Fight Like A Girl Read online

  So: the crisps and fancy drink have been ordered. My brother and I grip the massive glasses with both hands, rivulets of condensation running down the sides as the fluorescent glow of the orange bitters sloshes around the ice cubes. We totter back to our umbrellas to recline like kings.

  Just as I’m shaking the final crumbs of the crisp packet into my mouth, slurping up the dregs of the Chapman and thinking about swimming back out to the raft, a trio of kids appears. I know them from ‘around the traps’ which, at nine years old, means I’ve been forced by necessity to play with them at various grown-up parties and occasionally at the pool. I don’t like them, but kids are curious creatures; we’ll play with pretty much anyone the same height as us, even the people we hate. My brain has blanked out their names, so let’s just call them Snot, Poo and Wee.

  Snot and Poo were boys a little bit younger than me, and Wee was a girl of my age. They asked me if I wanted to go rock-pooling with them. I couldn’t imagine anything less fun, but I said yes anyway because as boisterous and confident as I was within the safety of my family’s home, I was also insecure about making friends and I wanted people to like me. I traipsed behind them along the beach, already regretting my decision. Snot and Poo were whispering to each other and giggling, and Wee was marching imperiously to their right. My skin was tight from the salt water, and the sand was rubbing uncomfortably on my feet. Why was I here? Why wasn’t I swimming around the raft pretending I was a mermaid?

  I trudged on.

  We reached the rock pools at the far side of the cove and started to poke about in the shallows. Just as I was bending down to reach one of the pools, I heard the three of them giggling behind me. I turned my head, my bottom still stuck in the air. They were pointing at me and making a grand show of whispering behind their hands. I stood up, feeling ambushed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.

  It was Poo who spoke up. ‘You’re fat,’ he said.

  Wee sneered at me from next to him while Snot guffawed.

  My cheeks burned. It wasn’t the first time I’d been called fat. I’d even used the word myself. My brother and sister I hurled it at each other like a weapon when we were mad, and it always stung. It was different to the torture we usually inflicted on each other, which mostly involved using one sibling to sit on the other so they couldn’t move while the third one tickled their feet or farted on their head. Although neither of these things were all that fun to be on the receiving end of, there was something vaguely jovial in their application. Fat was different. Even as kids, we knew it was a word designed to humiliate and silence.

  So it didn’t matter that my feelings for Snot, Poo and Wee were less than friendly. I had been pulled away from the safe nucleus of my family to be laughed at and told I was fat, and it hurt. Worse was my feeling of furious injustice. I wasn’t the only fat girl in attendance.

  ‘Wee’s fatter than me!’ I protested. I know it’s not admirable to throw someone else under the bus, particularly when it’s another girl, but it does go to show just how deeply entrenched those feelings of patriarchal capitulation are. It didn’t occur to me to tell them there was nothing wrong with being fat, or to defend myself or even to call them a mean name in return. On some level, I must have agreed with the assessment. I was fat. My only defence was to prove that I wasn’t as fat as one of their allies, and therefore render their arguments null and void.

  ‘She is so not as fat as you,’ piped up Snot. ‘She is this big’ – he pulled his hands apart to mime the measurement of someone’s waist – ‘and you are this big.’ His hands widened considerably. Standing beside him, Wee beamed.

  I must have protested further, because the next thing I remember is being told to stand back to back with her while the boys judged which of us was the most disgusting. Definitely me, according to Snot and Poo. The matter of my repulsive girth settled, the boys rapidly became bored and wandered back along the beach while Wee chatted animatedly next to them, her laughter carried back to me on the breeze.

  I was quiet on the drive home that night. Underneath my damp t-shirt, my tummy loomed up at me.

  Fat, it whispered.

