Mirror, Mirror

At an orphanage for the children of Chernobyl a colleague of mine reported from, there are no mirrors. The kids don't have to confront, on a daily basis, how they look. Maybe they even forget completely.

Over the past few days, various friends have held up a mirror to me, and I am as shocked as if I've lived in the orphanage myself. BN2 thought I was pretty and sometimes glamorous – that I know, because he said it – but otherwise the image of me he reflected back was unrelentingly ugly. I was selfish. I was a downer. I was cheap. I was dishonest. I was boring. I was a cold fish. I couldn't be bothered to make the slightest effort.

But a Christmas card arrives from a friend: "Thanks for being such a great friend. An evening with you is always a pick-me-up."

Another friend emails that I have been so generous with her Christmas present that she thinks she owes me something in the new year.

At dinner with friends last night I haven't seen for months – mostly because of BN2 – they say how much they have missed me. I don't feel like myself – whoever that is, I'm not really sure at this point – but they seem happy to see me, anyway, and in fact stay up much later than usual.

Maybe as much as a year ago, one of my best friends told me she feared for me in this relationship. "Every day you stay with BN2 is another day there's more damage being done to you."

With every hour that goes by, it seems, I find another bruise. It's scary, and it hurts.

***

My sister and a couple of friends kept saying that if I could just disentangle myself from BN2, my whole life would suddenly be full of possibility. It's a promise that's already being fulfilled, in ways large and small.

Sunday night I accepted a last-minute invitation for drinks at Shoreditch House. With no one keeping tabs on me and no hour and a half trek to make it, as one friend put it, to "the ass end of Putney and Wimbledon," I feel free just to let the conversation flow, as opposed to worrying about packing in as much as possible into a couple of hours of freedom. (I should say here that I've realized every binge of the past six months was in some way related to my knowing I was about to be shoved into the BN2 cage again, the door slammed shut.)

One of the people I had a long, freewheeling chat is a Big F**king Deal at a major London department store. I wasn't trying to impress her and didn't even know they had a job open, but at the end of the night she told me what fantastic ideas I had, and suggested I should come in and meet with them. (I don't really want to do PR, which is what she had in mind, but I'm never one to turn down a meeting. It's all about, yes, possibility.)

Today I am frustrated because I can't check in online for my flight to the US. My ticket is a ludicrously overpriced last-minute purchase, and now I'm going to be crammed into a middle seat for eight-plus hours?

It turns out it's because I've been chosen for an upgrade not one but two classes, to Business Class.

"When that happens your e-ticket number is wiped from the system, and so you have to come and do check-in in person," explains the BA agent, who's wearing a silver tinsel boutonniere. Of all the days of the year to be fast-tracked through security, oh yay. I nearly cartwheel through Terminal 5 to the lounge. I remember briefly a huge fight I had with BN2 last New Year, when he thought I spent too much time (translation: wasted his time) buying some food for the flight. When flying economy (I say this like I ever fly anything else), I like to bring my own – (a) why waste (so many) calories on crappy airline food, (b) there's often peppers in it, to which I'm allergic, and (c) travelling is a huge binge trigger for me, so it's better and cleaner for me to know exactly what I'm going to eat. BN2 was particularly angry because he had lounge access, which he didn't get to use because I was too, as he put it, obsessed with sorting myself out. (I'd told him to go ahead, but he wouldn't.)

Note to self: Even if you are at home with your married pregnant sister and her husband, it cannot be worse than last year, a story so awful I've almost repressed it, and can't bear to tell it. But I digress.

In the lounge I am seized by fear. There is food. Loads of it. Everyone is eating and drinking: wine, shortbread, pasta, crisps, sandwiches, cakes, cheese. I think of how much I would have eaten three plus years and nearly 100 pounds ago. But what do I eat now?

It's 3:30 pm and I'll be needing a snack soon. Before I'd gone to the lounge I'd looked in the chocolate shop, where I debated buying a 500g buy-one-get-one-free sampler of Lindt for £7, which would be an economical and probably delicious way to sort out a couple of weeks' worth of snacks. But I always have to consider – particularly when travelling – what would happen if I ate the whole thing, and in this case, the risk was too great. (Besides, whenever I have a lot of something, I inevitably don't want to eat it when the time comes, which cancels out the economy.)
I was hoping for some (snack-size) chocolate, but there is none to be found. Instead there are packages upon packages of Walkers shortbread in different varieties. They are snack-size (no more than one or two biscuits per package), but without calorie counts. I confess to still being (slightly) freaked out by this. I'm OK doing it occasionally, but I want to try one of each, which is certainly several days' worth of snacks. More to the point, I'm slightly worried about whether I'll eat them all on the flight – being trapped (and not just by BN2) has always been a massive trigger for me, and usually I bring just enough food to get me through, with maybe one extra snack.

Feeling like one of those old ladies at a Florida fundraising luncheon (they bring plastic bags and take tons of food – so much so that when my mother ran these lunches she wouldn't allow buffets) I take one of each: chocolate chip, ginger, oatmeal honey, double chocolate, the works. For a snack I have a bag of Kettle crisps. I also grab a Granny Smith apple for the flight.

Onboard I am torn about whether to have the dinner I've brought or to sample the business class fare. I figure I'll feel too much like a martyr doing the former, and of course, now that I've decided to let go a little bit, true to my black-or-white form, I want to go crazy. I decide on the healthy starter (some kind of marinated leeks), a salad (which comes with everything), and the beef casserole with a dumpling and mash. (The "healthy" option is a cold salad, which I cannot face.) The pudding is some kind of orange thing, so I decide ahead of time I'll skip it and have the cheese. I'm incredibly hungry (have been all day), so I eat the apple when everyone else is eating nuts.

The casserole is too salty but I eat it anyway. I also have a few glasses of champagne – I love champagne. The dessert turns out to be mince pie or cheese, and I opt for my pre-chosen cheese, though I do have a (possibly champagne-fuelled) moment of wanting to ask for the mince pie, too. But I don't. I eat ¾ of the cheese (it's two kinds: one blue cheese and one brie) and the three oat biscuits. I eat the piece of chocolate that arrived at the beginning of my meal with a cup of tea. I think briefly that it's BN2 who got me in the habit of thinking tea to be the perfect accompaniment for something sweet, but the thought actually doesn't pain me.

Usually when I fly to the US I plan to have an extra meal – sometimes even an extra snack and an extra meal – but as I've eaten more than usual I'll have to play it by ear, something I am never very good at. (Except immediately post-binge, I honestly think I could easily and happily eat at any time of day, should I be offered food.)

***

Update: I wrote the above on the plane, before going on to consume a pear and a piece of chocolate (silly me for not realizing they were serving more food.) I then had half the sandwich they served and the tiny piece of Christmas cake, plus a package of 100-calorie Weight Watchers lemon biscuits (I usually hate "diet" food, but these were pretty good) and 30g of nuts, seeds and dried fruit I'd stashed in my bag. Then I managed, despite staying up until midnight (5 am London time) not to eat anything else.

I'm unlikely to be able to run today, which ideally I'd do to feel a bit stronger at the Christmas party we're attending at a friends' parents tonight. But my goal is small, and one I challenged a friend to: Don't eat anything you don't like. (You laugh, but I actually do the opposite more often than I'd care to admit.)

Happy Christmas, and enjoy!