Metanoia: A Memoir of a Body, Born Again

By Anna McGahan

Perhaps we have done to our bodies what we have so long done to God?
We have demanded they conform to the image we find the most desirable.
We have treated them as rubbish bins, weapons and punching bags.
We have muted their wills until their voices have fallen silent.
At 23, Anna McGahan was wrestling with the rest of the world for ownership of her femininity, sexuality and physicality. As a young actor thrust into the spotlight as a poster girl for sexual liberation – intent on exploring the next relationship, the lowest weight and the wildest high – her path pointed her to chaos, starvation and isolation.
Until – unexpectedly – she met God.
In this memoir, Anna shares the story of reconciling with her body, mapping its journey from another product in a marketplace, to a vessel of inherent power and worth.
Metanoia is the cry of a body broken and resurrected, the song of a bird set free.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Acorn Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9780647519844

Book preview

been.

the body is a marketplace

All night long on my bed

I looked for the one my heart loves;

I looked for him but did not find him.

I will get up now and go about the city,

through its streets and squares;

I will search for the one my heart loves.

Song of Songs 3:1–2

The Letter

It was night. I was in my single bed – the one with the iron bed frame and ornate, painted flowers.

It was home to fifteen stuffed animals. To the eight-year-old child, they were conscious and sensitive. I spoke to them, mediated their relationships and made sure they were content in their corners. Each night, I taught them to sleep. ‘Sleep School’ involved lectures and demonstrations to my menagerie about what positions were best for optimum comfort and who would snuggle best with whom. We all slept very well.

That night, however, my entourage and I lay awake.

That night, I had written a letter to God.

It was one page – direct and vulnerable. It detailed my thoughts, my doubts and my questions. It ended very sincerely.

If you are real, please take this letter while I’m sleeping.

I left it by my bedside table, expectant. I lay awake, conscious of it still sitting there in its envelope. I was terrified something might actually happen.

Usually, my magic was wild and available. I saw things other children couldn’t see. I wrote my own fairy stories and spoke secret languages. The simplest backyard was a forest of adventure and mystery. My parents responded with an ongoing mixture of amusement and exhaustion, my younger brothers with curiosity and caution. I had convinced them of magical ideas a few too many times.

Santa always showed up. The Tooth Fairy was a little inconsistent but mostly spot on. The Catholics had taught me to pray with the right words to the right people, and I knew miracles were possible, as all children do, but the God I had in my mind was different. Though distant, and hard to grasp, he offered an intimacy I wanted. Santa didn’t say he loved me. The Tooth Fairy didn’t have any interest in my heart.

It felt like all the magic in the world rested on whether the God I had wondered about was powerful enough to make that letter disappear. I wanted to know the ways of the invisible things. I needed to know if heaven was real enough to receive my gift. The letter was my whole being condensed into a searching, fumbling question.

Are you real?

When I awoke in the morning, the envelope was exactly where I’d left it.

My little heart hit angrily against my chest.

How could you have been such a child?

Whoever God was, he did not have time for my terms, for my searching. He wasn’t there – he wasn’t even close.

I threw myself back into the world of the stuffed animals taking up my bed and fell softly onto an unfailing imagination. We would lose no more sleep over miracles at night. I had other people to talk to.

I had my own magic.

The Nutcracker

They gave me soft leather shoes instead of pointes. I wasn’t proficient enough to dance the part en pointe – it required too much technique. I was okay with it. The flats felt grounded. They gave me a security that the startling heights of the dance itself did not afford.

Everyone had been surprised. I wasn’t the strongest or most flexible in the class. I struggled with turnout and with pirouettes, but the teacher had asked me and one other girl to begin rehearsals for the role of Clara in the Nutcracker, and I had said yes.

The music had floated through my body since I was a baby, Tchaikovsky humming underneath my sleep, my car rides, my living room recitals. I had seen the ballet performed over and again, had drunk in the festive magic. I had turned to its music while alone in my bedroom, choreographing fantasies, choreographing a way to express the changes in my body – the strange things only twelve-year-olds consider changes.