  Shortly after my run-in with Snot, Poo and Wee, I started to notice all the ways in which my body was different to my friends’. I was larger, wobblier and thicker. My legs were covered in a rugged coat of hair. I wasn’t yet wearing a bra, although it’s unclear whether or not the things protruding from my chest were actually breasts or just two lumps of fat that had sought refuge there after turning up at my middle and finding there was no room at the inn. There’s a school photograph of me from around this time, self-hatred and depression already starting to write themselves across my face. I recall this picture for two reasons. The first is that I’ve taken furiously to one of the other girl’s faces with a pen and scratched deep marks into it. Beside her head, I’ve written: Bitch! The second is because it was the first time I can remember feeling that sharp stab of disgust and self-loathing that I would feel looking at any photograph of myself from that point on.

  It’s no coincidence that this sense of being suddenly thrust under a magnifying glass of external approval coincided with an escalation of my interest in boys. Perhaps by sheer combination of going to a tight-knit international school or just having parents who didn’t expect the emotional side of puberty to start so early, it wasn’t uncommon for the kids in my school year to have mixed sleepovers. Although we were ten years old and still more comfortable with relative chastity, these were not wholly innocent affairs. I don’t know if any of our parents realised what happened once the lights had gone out and everyone had gone to bed, but telling ghost stories wasn’t exactly on the agenda. Instead, we’d sit together in a circle, put some mood music on (we favoured ‘Crazy for You’ by Madonna with a spot of The Bangles’ ‘Eternal Flame’ thrown in for good measure) and play Truth or Dare.

  The ‘truth’ part was just a red herring – this game was all about the dares, and the dares were all about kissing. It was here that the hierarchy of attractiveness really made itself known and it became quickly apparent that I was on the bottom of it. What’s especially funny is how unconsciously this all seemed to be decided. The more popular kids in our circle would always be dared to kiss each other, while the less popular boys ended up with me.

  I’d experienced this sudden and unpleasant realisation of my lack of social power a year or so earlier. The Gulf War was happening a few countries to the left, so my parents shipped us kids out of one war zone and deposited us smack-bang in the middle of another: boarding school. To say that boarding school was an unhappy time for me would be an understatement. Although I would never trade the experience now (strength through adversity etc.), it was my first glimpse into how horrible children can be and the particular weapons made available to girls just trying to survive. The fact that there was only a handful of girl boarders in my year level was both an upside and a downside. We were forced to be friends through sheer proximity, but this also meant we couldn’t escape each other.

  One Saturday afternoon, we were sprawled on the wooden deck outside one of the classrooms. I remember it as being like a wooden hut, which I suspect is the universal attempt by school architects to create the illusion of healthy outdoorsiness to parents considering banishing their children to a prison of morning wake-up bells, prescribed dinner times and detentions for having wet hair at breakfast. As we sat there in our mandatory civvies uniforms of blue jeans and maroon jumpers, the circle tried to find a girlfriend for the unpartnered Josh.

  Of course, nine-year-olds partnering up sounds absurd to an adult, but it was very serious to us. Couples who ‘went together’ had a particular kind of gravitas. They didn’t actually do anything, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to be chosen. I guess that makes a lot of sense when you consider these were all kids whose parents, for various reasons, had sent them away.

  This charge to find a match for Josh was being led by Sarah, who was the most popular girl in our ye
ar but coincidentally also the nicest. Sarah threw my name into the ring, deciding that Josh and I should ‘go together’. He grudgingly accepted. I was elated, not because I secretly fancied Josh – to tell the truth, I thought he was mean and rude – but because it was a big deal to be singled out by Sarah. We all chatted happily for the next minute or so, until Josh suddenly piped up with, ‘What about Cheryl? Can’t I go with her?’

  The group exclaimed their approval, each high-pitched shriek puncturing my ego further. I joined in, acknowledging that yes, that pairing made much more sense. Why hadn’t we thought of it before? But inside, I wailed. Because unlike Sarah, Cheryl was not nice. Cheryl was a two-faced moll.

