A Letter To Recovery

Unalike to the story that most people share as they endeavour to recover, I find recovery to be like a wave that's broken at the shore - Some days it's close enough to dip your toes into, some days you cannot touch it all and on some days, your body becomes immersed in all of its glory. I don't have a rulebook on recovery that, I think, some people expect me to have. My recovery has required patience, lowered expectations and spontaneity but, above all, holding on to the hope that it's possible.

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A is for the world I continue to wake up to alone. Despite an endless love living in my heart, despite the scent of my dad that I smell every morning when he holds me in his arms, despite the tune as sweet as honey that my mother hums in her sunrise showers, the world before me is not the world they see. I see the girl that's supposed to be me, being showered with support and devotion, but the girl I know with brunette hair, in French plaits and silk pyjamas sees a world where there are numbers on the backs of packets, there is fear in a container of moisturizer, there is dirt on an irrefutably perfect dog and porousness in an utterly full world. She finds flaws within a beautiful moment because the world she knows has taught her that a good moment bears no longevity, that it is never truly good and that her destiny is a fabrication of a fantasy that will never belong to her.

B is for the burden I'll always know myself to be. It's every last bit of their hope that I swallow in a pill, then cough up and choke on. Every hopeful offer, every hopeful professional, every hopeful facility are just other things that I won't want to work and so they won't. And it becomes another thing they thought they'd have, like a healthy, happy, free child but don't. The burden that is me is engrained in every 'I ate' when I didn't, 'I'm okay' when I wasn't and 'Don't worry' when they should've worried. I'm a burden to myself as old habits I thought had passed, resurrect themself or when I promise to myself that I'll increase tomorrow but when the new day dawns, so does my pre-existing fear. I derail, I regress, I purposefully neglect, I repeat, I exhume, I loathe, I hurt and confuse because being a burden is what I do best.

C is for the ceremonies, festivals and events that I'll never be able to enjoy in the same way as everybody else. The simple pleasure of accompanying food in the form of canapés, Easter eggs, pavlova, birthday cake, Christmas pudding or candy canes will remain, indefinitely, a complicated pleasure, or quite possibly, one that is not even pleasurable at all. For others, it's normal. For others, it's fun. But for me, the guilt, the quantity, the sickening, saddening, tortuous feeling as the food slides down my throat and into my belly, is a task that will always feel easier to avoid. For you, choosing to eat is mindless, but for me, eating cannot occur without careful consideration, deliberate decision-making, planning and woeful reprimand. I feel uninspired and unmotivated to persist on my darkest days, because I live in fear, that in the end, I'll never truly be free, ever again. I can do it if it's hard along the way... I am strong, I am bold and I am brave but if I cannot know for certain, that one day, taking a bite of food won't be absent of fear, then perhaps this makes me a coward and perhaps that's not okay but if I'm honest, it makes me want to stay the same.

D is for the death that I'm in constant fear will come. It's for the moments I catch myself in a reflection and feel ashamed of the person I know others see. It's for the days when exhaustion plagues my body and I think to myself that today is the day that my body will finally give in. I wait and wait and wait through every second that feels like a minute and through every minute that feels like an hour. When my body pulls through, I close my eyes, I hold myself in my arms and somehow, in some way, I manage to pray and thank whatever it was that let me be okay. It's for the moments when suddenly, the world stops being safe... Everything I just ate replays in my mind, the guilt becomes unbearable, the air is unbreathable and the sadness is inescapable. Death is being trapped in that world until someone I love can squeeze my hand so that I don't feel so afraid.

E is for the end goal that a community promises... One where everything's better and amazing and okay. It's one where bad days exist but the good days outweigh them. At the finishing goal post, recovered people speak about how they're recovered but it seems as though they don't discuss every day along the way. Surely, to reach the end goal of recovery, one has to spend the proceeding days doing what is most difficult... Recovering. But, the discussion is blank. The community is quiet. Their hands strangle me and my only rope to hold onto is my all or nothing thinking. I become worse and worse and worse because I'm left feeling entirely, completely, inextricably alone. I add 'unknowledgeable on how to recover' to my very long list of things I'm not good enough at.

F is for the fragile person who I have become. Seemingly insignificant comments are the ones that affect me the most. It's as though anorexia is waiting for an excuse to relapse or restrict and any careless comment will fulfil that wish. Fragility exists at the dining table, where particular noises, such as music or conversations, somehow, for a cruel reason that I don't know, make the task of eating become more complex than it already was.

G is for the glorification of eating disorders. Considering I publicly share photographs of myself on social media, I have been accused of glorifying my illness. Glorifying an eating disorder involves sharing photos that scream 'Look how great my life is' when in reality, one's life is crumbling apart. I am openly candid about how my life has been severely impacted by anorexia. I do not pretend the body I have is by any means healthy or that as a result of my body, I am immensely happy or fulfilled. I often feel pulled between two sides. The side of me that understands how the state of my body may be aspirational for those who are equally as sick as me exists alongside the side of me that has fun taking pictures of outfits I've assembled and loves capturing the memories of spending time with my family and friends. I want to have instagram like everyone my age and when others say that I don't deserve to have an instagram account simply because of the way my body looks as a result of suffering from a mental illness, it feels isolating and degrading. I deserve to have Instagram like all of my friends. I deserve to have pictures taken of me that I can look back at in years to come. I deserve to not be judged for doing so. I am not naive to the fact that there are young people out there who want to look like me because I have been that young person, too.

