AN EATING DISORDER OR JUST REALLY COMPETITIVE?

I studied at the University of Southampton for 3 years as an undergraduate in Philosophy and sociology, with a Master's in the former starting this year. Logic in Analytical Philosophical language is concise. We break ideas down into premises, which can, in turn, be broken down into Algebraic symbols. The claim “Adams belief is right or wrong, he is not wrong, so he must be right” can be written as “Φ = A v B, ¬B, ∴ Φ= A.” This incredible simplicity has made dissecting claims, uncovering fallacies and truth, a delightful and fulfilling part of my life. It makes life appear to have a fundamental code to break down and uncover. But I have also found areas in life do not fit so neatly. Yes, I can evaluate a four-chapter Kantian argument using this method, but how do I even begin to approach areas of trauma in my own life? How do I break down my rich subjective experience into those cold symbols? When there are so many thoughts to be had and so many interpretations of each memory, how does one begin to label trauma? I am equally amazed and daunted by those who can stand up in a room and point fingers. They make strong claims about their experiences and who has wronged them without a hint of uncertainty. I find myself constantly flooded with a thousand-second guesses, predicting the responses of a dozen people I have never met. Before I can even predict others, however, I am already second-guessing the accuracy of my own memory. As a child, my motives and thoughts seemed like a fog, not like some unshakable witness in a court, far from trustworthy in applying blame. This gets to the crux of what I am saying. We are fickle, unhelpful to ourselves, self-sabotaging naturally. But I also want to ask, what does this change? Perhaps it is not essential in life to always have an infallible witness. Well, we shall see. To get there, I will lay a personal anecdote (how fun), and you can decide the answer to my title. Isn’t that title random, by the way? A paragraph in, and I haven’t even acknowledged it. Apologies.

I have always been insanely competitive. I hope someone reading this can relate to ‘insanely competitive’ because the all-consuming love of winning everything and anything is hard to put into words. I find competition a way for my mind to be itself in a way it just can’t be on its own. My entire life, I’ve been unable to lie in silence at night, finding my thoughts to be overwhelming and too loud. Not wandering about but crashing down on me with suffocating force. When I was younger, my mother would read to me in an old rocking chair before eventually buying a treasured cassette and CD player. Now, I thank God that Audible exists. Yet with competition, my mind is keenly focused, all noise vanishing while my one goal becomes achieving whatever is just out of reach. All the better if that goal looks beyond my ability; that’s when adrenaline kicks in - my mind fear and excitement incarnate. Determined, focused, quiet. The tennis games of my teens, plus the later Bouldering and Ping Pong of my University years, have been the therapy that kept me sane enough to live. The raw emotion of being one point from losing a game, set, and match, only to claw back the win by pure determination, is not a feeling you forget. It is that kind of feeling I want to emphasize to you here; winning has always been my therapy, my drug, and my most realized self. I have always (mistakenly) placed everything into winning for these reasons, and an opportunity for honest competition was blood to a shark, a high to the person with an addiction.

It would be dishonest of me not to discuss the flip side of this competitiveness, a childhood filled with being a very sore loser. I am embarrassed to admit that it took me far too long to shake this terrible habit (I still work on it to this day), and I can remember many a sulk unbefitting of any age over four. God help you if you dared go easy or hold back on me in any game; I wanted your best, your full 100 percent every time. It was inconceivable to me that a person may want to not win at all costs but rather have fun in the experience. I often got distraught when I thought anyone was throwing a few points of table tennis to help me, despite frequently doing this myself to keep games closer and more competitively intense. I would demand to lose 21-6 rather than have a longer, closer game, only to shed an angry tear. In one case, around ten years old, I was being thoroughly beaten at chess, a game that I believed made me look brilliant. So angry at losing this game was I, that when my friend called a pause to use the toilet, I ran ahead of him, locking every stall with a penny from the outside. When he arrived, I lied, saying they were occupied, eventually leading to him soiling himself and going home. He knew I had lied, but to the teachers, ‘Arlo, the preacher’s son,’ could not even imagine such a convoluted act of cruelty. Despite said friend having forgiven me years later, I think about this story a lot. I was an earnest Christian at that age, yet I acted with such malice at the thought of losing one chess game. I am grateful that I grew out of this phase of sore losing and have worked to cleanse that childish anger from my competitive streak. I hope you don’t think too poorly of young Arlo; he was confused and misguided. In many ways, I hold myself too accountable for the fruit of my upbringing. The most damaging lie told to me was that I, as a child of God, knew a truth that all the other children did not. This made me feel superior to them and made my actions more justified. But religion is a topic for another time. Now, I wish to use this overly long foundation to discuss the bizarre title of this chapter. Given the above context, I hope you form a strong opinion. Should we ever meet, please tell me what you decide.