  These people were the closest things I had to any kind of friends or normality, and even they thought I was nothing. Realising this, the tiniest part of my heart broke away. When it found its way back to me, it came with the belief that, given the option, there would always be someone better, prettier and more preferable than me – someone who just made more sense. Irrational though it may be, I’ve never been able to shake it. Relationships have been sabotaged before they’ve even begun, the thought of someone liking me filling me with a deep and abiding disgust. Why would you like me? I mentally sneer at potential partners. What’s wrong with you?

  For a lot of us, self-love is a hard mountain to climb. And it’s not made remotely easier by the messages we receive about which of us deserves love and which of us doesn’t. I started to feel some sense of this on the wooden deck that day. I was already tall, loud and lumpy. Realising I was ‘fat’ and ‘undesirable’ just added to the trauma. As the girls around me blossomed, my resentment for them increased. Why did they have it so easy? Why could they eat what they like and still stay so thin? Why were all the labels that made a girl too much of one thing the same traits that made her not enough of another?

  A few months after I turned twelve, my parents announced that we were moving to England. I dreaded the prospect, and exercised my disgust by stomping up and down staircases and dramatically telling my parents they were ‘ruining my life!’ When the time came to leave, I exchanged tearful goodbyes with my friends – girls I had secretly cursed for being considered more popular and attractive than myself, and boys whose admiration I desperately yearned for and hence didn’t punish to anywhere near the same kind of level – and began a new life in a picturesque seaside town on the Norfolk coast.

  Sheringham was a world apart from Muscat. For a start, the kids there were wild. They drank alcohol and smoked cigarettes, both things I swore I would never do but enthusiastically took up within a year. Sartorially, it was unlike anything I’d experienced growing up in a modest Muslim country. Girls with tiny waists and thigh gaps draped themselves in short tops and shorter skirts, while boys who put in no effort at all looked on half approvingly and half bored. Once again, I found myself simultaneously hating and envying my female peers.

  That tremulous period between turning double digits and becoming a teenager can be difficult enough, but it didn’t help that I was settling into a new school with what I felt was a weird name, a weird accent and an entirely undesirable body. I longed to return home to the life and people I understood, but relief never came. With no means to control my environment, I did what so many girls and women have done and tried to control the one thing I felt sure I could conquer – my rebellious, unwieldy body.

  I had tried to diet before, copying my mother when she ate nothing but cabbage soup for days on end or grimaced her way through sour grapefruit halves. Nothing had worked, because those diets are both medically irresponsible and completely disgusting. And so I began to cut back on meal sizes instead and started walking the thirty-minute distance to school. Portion control and daily exercise are widely praised as the kind of ‘sensible’ methods people should use to lose weight, with little regard for how easily they can escalate into obsessive behaviours. Soon, my new eating plan had turned into a punishing diet; everything became about the limited calories I allowed myself to consume, and the rigorous order in which I could have them.

  Newspaper supplements – particularly those targeted at women – are fond of including columns called ‘My Day On a Plate’. Here, local celebrities will share a typical day of eating with a nutritional expert, who’ll then judge as good or bad their food choices. At twelve, this was my day on a plate:

  • Breakfast: A 100-calorie yoghurt. Speed-walk the thirty minutes to school, playing a game with myself to try to walk faster than the cars.

  • Lunch: A can of Diet Coke. Inwardly pity the girls eating actual food, their lack of self-control on display for everyone to see.

  • Afternoon snack: After speed-walking home, do a thirty-minute circuit of exercises from a book found in a second-hand store – all this to earn my snack-time reward: four Ryvita crackers with a tiny scraping of raspberry jam.

  • Dinner: A few bites of vegetables and white meat, even fewer bites if it’s pasta or some other carb-heavy dish. Claim to be full, which is half true because I’m distracted by the act of tallying today’s calories.

  As far as calories went, I tried to aim for a daily mass of around 800. Anything above this meant I was a pig and would send me into a hysterical, obsessive cycle of measuring my body with a tape measure over and over to check that I hadn’t suddenly become fat again. But, in a telling insight into the less explored side of eating disorders, I also viewed anything below this number as being unwise. The problem wasn’t that I was starving myself – I just hadn’t lost enough weight yet, that was all.

