Hunger
first published in “Potluck” by Landing Press (2025)
- When I was an anorexic ballet dancer, everything made sense. That tired costume change: art form turned exercise turned punishment turned cause of death.
- We will never know the true number of people who died in the Irish Potato Famine. They say maybe one million. They say maybe two million more left Ireland.
- Leaving is a kind of death too.
- The Irish prefer the phrase The Great Hunger instead. Yes, there was famine, but there was also a choice. Who gets the food? Who has earnt it? How do we earn it too?
- It does not take long for treatment teams to label you chronic. To look at the soil in all its complexity. To say, nothing will grow here.
- In 2015, I took part in the global Anorexia Nervosa Genetic Initiative. The researchers met with me, so I could prove my sickest self. Asked questions; took blood. All to see how deep this hurt could burrow.
- My parents found a bag full of apples and mouldy sandwiches in my wardrobe when I was 11. What could I say? I was not denying myself. I wasn’t hungry to begin with.
- My family, Irish Catholics escaping the Troubles, left Ireland in the 70s. The world map now rounded and real. My mum—small and needing—sitting above it.
- Leaving is a kind of starvation too.
- In 1981, in the North of Ireland, 23 interned Irish republicans staged a hunger strike. They demanded reinstatement of their political prisoner status. The whole world was watching, and they were left wanting. Ten of them died.
- Sometimes, my family has a big lunch and then doesn’t need dinner. Sometimes my family eat off the small plates.
- Starvation is a painful ritual. The body’s final dance is slow and deliberate. You will feel every moment. You will never again feel so real.
- Studies have shown epigenetic changes in the metabolism of at least two successive generations after famine. Their bodies are primed for stress. Their bodies welcome deprivation.
- The global study into anorexia found genetic evidence that the disorder could be, in part, a metabolic disorder too. Starvation feels different to us. Feels better. Our bodies are primed for stress. Our bodies welcome deprivation.
- What is a hunger strike if not a Hail Mary battle cry? A weapon. A last-ditch howling prayer begging someone to look.
- When I give them my blood—our blood—for the tests, I think, this is what you will find: I was born to be hungry.