I was seventeen and being driven to Limerick to be crowned The Young Poet of the Year (capitals and imagined crown my own). My father was beside me and I recited vast swathes of World War II to him. The passages had become prayer-like to me during my final year of school. I was an anxious but lazy student in many other subjects, but found comfort in my ability to regurgitate history. At night when sleep was evasive I would repeat the ins and outs of the Russian invasion to myself, details rendered meaningless through their brevity and number. Later in the year, another student would find me hysterical in the school toilets, helpless with fear and panic. That week, in our mock exams, I had not expressed myself well, had not gotten the war out to my satisfaction, and all seemed lost.

In Limerick, a part of the local library had been half-heartedly cordoned off, and we gathered for the prize-giving. I had overdone my outfit by some distance, given that I was largely surrounded by middle-aged library staff and precocious early teens. I had always romanticized writerliness and imagined its bearers to be haunted, rail thin, beautiful. When I signed up for creative writing classes, I hoped I would write brilliant things, but I also hoped I would meet tortured boys to obsess over. Instead the classes were filled with sensitive, overweight girls like myself who wrote overwrought romance, and lonely boys in leather coats who wrote incoherent science fiction. And so it went again, me carefully turned out in my best Topshop, glancing around with dismay at the very me-like people everywhere.

They called out my name and, unexpectedly, asked me to read the winning poems. Eyes fixed ahead and cheeks flaring, I made my way to the podium, horribly aware that the work I’d submitted was a drawn out enchanted hymn to the long summer nights I had spent with my first serious boyfriend; descriptions of the pollen I would find convening in every part of me after an afternoon carousing in the fields near his house, paeans to the beauty of his bare and rising ribcage. In short, a change in tone to an event in which the raciest moment thus far had been a twelve-year-old girl’s haiku about leaves. I stepped up and judiciously omitted the most explicit parts as I went along. Afterward I stepped down, all weak and light-headed and gorging myself on the earnest handshakes of the judges. One looked down at me from behind his ample beard and shaking with mirth said: “I notice you left out the exciting parts.”

I laughed it off breezily, with unappealing affectation, lividly aware of my mortifying teenage body, which I had been so crazy as to write about for these people’s consumption (the woman wrote, writing an essay about her body).

Back at home, I spent my prize, a book voucher, on the Collected Works of W.H. Auden and something called Skinny Bitch, a sort of tough love diet book in the He’s Just Not That Into You mold which I had seen photographed with Victoria Beckham. The book advised me to stop shoveling crap into my mouth if I wanted to quit it with the self-loathing. It was the sort of book that referred to itself as one’s sassy girlfriend. It was the cruel equivalent of the sides of Innocent smoothies, which practically write you a sonnet of tearful appreciation for so wisely choosing their product. It worked the other way; it was shrewdly clued in to the fact that many women are far more lacerating about themselves than even the diet industry dares to be. It mass-sold this hatred back to women, in the thinly veiled disguise of refreshing straight talk. When I looked at the book again recently, before writing this essay, I immediately remembered the weak relief of being addressed as a fat, lazy slob. When you compulsively think these things about yourself, it’s almost an exhilarating release when a third party confirms it for you.

I hated the book and I hated myself for buying the book, and I especially hated that I had used profit reaped from the use of my brain to invest in this vanity. It was vanity not only in that it was concerned with my appearance, but it was a condescension to the socially acceptable form of self-obsession that is self-loathing. I aspired to the nobility of a rich inner life and intellectual pursuit, but the only thing I put serious work into was my idea of aesthetic purity. The two impossible aims would not sit still together in my head. I longed to be taken seriously and to create serious art, but I was also aware that I would sacrifice these desires if I could consider myself thin and beautiful. I felt cheap and dishonest in my endeavors, knowing that I ultimately cared less for their success than my diet’s.

I grew very thin for some of these years, pulling back the skin of my wrists in class to emulate delicacy, nursing the gathering cuts that had congregated under my sleeves like hungry mouths. I did things only because I had read about girls doing them in magazine problem pages, exercising looking at pictures from Vogue, labeling my meager lunches with inspirational slogans. I did all of these things with removed disgust for the tired cliché of them, and with a writer’s removed observance. I wrote with interest about the loss of weight, and the different ways people had begun to treat me. I struggled to never sit still long enough to feel the pain I was in, to always be moving around it, describing it. My body at that time felt like a collection of anti-phantom limbs, like an assortment of arbitrary parts which I did not own or want. I could not live without a body, so instead I aspired to make it as unobtrusive as possible. I wanted to apologize to the world for being in it, to say through my smallness that I would not be an imposition. It has always struck me that as a child I quickly learned to like my own face and make the most of it, because imperfect as it may be it will always be mine. This never occurred with my body. As Susie Orbach writes in her book Bodies, in late capitalism we have all emerged from old bodily traditions centered around work, procreation, the satisfaction of hunger, ageing. The journey of our bodies is not so routed now, and can be disrupted at will with both dietary and surgical endeavor, which was not readily available to generations that came before. I saw my body as a project to be tinkered with, rather than an embodiment of true self, which is why I had never come to accept it.

The denial of hunger became for me what over-eating had once been, what drinking too much would later become, which was a means to totally flood my brain, to sate my ability to feel things complexly. To be scared, to be alone, to be sad, to feel ugly, these are all overwhelming things to feel as a child, and some of us more than others become adept at finding different manners of consumption to drown them out. But what I know now is that those disordered consumptions are far more hurtful and terrifying than the feelings that they are used to cover up. As an adult, I am capable of feeling those things without being so overcome. The difficult part is allowing myself to feel them.

I can see now that I thought being intellectually respected would make me feel like a real, unmoving person, just as I thought being thin would. In both cases I thought that if I just worked a little bit harder, impressed people a little more, I would be handed a key to some more authentic department of personhood. But of course there is no unmoving selfhood, no permanent, better you that can be achieved through sustained exertion. There is only constant change, some parts always ugly and brutish, others a little bit noble and beautiful.