Love, Longing and Butterfly Hunting

When I was very young, my grandfather would take my older brother and I into ‘big town’ to visit the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. We would walk round as he narrated fictions, inventing backstories to the objects behind glass. His favourite room was the balcony on the top floor where the Egyptian sarcophagi were laid out, thousands of miles from their intended home. While he explained hieroglyphics to my brother, I would wander off and stand transfixed in front of the wide mahogany cases of taxidermy; broad drawers displaying rows upon rows of pinned-down butterflies.

The flightless insects seemed magical, like tiny talismans of summer. This was the era in which my belief in fairies was fully fledged, and the butterflies in the BMAG were the closest I was able to get to my fae friends. More than artefacts, they were art: natural wonders caught mid-flight from the farthest reaches of the world and brought here to the industrial heartlands, rendered immobile and perfect. And yet there was always something unnerving about the pinned-down butterflies. These specimens of natural beauty had been rendered artifice through capture: their preservation came at the cost of their life. They were displayed alongside Pre-Raphaelites and Monets, but how could oil paint compare to the wonder of a butterfly in flight? How can deathly perfection compare to life?

Evanna Lynch’s recent memoir, The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up, recounts her experience with, and recovery from, anorexia. Its title takes its inspiration from this metaphor of preservation, comparing ‘butterflies gleaming tragically on their pins,’ with ‘women who waste their unfathomable depths and limitless creativity — and eventually whittle themselves away to nothing — hunting for perfection in their own bodies.’ Anorexia, she says, is like capturing a butterfly and piercing its thorax with a pin. Unlike many other eating disorder memoirs, she omits talk of weight, calories and health statistics, though does not shy away from the more brutal details of the toll that anorexia can take on a body. She also offers a reasoned critique of the ineptitude of medicalised treatment programs and instead proposes a route out which prioritises the passions of the person who existed before the anorexia took hold, not just the body that it took over.

Much has been made in the media of Evanna’s inspirational recovery, and the correspondence between herself and the ethereal character that she played in Harry Potter. But her memoir is one of the most accurate and insightful books about eating disorders that I’ve read. She manages to both dismantle common narratives around the illness and describe what it feels like to live in an anorexic body, while trapped in an anorexic mind. ‘Socially and medically speaking, when compared to anyone else,’ she reflects, ‘I knew I wasn’t ‘fat’, but I still looked down at my own body every day and felt an overwhelming swell of revulsion and nausea at the bits of soft flesh clinging to my legs and abdomen.’ Her revulsion wasn’t against fatness itself — that, she writes, is an abstract social construct — but fat cells came to symbolise her existing self-disgust, and offered a way to eradicate it. That’s the contradiction of an eating disorder: the issue also feels like the answer.

‘All I’d known was that I was empty, unremarkable, unexceptional at everything, and that it would be hard to find love, friends, work, a place in the world at all, if I didn’t find something by which to define myself — and then I’d found it,’ she says. With its vague promise of exceptionality, anorexia makes self-destruction seem productive. Slipping further into the category of underweight means getting further away from the range of normal, means elevating yourself above the oblivion of the ordinary. Particularly in our weight-obsessed society, to be dangerously thin can feel like a kind of talent. But anorexia shouldn’t be aligned with vanity. It’s an attempt at survival. As Evanna says, ‘People see eating disorders as slow self-destruction, but the intention is quite the opposite. It’s a stab at life, at asserting oneself. It’s a fierce, warlike struggle to battle all the voices — internal and external — telling you you’d be better off dead.’

Most of us, at some point, will feel the burn that life has to offer; feel how it can singe, right down to our veins. Eating disorders can feel like a balm, offering a seemingly productive respite from the unrelenting fury of existing. Like alcohol, or anaesthetics, anorexia is a numbing agent. This is why recovery is so torturous. Even if you don’t end up in inpatient, even if you’re not forced, kicking and screaming, to be tube fed, I don’t think that anyone escapes recovery without trauma. I don’t think that most people end up in treatment for anorexia without having experienced trauma already, which makes recovery a double-whammy of pain. When forced to sacrifice the coping method that saved you from self-sacrifice in the first place, forced to confront the cause and the hold of that original grief, recovery can feel like suicide. To live without the placation of numbness that anorexia can offer is to confront life at its root, at its nerve endings.

But it’s not fair to say that those who die from anorexia didn’t fight against it. ‘There is something heroic about people who manage to get up every day and somehow stay alive with their most vicious hateful bully living within them […] But I don’t think they took the right path. I think they took the path of numbness, certainty and safety, and I think it was the safe choice that cost them their life. I think the safe path always leads to a dead end.’ Such is the tragedy and the glory of growing up: we do not stop growing when we leave adolescence. We are always learning, developing, taking one step forwards and many more back, figuring it out and taking multiple wrong paths on the way. We might fall in love and find ourselves with the wrong people; we might achieve academic success and spectacularly fail in our careers; we might start our own families and ruin our relationships. To live requires a willingness to accept that there will be some things we regret, but that without missteps there can also be no growth.