I had been waiting so long to get breasts, and every other girl had seemed to come into season prematurely – sprouting these little mountains of femininity and the bouquets of adult glory under their armpits. How blinding the mysteries of puberty are for the uninitiated …

Despite my jealousy at their bodies, my ballet friends were my most treasured. We bonded through sweat and endurance and were brazenly affectionate and conspiratorial with one another.

I was so hungry for adulthood that the role of Clara felt like a consolation prize for my slow development. I was both embarrassed and honoured by the distinction, routinely telling anyone who asked that I was only cast because I still looked like a child.

I rehearsed with the other ‘Clara’, who incidentally had breasts and was strong enough to wear pointes. She was technically better, but she didn’t seem to understand the character on an expressive level. I had decided what I lacked in bodily aptitude I would make up for in enthusiasm. Clara was curious and fierce and faced the wonder of magic with her whole self. She was everything I wanted to encompass. I would play her, and I would finally dance to Tchaikovsky, wearing every coloured costume and finding every focused light.

Mum coached me through each step as I absorbed the choreography into every muscle and braced myself for each technique criticism.

My mother was a dancer, too, but had given it up upon graduating high school.

I was too tall.

No man could lift me.

My father wouldn’t pay for it.

She had decided her time was better spent studying at university and became a physiotherapist instead. I secretly believed she would have gone professional, had she continued. I loved the way she still moved like a ballerina – always graceful, always sweeping and extending her body with complete control.

Mum had lost her own mother to breast cancer when we were all very young. My memories of her are fragile and faded, like old photographs: the deteriorating body of my grandmother, Maurine, held up with a small smile. My mother sheltering us kids from the hospital and funeral, as if death was not made for magical young minds. The way Mum hardened and softened in grief, depending on the day.

I knew that she missed her mother like a limb, like a body that needed to dance but couldn’t. We didn’t speak about it. Mum just kept moving with controlled grace, as always.

Forceful, and delicate.

Harden your core, soften your fingers.

Make the hardest movement look like the easiest thing in the world.

We rehearsed for Clara almost every day. I was discovering that my body wasn’t really my own – yet. It didn’t do the things my teachers and mother wanted it to do. It wouldn’t get stronger or looser. It couldn’t get faster. It felt like it wasn’t on my side – as if any moment, it could betray my efforts to have its own way.

Earlier that year, I had discovered that sometimes, it just stopped.

I would be dancing a solo, then suddenly – mid-song – realise I was no longer dancing. I would lose time, like I’d left to enter a parallel universe. I would assume I’d been daydreaming, but I never remembered what about. Upon returning, I would stare in horror around the room at everyone’s confused faces, the piano music continuing without me, the blood rushing into my face.

It was always so hot afterwards. I would apologise profusely, admit confusion, pretend it had never happened.

I could ‘leave’ like this at any time, anywhere – on the chairlift on a ski field, speaking in front of my class. It was out of my control. Eventually, at a family dinner, I confessed it to the table, jokingly.

Today in athletics I crouched down for the start of a sprint, and when I looked up, everyone else had finished the race.

My father shared a curious glance with my mother.

What?

From there came a flurry of strange wires, flickering lights, doctors and conversations. Apparently, I wasn’t travelling through space-time or lost in my own imagination.

I was epileptic.

They were absence seizures, instances of complete unconsciousness where my body would remain upright and functional, sometimes continuing its movement on reflex. Lasting for up to ten seconds, multiple times a day, most of these seizures were going unnoticed, being written off as daydreaming.

Now, instead of a mild passive aggression between me and my body, there was a mix of wonder and fear. I had superpowers.