I’ve always hated food. I used to see it as an annoying distraction designed to drag me from my toys and games. My favourite foods as a young child were whatever was the sweetest, combined with chicken nuggets and chips. As I got older, this belief about foods continued as a constant. My mother often joked that if I could take a pill instead of sitting down for a meal, then I’d do it every time. Coca-Cola was a different story, as were sweets of course, but anything of substance was seen as a distraction. I still ate my food; if a plate was put in front of me, I said thank you and did my best to eat as much as I could. But it was always known that I never cared for mealtimes. So when I was old enough to be at primary school, a lunch lovingly packed in my bag but now no adult to oversee, I found myself drawn elsewhere. Why waste half of my lunchtime eating when I could be playing football on the field? It seemed an obvious choice to me at the time, allowing me to hang out with twice the friends, one group eating while the other lost some game to me. Only when I got home did I realize that a polite adult was waiting for my empty plate in the form of my mother, whom I expect lightly scolded me for skipping lunch at first. I imagine I ate my dinner and apologised enough that, by bedtime, all was forgiven. This event sadly did not teach me to eat my lunch, however, only that there was more thought needed in my approach. I continued to skip lunch, eating breakfast, going to school, and playing as much as possible before binning my lunch on the way home. But I was so wrapped up in my playing most days I would completely forget to bin the evidence, having to hide everything under my bed when I remembered. My mother was deeply loving, but stern on misbehaviour and I knew a slap to the thigh was in store if I was caught, so this game of sorts continued. There is, however, only a certain amount of ham and cheese sandwiches you can hide in one’s room before the smell begins to make even the best hiding spots rather null. Thus, my weird habit took on new levels, my mother searched my room for caches of moulding sandwiches while I expanded my stores across the house, garage, and tiny garden. Not once did it occur to me that this increasingly ridiculous effort was far greater than simply eating food. Nor did the thought that my mother did this out of concern for my well-being particularly penetrate my adolescent skull.

As I entered secondary school, there were simply too many sandwiches to ever keep track of, and I would be surprised as well as horrified when an angry parent would show me the handiwork of my 2 months ago self. Yet, despite sport no longer being acceptable for an aspiring ‘cool’ Arlo to do at lunch, my bad habit persisted. This is where it became increasingly hard to tell myself I was simply too busy doing sports. Around this time I finally convinced my family to allow me to be pescatarian, something my father profoundly disagreed with and teased me about. I would feel incredibly guilty and made aware of my special treatment, ‘ungratefully’ having an alternative to the chicken or beef the rest of my family loved. Eating out was a special time that became a nightmare as my father continued taking us to steak houses (his favourite) with no vegetarian option except maybe an egg and chips. I hope none of you experience the embarrassment of asking a server whether they had a vegetarian option at a steak house; it’s rough. Still, I was blessed to eat out at all, and I was just happy that years of being forced to eat meat were behind me. It did, however, further this weird relationship between food and me.

Then, despite not having spare money at the time, my parents patiently and lovingly continued trying to solve this growing problem, generously giving me the money for what I believe was three hot meals a week on the school’s cafeteria system. For a time, all I had to worry about was the already hidden stashes of mouldy food, and I could lie to my family about the delicious burrito at school, with no evidence to the contrary. But this compromise ended when my mother worked out how to see that I was spending all my money on ridiculously overpriced brownies given to new friends. It was back to acting surprised when the brand new batch of Tupperware mysteriously ran out, despite us all knowing the truth. It was around this time that I began to experience a rift between myself and my parents’ religion, a religion that paid for our family’s livelihood. I started noticing my infatuations were not just with girls but boys too, a truth I dared not admit to myself outright as it flew in the face of God. This, combined with my growing frustration with the church, made dinner time an ever-growing nightmare, a minefield of political views to be avoided at all costs. Why would I want to sit and listen to my dad’s perspectives on the blue-haired news reporter when I could be playing overwatch online and feeling that sweet sensation of winning? I was also forever forced to get up earlier so that breakfast could be consumed alongside the morning bible study, a routine I did my whole life until college. Food became an utmost chore at this time, the worst thing I could imagine as a teenager. My mornings comprised of getting up early, reading and discussing Paul’s explanation that gays would burn in hell while forcing down porridge in front of my mother. Then, off to school, a nightmare in its own right but a bliss where no one noticed a lack of eating. But then the bell would go, and I’d trudge back home to try and avoid dinner as much as possible. Years ensued of this same routine, making a sandwich that would either end up in the bin or hidden in the house, some food forced down and away to play some game. But I was happy with this routine when faced with the alternatives, so life progressed.

Thankfully, I had a significant insecurity; my height of 4ft 11. It was only when it was explained to me bluntly that to grow, I needed to eat (shocking) that my hate for food was overridden. I need not explain the fear that young boys have of not growing, only heightened by my own increasing awareness that others' growing height and build were leaving me behind in sports. After a nasty bout of appendicitis, I started on drinkable meal supplements, further helping me begin to grow and eat. Thus, this chapter of my life slowly died out at around 16. I ate my meals through gritted teeth, and eventually, it became easier. The only reminder was the occasional text from my poor mother, having stumbled upon another criminal food hiding spot 14-year-old Arlo came up with.

