‘I thought I was just under-eating, but I was harming myself ’
Reading defender Molly Bartrip tells Katie Whyatt how she has fought anorexia and depression
For someone who has suffered so much, Molly Bartrip’s relentless optimism is extraordinary. This is, after all, a woman whose anorexia as a 14-year-old left her in hospital, and who became paralysed by depression and anxiety this year, leaving her burgeoning career at Reading in doubt.
Such were the depths of her despair that she felt she would “never kick a ball again” and she began this pre-season looking into career pathways outside a sport that was, she emphasises, “the trigger, but also my cure”.
Yet Bartrip, 22, never gave up hope. Anorexia is the mental illness with the highest mortality rate, but she knows recovery is always possible, even if it has not always been easy to talk as freely as she does today.
Bartrip frequently bookends her memories of her depression with “I’m not sure my team-mates know this”, but shares her story now in the hope it will encourage others to speak out. “I didn’t, for a long time, and that’s why it built up,” she says. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Anyone can go through something like that.”
Bartrip was 14, one of the best young defenders in the country at Arsenal’s Centre of Excellence, when anorexia took hold. “It was the pressures of football, the pressures of making your family proud. Rejection is hard, and
‘I broke down on my best friend’s shoulder. I said: I’m not OK – I need help’
failing is hard, and I wanted to do everything right. I didn’t think it was serious at first – I thought it was under-eating, over-exercising, trying to push myself. Actually, I was harming myself.”
She describes her anorexia as “this person on my shoulder that had control of my whole life, like a puppet”. Bartrip named her Anna. “She knew the calories in everything, would do everything possible just to make me lose even more weight.
“I used to look in the mirror and think I looked fine. I just completely lost myself and I didn’t know who I was. My mum actually said there were times where she wanted to physically shake me and say, ‘Wake up! You’re just ruining your whole life and everything you ever want to be’.”
Bartrip’s parents “didn’t know where to go”, and watched as their daughter was admitted to hospital. Doctors suggested Bartrip was almost ready to be tube-fed.
“I didn’t know what was happening, and my parents left the room,” says Bartrip. “They needed to wait in the waiting room, because they couldn’t see it. As the nurse started to put all the stuff on me, I was like ‘Get off me – I’m going to do this. I am getting better’.”
She was formally diagnosed, taken out of school and began weekly counselling, learning to fight against “Anna”.
Bartrip believes recovery has to come from within, but “because someone is telling you everything, you don’t know how to start it. But you can. It’s about finding that one trigger that makes you keep fighting.” She estimates she “fully recovered” at 19, but her move to Reading brought with it homesickness, and two years later the pressures of first-team football mounted.
“I was curled up in bed and didn’t move for a whole week,” she recalls. “I remember researching and thinking, what are these symptoms?” She did not like the answer. “I was thinking, this is not happening. I’m not having a mental health illness again. I’m not doing it. I can’t.”
Doctors at home in Essex diagnosed her with severe depression and anxiety.
She had anticipated a week off, but the full extent of her illness soon became clear.
“I knew I wasn’t right as soon as I stepped in the changing room,” she says. “I was shaking, I felt like everyone was too close to me. I felt so alone, like no one understood what was going on. We went in to a game and I broke down on my best friend’s shoulder. I said, ‘I’m not OK – I need help’.”
Bartrip missed the final two months of last season and Reading arranged for her to see a counsellor, whom Bartrip still sees and describes as “that person that I can get everything off my chest to”. She was prescribed antidepressants, then “started to be able to get out of bed, leave the house, do a food shop. It got more each day. My team-mates kept me busy and I fell back in love with the game. It wasn’t like a light switch, but it definitely was a month process where each day I was feeling like Molly again”. Now she feels “like I can do anything” and can look forward to tonight’s trip to Manchester City fit in body and mind.
She smiles as she recalls the day she bumped into one of the doctors who had treated her anorexia four years previously.
“She was like, ‘Look at you!’ It’s the proudest moment you’ll ever feel, when you know you’ve beat it. You know you’ve not just made yourself proud, but the people closest to you.
“That is the best feeling in the world.”