Have you ever been to a fairground — a good, old-fashioned fairground, one that has whirring lights and smells like corn dogs and candy floss, all sticky, sweet and savoury — and looked at yourself in one of the distorted mirrors? Stand in front of one, and you’re oddly tall with a head too big for your body. Look into another, and you are five feet tall and three feet wide. Do you remember giggling, and running away, knowing that you really don’t look like that?

I never walk away from those mirrors. Every brief glimpse of myself I see is a distortion. A lie.

This particular lie was fed to me by those around me, this lie repeated to me when I went home for Christmas and was told that I must have gotten too big to fit my old clothes. As though it was a bad thing. As though that was not the fucking point of recovery.

The worst part of it is that I believe them. The worst part is that, despite studying one of the most difficult degrees there is in one of the best universities in the UK, I can still simplify myself to my body image, and whether or not I look good in a dress. The worst part? The image in the mirror that I get uncomfortable out isn’t even what I look like.

The basic point is: I don’t know what I look like. I can’t see what everyone else sees. Note: I say can’t, not won’t. This is not a choice. This is a method of brainwashing which started when I was twelve and is shouted at me through the megaphone which is the media. Every. Single. Day. It seeps into my life through my friends’ words, through the books I read, through the films I watch. It filters through my nightmares and my other insecurities, my stressful life and my perfectionism.

It starts young.

If I think carefully about it, this all started when I hit puberty. Not the first wave, where I shot up two feet, or where my voice broke, but where I started growing curves and got my period for the first time. My body had been previously gangly, long-limbed and awkward. All the muscle on my body was wiry, lean, strong. I had often been mistaken for a boy, with my deep voice and unfeminine features. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, that all changed, of course. I fell out of the strict exercise regimen I had previously stuck to — mainly ballet and the family mountain biking excursions — and my diet changed from obscenely healthy to whatever I wanted to eat. So of course I plumped up. I was supposed to.

But no one told me that. Not even my mother, until it was too late, and shadows had started forming in my mind.

No, this is what happened: my fourteen-year-old boyfriend thought he had the right to pinch my stomach, chuckle, and inform me that I was getting ‘tubby’. I was so uncomfortable with the loose skin on my body that I bought diet pills and ‘cellulite reducing’ creams. My mother did not stop me. My sister did not stop me. My cousin did not stop me. The woman at the counter of Boots did not look worried, in fact, she looked approving. I walked out of Boots and past the fifteen different ‘shaping clinics’ in the mall, and as I looked up all I could see were stick-thin, beaming ladies who informed me that skinny was the way. Skinny would make me beautiful. When I was fifteen, I became so obsessed with exercise that I could do five hundred sit-ups without even breaking a sweat, and I did so each night before I went to bed. I even joined the school’s Biggest Loser club — even though I had nothing to lose. And still, my best friend leaned over after swimming, pinched my stomach, and mocked me for being ‘fat’. My teacher heard her, and he didn’t stop her.

Boys stopped trying to carry me, when they could carry all the other girls happily over their shoulders. If any of them — especially those that boasted strength — attempted to lift me, it was as a challenge. When they put me down, it was always with a loud ‘oof!’ and ‘Jesus, you’re heavy!’. When they did pay attention to me, it was to refer to my curves through objectification. When I was introduced to another friend by any of the boys in my class, there would be crude gestures imitating the shape of breasts, and winking — and through this treatment I learned to hate my natural shape.

With all this in consideration, I was not at all surprised that it ended up in starvation. I would stand in front of the mirror and admire the way my stomach dipped beneath my ribs, and still I could think that I was chubby. I would sleep just to avoid eating, or rather, to be forced to eat.