I was unpredictable until properly medicated, but the medications on offer for my brain were not without unpredictability either. They had side effects – necessary evils that calmed storms but caused fires. My mother fought fiercely for the least invasive medication with the smallest possible interruption to my development. All I knew was that my tablets tasted like blueberries and, slowly and surely, my seizures stopped. When my brain flickered oddly or my moods shifted darkly, we all put it down to adolescence.

Life changed quickly. For my safety, we had to take precautions we’d never considered before. I wasn’t allowed to hold onto my idea of normalcy anymore.

But I was still allowed to dance Clara.

Before and after each rehearsal, I would brace myself for the comparison between me and the other Clara – warnings about extension and timing and rebukes about my turnout. But something happened when the strings started to play. It was akin to the seizures themselves – a form of transcendence, a removal to a different place and time. I became free of body, free of gravity. The dances were complete unto themselves. Once the overture sounded and my right foot was tucked behind my left leg in preparation, all fear faded away.

On the night of the performance, I drank in the theatre, high on it. I have always loved the smell of theatres – of that theatre, the Schonell, in particular. The hairspray, the dust of the costumes, the sprung linoleum floor in front of three hundred seats. The running to the toilet every few minutes in complete terror.

Warming up on stage, I remember looking up to the lights as they created that soft wash of Christmas. Something felt sacred. I wanted to pray, but realised I had nothing to pray to since I had given up God those few years earlier.

As the overture swelled and I tucked one ribboned ankle behind the other, I remembered Maurine, her absence present in every plié my mother had corrected for me.

So, I prayed to her.

I closed my eyes and lifted my arms into their first position. The dancers ran around me, bustling. Clara did not stand on stage aimless, unconscious or confused. Not once. She did not hide her scrawny body. She did not apologise for her lack of perfection.

Once the music began, she could not be interrupted.

The Numbers

I don’t blame the lamb shank. I had never tasted anything so incredible. Dad had made them in the slow cooker for a table of guests. So I went to eat a second, like my brothers.

Someone stopped me, my plate held out with innocent expectation.

You really shouldn’t eat so much of this. You should be careful.

I stared at my brothers, extra meat on their plates.

But –

They’re different. They do competitive sport.

The table of guests stared at me, chuckling, calling out jokes to clear the tension. There was something about me they could see that I couldn’t. I retreated, plate empty, and blinked back foreign tears. I wasn’t to know then, at fourteen years old, that the woman developing inside of me had just learned her first, pivotal lesson:

Your body doesn’t need that food.

I can say now that I never believed I would take it so far. I was sure I would get hungry.

I was caught six months in. Mum dragged me out of the toilet, crying out in frustration, devastated:

You’ll have to stop dancing.

I sobbed at her feet on the front verandah, begging her to reconsider.

My parents were health professionals and deployed all medical resources immediately, but my self-abuse was one poison that had no antidote. It couldn’t be cured with a pill. Nobody knew what to do except to reason with me, convince me I was making a terrible decision or shame me out of it by telling me what it looked like from the outside.

And from the outside, it did look horribly selfish: attention-seeking behaviour, copycat adolescence, vindictive princess bitch-facing. Skinny white girls at private schools starving themselves to get emotional validation. Idiotic, immature and disappointing. A lack of perspective. A lack of good parenting. Perfectionism gone sour. I heard it all. Everyone tried to say the thing that would fix it, and nobody said anything at all.

On the inside, I didn’t have the use of words like that anymore. By then, all I had left were voices and numbers. I had my anorexia – an elite with increasingly high expectations who would cut crosses into my skin to remind me not to eat. I had my bulimia – the angry, hungry, seething mess who would bully me into starvation followed by binging followed by desperate purging. They spoke over the top of one another, never stopping to take breath. And somewhere in there sat a muted and degraded young woman who no longer had any voice at all.

For four years it progressed like a march, a perverted offbeat within my blood that replaced all other rhythms.

I counted everything:

Kilojoules rejected.

Kilojoules consumed.

Kilojoules considered.

Minutes of exercise.