By insulating you from the risk of living, anorexia makes starvation feel like safety. In a single sentence, Evanna explains how so many ‘high-achievers’ fall into this trap: ‘There was too much potential and too much room to fail, so, day by day, I chose perfection over creativity; I chose no more creativity and no more mistakes.’ In the aftermath of my own recovery, I couldn’t understand why I had been willing to lose so much in order to simply weigh so little. My eating disorder not only caused long-term physical damage, but caused me to give up on the things that I had wanted to hold onto the most. First love, then friendship and so many opportunities: I had sacrificed them all in order to keep myself safe and small. I was both the agent and the unwilling spectator of my own downfall – and for what?

Yet my descent into anorexia always felt like a slalom race that could not have been stopped. ‘Sometimes I think there is an inevitability to eating disorders: a fierce, focused, burning force that nothing can alter or stop, a fire that won’t just be snuffed out,’ Evanna says. To understand eating disorders as an unstoppable force might strike terror into the minds of parents, but for someone on the other side of anorexia, to read this felt like a gift. Accepting it as having been almost inescapable takes away some of the pain of self-recrimination. I now know, due to the odd confluence of anorexia, autism and Ehlers-Danlos, that in some ways, my eating disorder was inevitable. That the genetic disorder which would cause me to dislocate my joints and force my feet to be fixed with screws at fifteen; that gives me both unnatural flexibility and daily pain, would also mean that my mind would find other ways to control the body which could not seem to control itself. And when that mind has a genetic predisposition to order, routine and control, anorexia can feel like the answer.

Evanna was hospitalised for anorexia at 11 and discharged from treatment at 13. But her recovery didn’t really happen until years later. Not while she was filming Harry Potter, not while she was doing press tours and publicity shoots. ‘I found that even after my fixation on food and controlling my body had gone away,’ she says, ‘that darkness was still present — and, indeed, it had been there long before the eating disorder ever took residence in my mind.’ Self-starvation is both the symptom and the side effect. And while malnutrition makes it a lot harder to climb out of the matrix, it is not the root. For Evanna, the emotional darkness that existed while still in primary school articulated itself in her childhood anorexia. It’s heartbreaking, and yet while reading I found myself almost jealous that her eating disorder took from her the innocence of her early adolescence, rather than the final years of her teenagedom. There’s more time in childhood to recover the course of a life than there is within the finite time accorded to a university degree, those hallowed years of freedom and finding yourself. My second year of university — that golden period without assessments or exams — is a barely existent haze. That year, grief and the aftermath of assault hung over my daily horizon like a fog. If I was thinner, I thought, perhaps the fog would clear. I believed I could starve myself free.

Perhaps anorexia comes from a belief in the possibility and power of transformation. Perhaps it is a wilful need to know that change is possible, that magic — in its basest sense — is real. By changing our bodies, we imagine that we can get closer to that ever elusive perfection, which means, ultimately, acceptance. Or perhaps anorexia is simply longing made manifest: a pure longing that knows no end. Perhaps this is why it is so difficult to maintain relationships while anorexic: to rephrase Maggie Nelson, ‘love is not longing, it is light.’ Longing means rejecting the present, means sacrificing current contentment for some vague vision of the future. I used to believe that I had to be perfect to be loved, and pushed away relationships until I could claim that phosphorescence. But I was trying to perfect the unperfectable: we are all just living, fallible bodies. And while I was chasing reflections of moonlight, I wasn’t standing in the sun. I lost so much time.

Against the frankness of her experience, Evanna offers the reader her own consolation: ‘I believe in the kind of fairy tales that have depth, complexity, profundity and moments of darkness that birth a fiercer belief in light. The kind where the endings are not endings but breakthroughs that lead to the next adventure.’ That’s the beauty of a butterfly in flight: it may rest, but it never stops. To fly is to be in perpetual motion, to live in the air and to be carried in gusts of light. In recovery, you realise how large and messy and glorious feelings can be, how much more love can fit inside a well body than a starving one. Love is not longing. It is not perfection. It is a butterfly in flight.

Works Cited

Lynch, Evanna. The Opposite of Butterfly Hunting: The Tragedy and the Glory of Growing Up: A Memoir. Headline, 2021.

Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. Wave Books, 2009.

Casanova, Emily L et al. “The Relationship between Autism and Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes/Hypermobility Spectrum Disorders.” Journal of personalized medicine vol. 10,4 260. 1 Dec. 2020, doi:10.3390/jpm10040260

Bulbena A, Baeza-Velasco C, Bulbena-Cabré A, Pailhez G, Critchley H, Chopra P, Mallorquí-Bagué N, Frank C, Porges S. “Psychiatric and psychological aspects in the Ehlers-Danlos syndromes.” Am J Med Genet C Semin Med Genet. 2017 Mar;175(1):237–245. doi: 10.1002/ajmg.c.31544. Epub 2017 Feb 10.

Kerr-Gaffney, J., Hayward, H., Jones, E.J.H. et al. Autism symptoms in anorexia nervosa: a comparative study with females with autism spectrum disorder. Molecular Autism 12, 47 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-021-00455-5