The texts kept coming. He said he liked me, that he was sorry he hadn’t been able to finish his sketch. He said he was only trying to help me. He had seen something special in me and wanted to help me understand more about what it meant.
I suppose I was flattered that this older man was paying attention to me. But it made me uncomfortable. This couldn’t be how normal people behaved, could it? What was normal anyway?
I was still in the grip of my eating disorders and depression, so to become withdrawn and quiet wasn’t new, but still my parents sensed something else was going on. They asked me repeatedly what was up, but I said nothing. I was too scared to tell them about what had happened upstairs at the spiritual fair or the texts. Maybe they would blame me. Maybe I was doing something wrong.
The texts became more frequent and the tone changed. Phil was clearly fascinated by me.
‘Can you send me some photos of you,’ he said in one text.
I didn’t want to. He started pressurising me. I sent him one photo but he came back immediately. That wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted something much more explicit – a photo of me in my underwear.
I was completely innocent. Not being at school meant I had missed out on sex education. In the books I’d read the sexual element was implied rather than explicitly detailed. I was very young in the head with regards to sexual relations, but it still felt wrong. I felt I had to do what he said, though. When I didn’t respond he called me. He spoke so confidently and smoothly, as if this was the most normal thing in the world and it was me who was being weird and difficult by not sending him what he wanted.
It felt wrong and strange to do it, but I took a photo of myself in my underwear. Why would anyone want that? I didn’t want to send it to him, but I felt like I had to because he was putting me under so much pressure. Reluctantly, I sent it. If I’d thought that was going to satisfy him, I was wrong. It only escalated further. He quickly demanded more pictures, even more explicit ones.
Next, he phoned me. ‘Guess what I’m doing right this moment,’ he said. I had no idea. I couldn’t even begin to imagine.
The idea of relationships was confusing for me. I had a skewed idea of what one should be like because my brain is wired in a very strange way. I just don’t know what is normal and what is not. I felt I had no option but to keep sending provocative photographs over text to him.
This type of correspondence went on for quite a while. I kept it secret, though. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I told anyone. Then one day he phoned me: ‘I’m coming to Brecon. I want you to meet me.’
Now I was scared. I had felt almost detached from it before, conducting things over the phone, but meeting up would suddenly make it real. Brecon was 30 miles away, so it would take some effort for me to get there.
‘Come and meet me,’ he persisted. ‘I’ll get the bed ready.’
That was it. It hit me in the face then. I can’t do that, I thought. I was scared. I still didn’t know what to do. All I knew was that I wanted it all to stop. I couldn’t think of what else to do, so I threw my phone in the bin. My parents thought it strange that I had lost my phone, but I refused to let them in on the real story. I was quite shaken by the whole experience, and it made me question his motives. Was he really a genuine psychic or was it all a sham? I suspect it was the latter.
The episode with Phil came at a terrible time, when I was full of self-loathing and wasting away physically. I was starving myself. My health really deteriorated. I had little-to-no energy, but I would still push myself to exercise for hours at a time. My hair started falling out and my nails stopped growing. My periods became very irregular and eventually stopped altogether. I started getting spots and my hair was always greasy. At my lowest points, as well as cutting myself, I’d pull out clumps of hair.
Despite my physical and mental torment, I felt like I was achieving. I felt in control, like I was doing what I was supposed to do. It might sound strange, but I felt happiness at the suffering and pain, because I thought, You can’t get what you want or be happy unless you go through pain.
For my mum and dad it was torture. They just couldn’t understand why I would do this to myself. They continued to take me to see my psychiatrist. He kept pushing me to take antidepressants. I confided in him about my need to self-harm. He took out a toy doll and said, ‘Pull the hair out of this.’
I looked at him like he was mad. How was that the same as pulling your own hair out?
‘Put tomato ketchup on your legs,’ he said, in response to the scars I was making. How could I compare the two? Self-harming was a pain I was willing to endure to take my mind off other things. The idea of putting ketchup on my leg just sounded strange. I just thought about how sticky I’d get, which repulsed me.
I was developing obsessive-compulsive disorder, and had started to value cleanliness above nearly everything else. The thought of willingly smearing ketchup on my legs was a no-no. Among my many daily rituals was obsessive hand-washing. I washed them over and over in the hottest water to kill the germs, until my hands were red. I had other rituals too, like doing specific hand movements a certain number of times. I’d turn around a certain number of times too, because I believed that if I didn’t do it something bad would happen. I lay awake half the night doing hand gestures over and over again, because if I didn’t do them 300 times I was certain something really bad was going to happen. There had been nothing to spark this. It was just something I had convinced myself of.
My OCD feels like something that has always been there. I can’t remember how or when it started. I just always had to do things. In the 1990s the condition, like Asperger’s, wasn’t that understood. In rural Wales there just wasn’t the health-care provision to advise on it.
In the grip of this mental maelstrom, my weight plummeted. I was down to six stone. My clothes hung off my skeletal shoulders. It became deadly serious then. The psychiatrist was clear about what action was needed.
‘Sophie, you have a stark choice to make,’ he told me. ‘You can either stop dancing and go on antidepressants, or go to a psychiatric hospital where they will look after you.’
The thought of going to hospital terrified me. It was no choice, really. Reluctantly, I agreed to the medication. He prescribed the antidepressant fluoxetine, known more commonly as Prozac, for my desperately low mood, and diazepam, or Valium, for the anxiety. Despite my age, they prescribed a high dosage because my situation was so serious. We were at the point where they needed to do something or there was a risk I could do something really stupid.
The medication had an immediate effect. My mood lifted and I felt less inclined to cut myself, and with the edge taken off my anxiety, everyday things seemed less stressful. For the first time I thought I could go out, and that was a big deal. I went to the pharmacy by myself and, although it sounds like such a small thing, to someone who had effectively been locked inside all her life it was massive. It was like climbing Mount Everest.
As I’d done before when I’d been feeling depressed, I tried to articulate my feelings in poetry. One from that time was called ‘My Time Is Now’.
My time for living is now.
I will no longer sleep,
As I have awakened from my long-lasting slumber.
It is too late to turn back.
The gate has closed.
My path is fixed.
Now out into the world I go!
With a smile on my face and love in my heart.
From my love I must depart.
Save your tears.
Do not cry.
Look into your memories for comfort from me.
Do