It’s odd the moments when pieces of the puzzle suddenly fit together.

One thing I’ve really struggled with over the years has been whether what I am experiencing is really real. I’d think that while many people actually experienced the problems I was having and deserved help and support getting through them, I had read about eating disorders and somehow decided to copy them and just needed to snap out of it.

It was also a message I heard from my Mum. I think she desperately wanted it to be true so that her daughter would not be going through so much pain. She would remind me of the occasion when I was seven or eight. I had a cold and a sore throat and was reading ‘Little Woman’. When I got to the part where Beth develops scarlet fever I worriedly asked Mum if that might be what I had. She told me it wasn’t and Dad reassured me later.

Afterwards Mum would often remind me that it’s easy to think you have symptoms of an illness you’ve read about. Something I also heard from medical professionals who experienced the phenomena during their studies.

When I was about 12 years old I had read a story about eating disorders in the Guide annual and had that strong feeling of recognition that that could be me. For years I’ve looked back on it wondering if I could have taken that story and chosen to follow it in some way.

In my early twenties as I started being diagnosed with things I also bought lots of mental health books. My Mum frequently expressed her concern that I would make myself worse by reading about these topics and suggested that I ‘only read the end.’ In some of those books the end was where she might have found hope that recovery was possible. For me though it was a search for any pieces of the puzzle which could help me make sense of what I was feeling.

I found a few that struck me in the moment and some more that made sense as I worked through things that had happened to me in therapy. However there was always that nagging doubt. What if I had it wrong? What if I really was just a bad girl who had read about other peoples suffering and taken it as her own? Was this connection because I was experiencing similar things or was it that I wanted to have so that the way I was behaving was justified?

I spent a lot of time in therapy expressing these doubts. For me the self harm that I used to cope was also important in flagging the stuff from the past to myself. I told mental health workers again and again that if I stopped self harming I would be saying that everything had been all right including the things that really hadn’t. As pieces fell into place and I was able to talk about these things I was indeed able to switch to healthy coping strategies most of the time.

Another puzzle piece fell into place for me this week as I arrived at singing. Being pregnant,my first stop had to be the toilets. For some reason a snippet of a poem I had been told to write in school at the age of 7 popped into my mind.

“How much longer must I wait,

I can hear my tummy rumbling favourite dinner on my plate.”

I met my own eyes in the mirror in amazement. We wrote those poems and then had to collage our favourite meal onto a cardboard plate for a display. The meal I had in mind writing the poem had been take away fish and chips but I vividly remembered my seven year old horror at the thought of admitting that. I was so sure that people would think I was a bad person for wanting to eat unhealthy food that I lied. I attempted to collage white fish and garden peas onto my white cardboard plate. It didn’t show up well on the wall.

I also remembered two years later when a teacher asked us to graph our heights and weights through that school year. At nine years old I was horrified to find that my weight had increased in the first three months. I was sure that a good girl who ate healthy food and did proper exercise would have lost weight despite being a growing child. I was desperate to be a good girl as I had convinced myself that if I could be good enough it would stop bad things happening to me and my siblings. I was too ashamed to put my real weight on the chart and instead charted the weights that I though could have made me good and kept me safe which dropped off the bottom of the charts axis as the year went by.

Looking at my adult pregnant self in the mirror a number of puzzle pieces dropped into place.

Firstly I realised that both of these incidents happened long before I read anything about eating disorders so my Mum’s suggestion that I had gone down that road by copying what I read about hadn’t been right. The story really had got my attention because it chimed with experiences I had had.

Secondly I realised that my current fears about trying on clothes that might not fit my third trimester body come from the thinking I was using to cope as a little girl and probably don’t serve me now.

Thirdly I felt compassion for the little girl that I was then. She did what she could to cope with situations that were well beyond her coping skills. She got though and I can chose not to feel guilty that the coping strategies she came up with were not healthy and later caused many people distress and worry. No one can go back in time to rescue her or help her unpick those thinking patterns when they were still new. I also can’t go back and wipe them away or undo the distress that people who cared about me experienced when they noticed that things weren’t right. All any of us can do is our best to respond in the healthiest way we can right now.

That night I dreamt of a man who for whatever reason had touched me inappropriately from a very young age. In my dream he was huge and I knew that I had dreaded seeing him again having told people our secret. Yet in my dream I was able to to say to him

“The dead have not hold upon the living.”

Each time I repeated it he grew bigger and his threats more dire until he was far taller than the houses. Yet I woke with those words running through my head feeling calmer and more free than I had in a while.