Sarah Berry: When my life spun out of control, I stopped eating

I know it's ridiculous as soon as I think it. Still, I fantasise about my escape. I will wheel my bed down the corridor, out the double doors and away from this wretched place. What I will do then, I can't decide. Even if I make it past the night-duty nurses, I can no longer walk, so I can't really run away – not in the traditional sense, at least.

Perhaps I will hail a cab. It will have to be a maxi taxi to fit the bed in, but there are plenty of people who use wheelchairs around here, so I figure there's a decent chance of finding one. I don't have any money and I stopped speaking a while ago, but I could write down where I want to go.

The writer with her family.

Where do I want to go? I don't know. Maybe the Maldives. There's a photograph on the wall of one of the appointment rooms that I stare at, waiting for the endless examinations and cross-examinations to finish. Turquoise waters, a palm tree and smooth, creamy sand. Calm.

A nurse doing her hourly round of checks shines a light in my face. I close my eyes. Well, one eye. I keep my other eye closed all the time now.

Sarah, right, in 1993.

I'd close both eyes if I could, but then I wouldn't be able to escape so hungrily into the worlds within my books. They are worlds away from my increasingly shrink-wrapped one, in the artificially lit hospital ward with which I have become so familiar.

I came down with glandular fever in September the year before, in 1993, and, when the flames in my throat softened, there came a time I could swallow food again. I just stopped wanting to. It wasn't on purpose. I didn't think I was fat – at 168 centimetres, I weighed 48 kilograms.

Just before I got sick, Mum took me to the doctor because she saw a problem before I did. I sat in her maroon Ford afterwards eating a peanut butter sandwich, confused; I loved food.

Although I didn't feel fat, I did feel heavy. I turned 12 that June of 1993 and was overwhelmed by the fast pace of my first year in high school, at the Ravenswood School for Girls on Sydney's North Shore.

The writer in 1993.

I did swimming squad most mornings, athletics training most afternoons and netball, cricket, rhythmic gymnastics or water polo in between. I felt joy and freedom when I ran and, importantly, given I was shy and anxious off the track, I felt confident.

On the athletics field, breathing deeply the warm smell of cut grass, I would warm up on the tartan track, picking off bits of the orange polyurethane that made indents on my knees as I knelt down, stretching. Effervescent waves of nerves and anticipation would wash over me before I was about to race.

Sarah Berry.

I knew this place. I had been here since I was two, wriggling and begging Mum and Dad to let me follow in the footsteps of my brothers and run free.

After two years of nagging and whinging, they finally enrolled me in the under-6s at Northern Suburbs Little Athletics and I proudly pulled on my black scungies and red singlet for the first time. The track was my home.

The writer today.

IT FELT EASIER TO WITHDRAW, TO BECOME SMALLER AND SMALLER UNTIL ONE DAY I MIGHT, WITH ANY LUCK, EVAPORATE INTO OBLIVION AND NOT HAVE TO WORRY OR FEEL OUT OF CONTROL ANY MORE.

But being there, competing, winning, was also the only time I felt competent and worthy of affection. If I won, I was worthy, if I lost, I was not – as simple as that. So I was fierce about winning.

Apprehensive about starting at my new school, I sensed an instant expectation as some girls knew my name from junior school competitions and spread the word.

Sarah with her brother.

At my first school carnival that year, the girls from my house gathered around the mats. Earlier that day, I ran 13 flat to break the under-13s 100m record.

As I stood in my canary yellow T-shirt and blue bike pants, I was preparing to break a long-standing high-jump record. I looked around, terrified by the attention. I ran and baulked at the bar, ran and baulked at the bar, ran and jumped.

I felt my body lift, my back arch fluidly, I let my head drop back, flicked my legs up and I flew. Full of possibility, it was the feeling of freedom. The bar quivered and held.

I shook afterwards, elated but freshly weighed down with the burden of my own expectations. The more I pushed myself – from school to state to nationals – the more everything seemed as if it was spinning too fast, and the faster I ran the less I could keep up.

Often I came home and collapsed in tears, exhausted by myself.

There was also Mum. I often opened the front door, its green paint peeling, to our weatherboard in Willoughby with dread. We were so close, yet she was battling the heavy burden of depression and her self-destruct button was in many ways pressed in as hard as mine.

I knew she was desperate to be a good mum while she struggled with her own demons. I knew sometimes she thought we'd be better off without her.

So I walked on egg shells waiting for something to give. Sometimes I provoked her, just to relieve my own tension and fear. And then I fell sick.