Minutes between meals.

Number of sit-ups.

Number of kilometres.

Number of hours against number of kilojoules.

The number of my body mass index.

The number of kilograms on the scale.

The number of grams of difference it made to remove all my clothes.

The number of seconds it took Mum to come upstairs from the garage.

I walked around in slow motion, armed with a diet coke and a calculator. Soon enough, I couldn’t take the stairs without blacking out. I was purple and crumbling. My heart beat so slowly that the doctors forbade me to exercise.

As the years crept on, my parents desperately sought help, sending me to psychiatrist after psychologist after counsellor. It wasn’t that I was impenetrable as a client – it was simply that ‘stubborn blindness’ was the very weapon of the disease. No matter what argument for health was pitched at me, no matter how many feelings I verbally processed, the bug – as I found to call it – kept burrowing. I was addicted. My eating disorder was like one of those brainwashing parasites that secrete venom inside the brains of creatures, leading them subtly and unknowingly towards committing suicide in order to further parasitic procreation.

For me, the bug had infiltrated and centred my mind around one simple goal: to be less. To disappear as much as physically possible.

When the human brain is starved, it displays a series of strange behaviours. The undernourished brain is hard to speak to, hard to reason with. On the one hand, the body is desperate to survive: the metabolism slows down to a crawl to preserve energy and the mind becomes utterly obsessed with food. I would read recipe books before I went to bed. I would bake for people and watch them eat every bite. Like every good anorexic, I considered ‘nutritionist’ the only valid career path.

On the other hand, the starved brain makes recovery from starvation very difficult. Studies into the strange responses of famine victims have discovered that the starved brain actually develops an eating disorder as a result. In addition, the research reveals that the only way to heal the starved brain is to heal the starved body. Once the fuel goes in and the body mass index goes up, the mental recovery can begin – but the window is small. Anorexia nervosa has the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses. Between five and twenty percent of sufferers will die of either physical complications or suicide.

I had been playing the numbers game with fury, unsure of how to solve x. It was a constantly shifting algorithm – every goal weight I set my heart on would mysteriously become lower with each one I achieved. Was 0 the perfect number? Was it possible? If it wasn’t 0, was it death? It doesn’t matter how good you are at counting cards – the casino always wins.

By the time I was sixteen, the only option left for me was institutionalisation. I had a gentle, round-faced paediatrician called Dr Diego. Each time he saw me, he would pull me aside from my mother’s desperation to quietly encourage my recovery. However, I was not recovering. My weight dropped so low that my pulse had slowed to the sound of a dripping tap.

I refused to eat when given the choice, so the choice was removed. I was to be force-fed for at least six weeks in a children’s hospital, with little psychiatric intervention. They would bypass my brain to try to save my body, then teach it how to eat again.

I was tired and somehow relieved. Surrendering to the institutional process and relinquishing the years of control would potentially set me free. Someone else needed to take the wheel, but I only hoped that the hospital was strong enough to wrangle my illness from me. My body was on the verge of a heart attack – a shivering mess of ferocity and frailty. I had fought my body and failed to break it.

As they inserted the nasogastric tube down my nose and throat and into my stomach, I remember my mother stroking my hair for the first time in a long time. It felt confusing – a loving touch mixed with a new pain.

Most children with mental health problems are placed in a ward together in the Child Youth Mental Health Unit, despite the common knowledge that if anorexic girls are in proximity, they will compete ravenously with one another. Dr Diego intervened in my situation, and in a controversial turn I was placed in a medical ward. There, I was surrounded by young children with tumours, severe injuries and congenital diseases. The staff fed me through the nose at night and taught me to eat again during the day. The structure of the ward made it painfully obvious to me that there were people in there who truly needed help, and I, in my ‘choice’, was taking up a bed that could have been given to someone else.

