For many a young woman at Rhodes, sticking her index finger down her throat and throwing up a res lunch is not an uncommon practice. As my first year in the land of purple draws to a close, memories of self destructive habits, of both my own and other women, surface and replay like filmstrips in my mind.
I know that I am not alone when I say that a woman and her thoughts can be more dangerous than walking home from Friars on a winter night. After speaking to one of my close friends, who is at the moment recovering from a serious eating disorder, I realised that self destructive habits do not sign post themselves in your brain and alert you to the fact that you are not acting like yourself. Instead they creep under your skin, feeding on your insecurities and stress and homesickness and before you know it, you’re hooked on doing whatever you must to get that sense of control in your life. Many female Rhodents feel overwhelmed as work, love life issues and res life all pile up at once, often leaving one feeling exhausted and hopeless, afraid to fail and above all, angry at herself for feeling this way.
At http://my1stime.blogspot.com/2008/10/when-you-miss-your-mommy.html the issue of homesickness and what to do with these feelings is discussed. I feel it is an important article because it looks at an issue that is often over looked by students when they first come to Rhodes – the fact that yes, you will be missing your mom, no matter how many times you fought with her or found her annoying.
Women are known to be hard on themselves, but for perfectionists who come to Rhodes expecting their academic path to be paved with as much gold as it was in high school, pressure can be a dangerous trigger for all kinds of strange behaviour.
A girl that I know in res, let’s call her Amy, has been a self mutilator since the beginning of second term. She is very open about the fact that she is a cutter, not as a means to get attention, but to try and overcome the terrible practice herself. She tells me that as soon as she starts becoming secretive about things that she does to herself, she finds herself falling into that familiar trap of self harming all over again. She says that although she has it under control at the moment, her second term was one huge nightmare. She says that what many people do not realise is that cutting often accompanies eating disorders and depression, and that these three issues form a love triangle that can easily become life threateningly dangerous. She came to Rhodes a healthy, happy past prefect from a private school in Cape Town, and soon learned that the pressure of varsity was sometimes too much for her to bear. Alone one night, after dinner, she made a conscious decision to skip every meal the next day and work on her Journ assignment. Starving herself didn’t last just one day. In fact, it hasn’t yet ended.
Amy is just one example of many women at Rhodes who sometimes find some of the pressure of varsity life too great to overcome. Unfortunately, not all women turn to the healthier ways of trying to deal with this stress. And ok, although not every stressed first year woman becomes best friends with knives and razor blades, statistics show that self mutilation and other forms of self destructive behaviour is on the proverbial rise. Which is a problem because this means that many first year women are becoming incapable of handling their emotions without resorting to irresponsible methods of dealing with them.
On http://1styearspread.blogspot.com/2008/10/miss-independent.html a first year Rhodent is interviewed about her self-harming, and, in a very frank and honest reply to questions that she is asked, she talks about how she used self-harm to deal with the stresses of varsity living.
Although there are countless first year women who do not fall prey to the tight grip of the terrible trio (eating disorders, depression and self harm), and instead embrace university life and manage to handle the whole Rhodes package, it is a sad and true fact that many women do. For them, reality is a harsh one, as they are trapped in bodies that they despise, by minds that try to trick them and with spirits that slowly diminish under the power of self destructive habits. I feel that this is an issue more important than how much first year students drink, and should be addressed with the seriousness that was present at the name change of the Union to Bantu Steve Biko Building. If student support groups want to help these women, they need to help them see that they have options – and that they do not always have to involve a razor, pills or throwing up.
Although there are countless first year women who do not fall prey to the tight grip of the terrible trio (eating disorders, depression and self harm), and instead embrace university life and manage to handle the whole Rhodes package, it is a sad and true fact that many women do. For them, reality is a harsh one, as they are trapped in bodies that they despise, by minds that try to trick them and with spirits that slowly diminish under the power of self destructive habits. I feel that this is an issue more important than how much first year students drink, and should be addressed with the seriousness that was present at the name change of the Union to Bantu Steve Biko Building. If student support groups want to help these women, they need to help them see that they have options – and that they do not always have to involve a razor, pills or throwing up.
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