My destructive relationship with food had taken a noticeable grip by the time I was fourteen. My family focused heavily on a perfectionist driver, including wanting to keep us as ‘perfect’ children, like Peter Pan. When I and my sibling entered puberty this was hard on my parents as they wanted us to remain young, to not grow up and begin changing. I was in my mid-twenties before I finally sought professional help when I realised that all my attempts to ‘cure’ myself were making me more and more ill – not better.

In my early life I had experienced embargoes on certain foods, not because they were bad for us but because they belonged to my parents and we were not allowed to have them. In a typically northern way, ‘healthy’ food comprised of meat and vegetable dinners with the vegetables cooked until they had no flavour and were little more than mush. Whilst we were not given fast-food a great deal, although comforting carbohydrates were often the principle food source, suet puddings, bread served with meals and Friday treats of large cakes were frequently featured.

My family script consisted of being perfect, pleasing people, not displaying difficult emotions and taking care of others. This was juxtaposed against the promotion by my mother that it was OK to talk about anything at all with my parents; in reality, when this was tried, they were reluctant to talk about difficult subjects, would accuse me of being far too emotional or put my fears, concerns and tears down to my hormones. My hormones were used to explain a plethora of things between the ages of twelve and twenty. I’m sure that at one point my parents would have put my sexuality down to my hormones.

I had noticed my unpleasant body-shape in a pre-pubescent photo of my brother and I sitting, shirtless whilst on a picnic, with my great aunt, on a hot summer’s day. That picture is still synonymous with the first time I knew I didn’t look ‘right’. From a very young age, around seven or eight, I hated having my photo taken and refused to smile as I thought I looked awful when a fully smiled, instead I adopted a thin, tight-lipped grin whenever I did have to be in a photo.

I was also around this age when I first began experiencing crushes on other boys. I had male and female friends at primary school, my best friend was female, and my special friend was a boy. At secondary school it felt overwhelming as everything hit at once. I discovered many things all at the same time. The first was that I wasn’t like other children. I apparently (according to what I have been told) had an old head on young shoulders so people wanted to talk to me about things they found difficult from early on in my time at school. I became adept at keeping secrets at once. Nor in other ways was I like other children of my age. I was given labels such as ‘individual’ or ‘quirky’. Despite people’s perception of me I was lucky enough to avoid serious bullying, in fact I had one of my early sexual experiences with the ‘hardest’ boy at school who then became my ‘protector’ and shielded me from much of this, I was terrified of not being called these labels and being called gay, instead.