. By then, bulimia had become part of my dai