I Looked Like I Was Coping. I Wasn't

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 after meals. Suddenly there was nobody watching.

Mum had arranged for me to have an account at the college canteen. It was a perfectly sensible thing to do for a seventeen-year-old living away from home. For me, it was disastrous.

The canteen sold pies, pastries, chocolates and chips, and I suddenly had almost unlimited access to food without having to pay for it at the time. My bulimia went completely out of control.

Eventually, I did something that still tells me how desperately I wanted help.

I went to the schoolmistress myself and asked her to close my canteen account.

I was making myself sick up to nine times a day. Buying food elsewhere was becoming expensive, and I knew I couldn't stop myself. Closing the account was one of the few things I could think of to put some kind of boundary around my behaviour. The school informed my parents and they took me to see a psychiatrist. I went once.

Then I chose not to go back.

I don't remember exactly why, which seems strange because I was desperate for somebody to help me. I knew something was terribly wrong. I just didn't seem to know how to let anyone close enough to help.

Instead, I exercised. I went to the gym for around two hours a day and worked hard at developing a lean, muscular body. From the outside, that could easily have looked like discipline. It wasn't. It was another way of trying to control something that felt completely out of control.

Alcohol was becoming increasingly important too. I danced late into the night at nightclubs and almost everyone around me drank heavily, so it wasn't particularly difficult to hide what was happening. But even among girls who drank and went out regularly, I was different.

I smuggled bottles of wine into my hostel room so I could drink before we went out.

Years later, my roommate Tracey told me that another girl had approached her because people were becoming concerned about how much I drank. Tracey didn't feel it was her place to confront me. I had no idea those conversations were taking place.

By twenty-one, I was drinking every day. Eventually I began drinking in the morning to deal with the hangover from the night before. Bulimia became less dominant partly because alcohol suppressed my appetite. One addiction was effectively beginning to replace another. And yet something extraordinary was happening at exactly the same time.

I was functioning.

I worked as a sales representative and I was good at it. I worked hard. I achieved results. I handled myself well in business and presented as a confident young woman. Nobody looking across a desk at me would necessarily have seen the woman who was arranging her entire life around alcohol.

That contradiction is something I understand very differently now. We tend to imagine that when someone's life is falling apart, it will be obvious. Sometimes it is.

Often they stop functioning. But sometimes they get dressed. They do their hair.

They put on their makeup. They go to work. They perform. They achieve. And then they go home and continue doing whatever they have learned to do to survive another day.

That was me.

There were times when I genuinely felt I was bordering on madness. I wrote dark poetry and drew distorted portraits of myself. I was taking self-prescribing codeine while continuing to drink. There were days when I desperately wanted to die.

Then morning came. I would wake up, have a drink, do my hair and makeup and get through another day. For a long time, my ability to function disguised the depth of what was happening inside me.

Looking back, I think that's one of the reasons this part of my story matters.

Being capable isn't the same thing as being well.

You can be intelligent, productive, attractive, competent and successful while something inside you is becoming increasingly fractured.

I was living proof of it.

Standing on the Edge: A Fight for Freedom tells the story of what was happening beneath the woman everybody else could see and the long journey God eventually took me on to discover why.

I couldn’t put the book down as Kim’s words resonated deeply with experiences and accounts from friends who have shared their fear and shame, through their alcoholism, addictions and satanic ritual abuse and the power of the Holy Spirit and prayer to fight to be free.

Hazel, Cunsellor

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