I'd heard about anorexia before. My eldest brother, my best friend, had told me about the girls who were his age – 16 – who would only eat jelly killer pythons, smoke cigarettes and drink coffee. Mum had told me that she'd had an eating disorder as a teenager.

I'd seen her get skinny, sometimes, by eating not much more than celery sticks all the while spreading the butter too thickly on my bread.

It was odd this not-eating business, I thought. I didn't understand why anyone would want to eat only celery. So when I came down with glandular fever in 1993, I wasn't thinking about weight or food or only eating celery. I just felt tired. Tired of worrying about Mum. Tired of worrying about winning, or what it meant if I lost.

Slowly, the more time I spent away from school, the scarier it became to think of going back. What if I didn't have any friends anymore? What if I had to repeat? What if I couldn't win any more?

I couldn't conceive of finishing school, going to university, falling in love, having a life beyond the brokenness. It felt easier to withdraw, to become smaller and smaller until one day I might, with any luck, evaporate into oblivion and not have to worry or feel out of control any more.

Dad told me I would hit puberty soon. I might grow breasts and hips, my body might change and I might not be suited to do high jump or to run fast anymore. He told me that it was okay and it was natural.

I began to cry. I didn't want to grow breasts. To be a woman. I ate less and less until I'd press just a spoonful of peas reluctantly to my mouth each day.

I'm not hungry, I'd tell Dad. And so I went to hospital where they would conduct tests, feed me with a tube pushed up my nose and send me home weeks or months later when my weight stabilised and nothing was deemed physically wrong.

School friends and coaches would visit me in hospital and try to urge me back. I enjoyed the gifts they brought and the silly skits they entertained me with. But I was drifting further away and increasingly resentful of attempts to help me. Then Mum ended up in a psychiatric ward.

I swallowed my emotions. Dad swallowed his own struggle to afford the school fees as he cared for our crumbling family.

My brothers kept some semblance of normalcy while chaos gathered momentum around them. The eldest one was increasingly pale and quiet while he studied for his HSC, and the other, busy training to swim in the nationals again, injured his knee and literally limped by on crutches. I stayed in my room.

Dad tried to keep it together, tried to keep us all together. I stopped walking. I'm too tired, I don't have the energy, I said, and he and my brother had to carry me to the bathroom.

"The doctors say you will die of heart failure if this continues," he pleaded, pushing a plate of pasta towards me.

I went into hospital again, back at Camperdown. They performed more tests while threatening to send me to the eating disorder clinic in Sydney's Chatswood. As the tests and hospital admission stretched out, I stopped talking and then closed one eye. With only one eye open, it's easier to focus on my book while lying on my side.

Mum phoned every day. She was sorry, she told me. She loved me and would visit me as soon as she was allowed out, she said. She asked me questions and I responded with one tap of the phone for "yes" and two taps for "no". When she visited me from hospital, she held me tight.

I wanted to scream and scratch and punch and kick wildly like I did when I was little. Instead I swallowed. I wanted to rip the tube from my nose like that skinny, decrepit-looking, stringy, brownhaired girl down the hall did. They just held her down and forced it back in. I didn't pull the tube out, but I did find other ways to resist. The daily weigh-in became a sick game

Each morning before "breakfast", a nurse slid me from the bed into the wheelchair. She took me to the bathroom where I sat in the chair and she scrubbed me with pink soap from the dispenser and rubbed me too hard with the scratchy towel. "We need to get you warm," she said.

She weighed me. I did not smile outwardly when I saw the measurement on the scales drop.

Back in the bed with the green sheets and white waffle blanket, in that place thick with the smell of disinfectant, where no good ever happened, I filled my starving stomach with the despair that I was choking on.

The more everything else spun out of my control, the more I knew I could control my body. It was a "f... you" to everyone else and a reflection of all the hollowness I felt inside.

I didn't know how to find my way back out. I didn't know how to feel joy again. The nurse's torch focused on the bloated boy opposite me with the brain tumour. Silent tears ran down my face and I fell into a sleep, hallucinating, praying, dreaming of my escape.

It was a slow road to recovery, but I did make it out. After nearly two years away from school, I returned towards the end of year 9 and became athletics captain in year 12. I still run daily – but now only from a place of joy – and have a close, loving relationship with my family and a peaceful relationship with food and my body. There is always hope for people who are stuck or suffering, that much I know.

For information and support about eating disorders and body image issues, contact The Butterfly Foundation on their National Helpline number: 1800 33 4673 (1800 ED HOPE)