What was it all about? I always ask myself years later about my weird relationship with food. I am quite a vain individual, and how I style myself is very important to me. A bad hair day can unironically make me change plans or panic about leaving the house. This was comical to me until I tried to put on weight this year. I have fallen in love with indoor bouldering, a sport in which I can lose myself without needing to rely on another person being around. I planned on gaining some weight to get better, which I hoped would turn into muscle. I bought the protein powder, began increasing my meal portions, and was greeted with a flood of old emotions. Again, I was forcing every bite down, having to set alarm reminders to eat, and my mental health began to suffer. But it was when I started to put on some weight that my mental health plummeted to new lows. The very thing that I had wanted to accomplish horrified me. A bit of weight on the stomach and a less angled face spiralled me as if it were 3000 pounds. I began struggling to eat anything again and had to stop the bulk to regain the careful balance I didn’t know I was maintaining. I was shocked. I had never struggled with food before, I thought. Yes, there were those times I skipped lunch, but that was a few meals a day, and it was because I was so in love with sports. I had always thought that time of my life as funny, so ridiculous that I had devoted that much effort to get 30 minutes more of football. But now I was confronted with another truth, another interpretation.

Yet I know people who struggle with actual eating disorders, who go home and force themselves to throw up after a meal with friends. I had never been that bad and felt so contrasted with them. A combination of comparative guilt and selective memory enforced my denial of anything unhealthy happening for years. Then I remember looking in the mirror and pinching my stomach. I remember using the trick my parents taught me: warm water and salt to make yourself vomit. Sometimes, I did it to get out of school; sometimes, I didn’t know why I did it to myself. I look back, point at it, and go, “There, AHA! I do have issues!” Only for my brain to second-guess what those memories are. There’s another side to every thought: an excuse to get off school or a way to go play more games. I remember hearing an aunt was struggling with an eating disorder for the first time and staring at the mirror for 20 minutes, thinking, “I could never have one of those; my body is not too bad.” I type it out, and it seems so clear. I’m so blatantly denying a genuine issue; it’s ridiculous. Yet a part of me still fully believes I could convince you I was fine, a child who loved sports and was figuring himself out, rebelling weirdly. This belief has made it so difficult to share anything. If someone agrees there was some deeper issue, I feel I have deceived them in some horrible need to be unique. If they disregard what I say, then I think I am a selfish idiot while simultaneously, another part of me believes the deeper issue is genuine. It was only when I laid this heap of thoughts upon a therapist that I received any real help. Honestly explaining everything, including my fears of perception, as I have attempted to do in this paragraph. If deeper issues could be clearly outlined, they wouldn’t be more profound. But this is the easy case. Here, I only had my mental health to blame directly. What happens when the fault is other people who also have thoughts compiled from myriad perspectives? How do we attempt to stand up and claim their loving home was really, in part, conditional love covering up hate? How can I point to a religion that informs their passion, jobs, and very lives as the root of some trauma when, to them, it has only been kind? Closure seems impossible when even accepting there was a problem is too difficult.

I have a real, problematic relationship with food.

I rewrote that sentence a lot, more so than the whole piece. It feels like a half-assed grab at others' trauma, and I feel guilty even to write that much. I am not saying I have an eating disorder. I mean nothing more than the sentence I have written. My life has been so lucky in so many ways that, when this isn’t even the most significant area of hurt, I want to laugh, say I was competitive, and move on. I’m not looking for a list of disorders or sob stories to write about, I want to understand who I was and what I am. So why is it so messy?

It was only when watching BoJack Horseman recently, a fantastic show that I cannot recommend enough, that I realised how stupid it was. When I listened to Diane Nguyen, one of the show's main characters, reason away her pain because she had a family who loved her, I felt frustrated and angry. I wanted to shake her by the shoulders and tell her she’s stupid, that things don’t have to be the most horrific experience in the world to be pain that hurts. I realised then that I needed to shake myself by the shoulders and tell myself that I’m stupid. Our minds and damage are so complex, yes, but they are also so simple. You experience the pain. You can try and create a narrative to push this pain or truth away, but you know it’s a pain. Perhaps you feel that you were blessed abundantly and had a happy childhood and good parents. But you know the pain. It’s existence is the evidence.

I began writing this when I first wondered if my experience was more than a competitive streak. I have since been diagnosed with dyspraxia, which ADHD commonly accompanies. I’ve looked into common shared experiences, and oddly enough, problems with food seem to be one. How ironic would it be that I wrote this whole piece just for it to be neither an eating disorder nor my competitive streak? But I guess that’s the point of why I wrote this: life is complicated, and it's hard to diagnose and locate sources. You don’t need the transcripts of a hundred conversations to open up or feel validated. It’s your pain, and you can’t deny to yourself that it's there, no matter how complex or messy your mind is. It can’t be captured in analytical philosophy? Who the fuck cares, go see a therapist anyways.

Arlo Curley is a Masters student studying Philosophy at the University of Southampton, England. He recently completed his undergraduate in 2024, also at the University of Southampton, and a 25-minute drive from Titchfield where he was born and raised. Arlo grew up in a strong evangelical community, his work often focusing on this aspect of his life, as well as his later deep love and emersion into queer culture. You can find Arlo at arlo.curley on Instagram, and he has recently made a website for blog posting ‘queercurl.blog’.