  At night, I would lay in bed with my hand on my stomach, enjoying the feeling of the protruding hip bones that were growing more prominent every day. I am in control, I’d think to myself.

  The weight loss was rapid. My clothes became baggy and shapeless almost overnight. My parents congratulated me on a job well done, telling me how good I looked and how proud they were of me. I began to wear shorter, tighter skirts to school, feeling suddenly inducted into a secret world of girlhood that I’d never been privy to before – the one where you’re allowed to feel good when people look at you instead of feeling exposed. As I continued to shrink, I thought of my body as a monster eating itself. I starved it, because in starving it I thought I could defeat it. I closed my mouth to stop it from making a sound, from telling me how hungry it was. Instead, I looked for nourishment from other things. Appreciative glances from boys at the park, smiles that had never been turned my way before with lips that moved to offer me cigarettes and alcohol. The spiteful glances of other girls, whose envy I took as a compliment. Acknowledgment from my parents that I was succeeding. Even the prick of smug self-satisfaction that came from thinking my ability to control my body might turn me into the favoured daughter.

  ‘It’s so easy,’ I would say when my sister was in earshot. ‘Really, anyone can do it if they just try hard enough.’

  I lost thirty kilograms within a space of three months. My period, which I’d been so desperate to get and so excited about when it finally arrived, abruptly ceased and I wasn’t sorry. Being undernourished enough to stop menstruation mightn’t have been ideal, but to my anorexic mind it felt a little like having a secret savings account in the bank. My budding breasts withered up and never really followed in the footsteps of my more buxom mother and sister. My shadowed ribs enveloped me like a suit of armour.

  But it still wasn’t enough. The slender body I’d been so thrilled to carve out from a mountain of flesh was no less terrifying to me than the gruesome mass I’d left behind. I knew I was thin, but I could never take pleasure in this newfound thinness for fear it would abandon me. I was obsessed. When I wasn’t counting calories, I was thinking about calories. I stood in front of the mirror, poking and prodding at the skin stretched over my bones, pinching all that I could between my fingers and recoiling in disgust. I looked at myself from every angle, pulling my clothes flat against me so I could check that I was as thin now as I had been three hours ago. I began to deprive myself even furt
her, instituting a series of bizarre rules. If the morning’s measurement had shown I’d gained half an inch overnight, I would gasp in horror and swear off breakfast. If I’d stayed the same or even lost a millimetre or two, I’d shiver with excitement – but I’d still skip food just to be on the safe side.

  Becoming thin was easy. Staying thin defeated my mind, my body and my spirit. Escaping the hatred I felt for myself was like trying to run away from a tidal wave. I wrote endless pages of self-hating poison in my diary, paragraphs and paragraphs dissecting my ugliness and physical grotesqueness. Being thin was meant to be a passport to being accepted, to being wanted, but it seemed I couldn’t even do that right. In these disturbed ramblings, I drew picture after picture depicting what I thought I looked like, the scribbles illustrating delusions of a misshapen duck’s body: no tits, massive arse, enormous saggy stomach, ham legs.

  My fixation with controlling my body crossed over into an anxiety disorder, and I started throwing up after meals. Bent over the bowl, I rid myself of the food I did not deserve and fed myself instead on self-loathing.

  The boisterousness I had exhibited as a child had given way to shame and self-doubt, the way it does for most girls who spend their childhoods exploring imaginary castles in the garden, singing loudly without fear, and proudly telling anyone who’ll listen about all the things they’re good at and all the adventures still to come. As our bodies expand and the volume of our voices decreases, we enter the territory that lies beyond the familiarity of our garden boundaries. Here, we learn about what happens to the girls who break the rules. The ones who have too many opinions, who eat too much, talk too much, fuck too much and act too much like we might have the right to decide what happens to us and why.