Learning From a Demon
By Maz Connolly, Guest Contributor
Two years after this photo to the right was taken, I still can’t look at it and not think about what a symbolic moment in my life it was. There I was, innocently walking between classes at Bothwell School of Witchcraft, when suddenly out of nowhere a demon just jumped out before me stopping me in my tracks. I didn’t have time to think, my life depended on getting past this monster, I needed to survive to get to my next class, I had a new lesson to learn. And so I fought. I used every spell I could think off to battle for my survival and as I walked away victorious after a prolonged duel I felt more pride in myself than I ever had before. I had won! I was too excited and caught up in the moment to recognise the significance of what had happened, but the first time I seen this photo it hit me; in capturing this moment the photographer had also captured my own battle with anorexia.
Let me start at the beginning. It was early 2017 and after 7 full years in recovery I was caught in a severe relapse of anorexia. As if that wasn’t challenging enough I’d had an accident at work on Christmas eve resulting in a torn ACL, was involved in a car accident in January and fell downstairs badly injuring my neck and back in February. I was in pain constantly, more depressed than I’d ever been in my life and if I’m honest was pretty close to just giving up, there just didn’t seem to be a point to be alive anymore.
Then as I was scrolling through Facebook one day, I saw an ad for a Crowdfunder campaign to create a magical school for adults similar to Hogwarts and I felt the first glimmer of hope that I had experienced for a long time. The more research I did on Bothwell the more hope I felt, as a huge Harry Potter fan getting the opportunity to go to Wizarding school was like a dream come true, but then the reality that I had no one to go with set in.
Thanks to the anorexia, I’d distanced myself from most of my friends and those who were still in my life weren’t interested. My family just thought I was crazy for wanting to “waste money” on something so juvenile and when I mentioned it to my therapist she pointed out that I wasn’t well enough to take part in something so physically demanding. And so the challenge was set – I would get myself fit and healthy enough to be a student, even if it did mean going by myself.
Buying my ticket was scary, I was still off work waiting for my knee surgery and deciding to spend so much money on something so unknown felt more than a little disconcerting, especially when no one else in my life supported my decision. But it just felt so right; it felt like someone had opened a door for me and was offering me a chance to step through to something different and so I took the risk. To this day, I am very glad I did!
Right from the start I knew I had found my place in the world. I wasn’t the only person planning on going to Bothwell alone, there were people coming from all over the world; Australia, Japan, USA, Europe – you think of a country and we probably had a student from there. As soon as the tickets were released our facebook community was created and we all started to get to know each other. We formed friendships and plotted storylines for months leading up to the actual event and as we did that we got to know each other.
Those of us that lived in the UK met regularly and for the first time in my life I actually felt like I belonged; I had found my pack. Yes, I was still battling with my recovery, but I didn’t feel the need to hide that and because I wasn’t hiding it I had more support than I’d ever had before. I was determined to be physically well enough to attend and Bothwell gave me the motivation to make sure that happened while my new friends reminding me why I kept fighting when things got tough. Then at the beginning of June this arrived in the post and my excitement and motivation reached a whole new level!
Receiving my acceptance letter and then starting to develop my character offered me a new, healthy form of escapism. It allowed me to reconnect to a creative side of myself that I hadn’t felt in years and in creating my character’s life story I was finally starting to live my own life again. Using my Bothwell character I got to explore parts of myself in a safe environment; in fact as I decided that my character was going to have two personalities. I got to play two roles depending on my mood: ‘Celestia’ who was the quiet, shy girl who didn’t really fit in (kinda like the real me) and ‘Tia’ who believed she was actually a long lost princess and didn’t care what anyone else through about that, or in fact about anything else she did. Although I didn’t consciously think about it at the time, being able to flit between both characters allowed me to slowly move between my usual way of being and how I really wanted to be without worrying about what anyone else would think or say.
To this day, my friends and therapist will still sometimes ask, “What would Tia do?” if I’m struggling to stay true to myself. Being true to myself and finding the authentic Maz is what my Bothwell experience has allowed me to do.
I hadn’t realised that I had spent my life trying to be what everyone else wanted me to be. I thought caring more about what other people thought about me was more important than what I thought about myself. Actually, the truth is I don’t think I really knew who I was because until I experienced the freedom to just “be me” I wasn’t aware that all my life I’d just been playing different roles. I had been the “good daughter”, the “A student”, the “Super athelete”, the “loving girlfriend”, the “Senior Manager” – all things that didn’t matter to me, because none of them made me happy.
In trying to please everyone else and make them happy I never learned how to love or accept myself just for who I was, so it’s not surprising that when anorexia first popped up unexpected when I was 13 I wasn’t prepared to fight for my life the way I fought with that demon at Bothwell. I didn’t have the duelling skills I do now, but most importantly I didn’t really believe I was worth fighting for.
Today, I know I am worth fighting for. I have a fantastic life and I belong to a community of fellow Harry Potter fans who are just as crazy as I am. The good thing about being in a group like that is we don’t feel different, we don’t have to hide because we know, no matter what, we are loved. We all have our own issues and demons that we have faced but we no longer fight alone. I stopped referring to my Bothwell friends as friends a long time ago, they are my family – a family who know me intimately and offer me a place of safety, something that I didn’t know existed before.
As the prophecy in Harry Potter says, “either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives.” I am choosing to survive, actually no – surviving isn’t good enough I am choosing to thrive, I will live to my full potential and I will be happy. Anorexia may have felt like a safe place for me when I didn’t know better, but now I do it’s the illness that needs to die, not me. I’m letting go of my demon, just like the one in the photo served a purpose so did anorexia for a while, but that time has passed. It’s time for me to walk on, to head towards that next lesson and to step into the role that I was always meant to have...the role of just being me.
BECAUSE I AM ENOUGH
Maz Connolly is an integrative therapist and hypnotherapist based in Chesham, U.K. She is passionate about sharing her own recovery experience and the tools that have helped her on that journey; including yoga, live action role playing and musical theatre, as a way to inspire others and offer hope that full recovery from an eating disorder is possible.