I would share rooms with dying children, my cubicle filled with cards and flowers to ‘get well’ and ‘be brave’, and theirs with nothing but the fold-out beds of their resilient mothers. Visitors were kind but unwittingly humiliating. They were witnesses to my failure. Witnesses to my selfish choices.

I gave my body to the refeeding, but the epiphany I had hoped for did not come. I wrestled the bug, and I wrestled the system. Every night I was fed continuously through the nose as I slept. In the morning, my breath would smell of something thick, sweet and disgusting that I knew I hadn’t eaten.

The night before my seventeenth birthday, I overheard the nurses talking about the cake they’d ordered for me, as they do for every child.

What’s the point? She’s not going to be eating it anyway.

Well, it’s more cake for us.

And they laughed.

I wanted to scream at them about how much I wanted it to be different. I wanted to eat the cake in front of their faces. I wanted to say I was more than that, that seventeen meant more than that, that I was going to be so much more, more, more, more, more, more.

But I couldn’t. I was still trying to be less.

The following day, a couple of school friends visited me. It felt forced and cheery, but I was grateful. They suggested we step outside to the hospital courtyard, a sadly deserted feature of my little prison, permanently decorated with numerous statues of terrifying clowns.

As we wandered out, something exploded. There was colour and noise, and I was hit with a party of about sixty people, screaming and shouting. They wrapped me in streamers, hiding the tube coming out of my nose. They made jokes and hugged my frame. I sat there, just watching them all eat.

Someone gave me a book of photographs of our friendship group, and I opened it. It was a beautiful gift, but indigestible. In some of the pictures I looked fat. In the middle of the party, in front of every one of my friends, I ripped out the photographs I hated and threw them over the edge of the building. I was systematic. It was necessary. I couldn’t let myself exist like that. Sixty people stared at me in silence, and I started to cry.

Recovery hurt much more than expected. After my first weigh-in, I sobbed the whole morning. The nurses sat with me, stroking my hair like my mother had done that first day. They were proud. I wasn’t like the others. I was doing so well. I hated them for every kind word.

Everyone tried to say the thing that would fix it, and nobody said anything at all.

The Rehabilitation

During my hospital stay, I was mostly alone.

A handful of other teenagers came in and out of the ward. We had our own ‘teen room’ with a DVD player and a beanbag, but it was usually empty. I made friends at hospital school, but our conversations always ended up circling back to illness, and I never knew what to say about mine.

I made friends with a fourteen-year-old girl with cystic fibrosis. She was excitedly planning to skydive – something she had wanted to tick off her bucket list – and I asked why her parents let her do so many cool things at her age. Because I’m probably going to die soon, she answered with poise.

I wasn’t sure how to look her in the eyes after that.

At the back of the ward was a quarantine room, which had been occupied since before I was admitted. A Sri Lankan family were constantly fluttering around it, but I never saw the person in question. The buzzer in that room would go off consistently, and the nurses, busy with other projects, would roll their eyes and have to drop everything to attend to it. If they didn’t go in quick enough, someone would continue to agitate the buzzer in quick succession or in patterns.

I started to think that the person buzzing might have a sense of humour.

A few weeks in, I saw her. She was a teenager in a wheelchair, being moved through the ward. She was lying back limply, but she peered at me, grinning. No-one had smiled at me like that in a long time. I smiled back.

The repetitive days tumbled on, but it wasn’t long before I looked up to find that a nurse had wheeled her right beside my bed.

Hi, a joyous little voice slurred at me from the corner of her smile. I’m Nimali.

She was sixteen, from Lismore. Her family had gone on holidays overseas, and

Reviews for Metanoia

[Katie Quathamer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wow what an incredible piece of writing. Such a raw and real memoir. Anna’s vulnerability and honesty is so encouraging and her story has encouraged me in my walk with the Lord more than I could have expected when I first picked up this book. It’s one of those books that you come to the end of and want to find another just like it but know that gems like this are hard to come by. Grateful to God for the work He’s done in Anna’s life and for prompting her to share it in this incredible book.