However, it is with extreme dismay, that I proclaim that a person who desires to look sick, is heartbreakingly, already sick themselves.

Offline, the people like me who have anorexia and Instagram are still walking around. We cannot go through life with a 'trigger warning' sign on our backs. With time, we have to find something bigger to believe in. When I see others who are sick like me, I choose to believe in the love my family have for me, the love I have for them and the love I have for experiencing life over the desire to look ill.

H is for every time my hunger stings as sorrowfully as a dying bee. What's most painful is not the hunger itself but my inability to fix it. Sometimes, I am so very excruciatingly hungry and all I want is to eat but I can't. So as I close my eyes to sleep at night, I'm crying, my stomach is begging and all I can do is listen to the same hopeless voice that I always listen to.

I is for the imagined life myself and others thought I'd lead. 'Should' and 'could' became the words used to describe the version of me that was never in their wildest imagination... I 'should' be better, I 'could' be more. But I'm not. I remain frozen in a glacier that others managed to melt. People try to hide it but I sense their loss of hope, their disappointment and regret. Truthfully, there are more days where I feel ashamed as a result than there are not.

J is for the jacaranda flowers during Springtime that I longed all year to see... The ones that dribbled pale violet during their slumber.

K is for the kid who I thought had passed away, but who unexpectedly, jubilantly and wonderfully I rediscover throughout my days. As I taste something I once always ate or as I feel something I once always felt, the nostalgia of my childhood flutters around me, suddenly appearing and then disappearing like the thought of a memory from long ago. When I believe I'm undeserving of the life that being recovered would allow me to live, I remember what my big brown eyes once saw when little Luka looked into the world. Through her eyes, she saw a horizon and an aquamarine canvas made just for her. She saw her left hand held in her mothers and her right hand held in her teddy's. She saw caramel ice cream in waffle cones being licked on a Summer's day and her future written across a screen, any screen that told her she was happy.

L is the love I have for my family that outweighs the love I do not have for myself. My cruelest desires bear no action if my family begs me not to, if I see the tears swelling in their eyes, if I hear the quiver in their voices as their broken hearts break yet once more. They are the only force that has ever managed to triumph. I love them as the moon loves the tide, as the painter loves their brush, as a spider loves its silk.

M is for motherhood, a world I'll never know. Whether or not I desire to be a mother is irrelevant because having that decision stolen from you is a loss in itself. Having the ability to grow a child inside of you is one of the most beautiful and empowering biological attributes of being a woman. I regret the irrevocable consequences of anorexia. I mourn the motherhood I know I'll never have the choice to have.

N is for the names that people with eating disorders get called. We're labelled as 'attention seekers', 'selfish', 'anorexic', 'skeletons', 'emaciated' and 'narcissistic', to name a few. Anybody educated on the pain eating disorder sufferers endure, the mental scrutiny they're faced with and the lack of choice they actually have, would know that such terms are not only incorrect and overused but deeply hurtful and unwarranted.

O is for the open person I once was. Mostly, now, I don't believe anybody is interested in anything I have to say or that my words are very valuable or that I'm deserving of anything much at all, let alone a conversation about my experiences and how I view the world. I spend most of my time alone because I'm too afraid to open myself up to the possibility that someone new will love and accept me just as I am. I believe I'm broken and that the parts of me that aren't will be, inevitably. When I open myself up, people haven't often understood. So, perhaps its cynical of me to take the possibility of someone understanding away from them but perhaps my hurt is too innate to think it's worth a try.

P is for the photographs that nobody wanted to take as we went to the movies, took a road trip, went to a concert or played songs on the piano. The comments were everywhere all at once. Initially, I understood the preservations my family had. But after a while, I missed the way they used to look at me, with a sense of pride in their eyes and love in their smiles as they captured a moment that was too beautiful not to. I miss the feeling of being in those moments, when I felt their irrefutable love.

Q is for the questions I never knew a person could be asked. From professionals, strangers and family, I've been left either in tears, disgust, shock or all three at once after being asked one of their questions. Their inquisitions have been utterly personal, knowingly inappropriate and entirely selfish. Whether it be a family member asking how much I weigh or a stranger asking me what I eat every day, I have learnt that there is immense difficulty in recovering in a society that seems to applaud and endorse dieting.

R is for the rain that falls on sunny days. It's for how much it hurts when it's forecasted to drip, yet it pours because there's no clear reason to attach the rain to and you're left feeling hopeless and confused. In recovery, the rain never stops. In fact, it falls harder at first because you thought anorexia was your sunshine and now, you aren't so sure. The certainty, reassurance and control you once had will cease to exist and that is when the rain hurts the most. In a non-metaphorical sense, the rain will begin to frighten you as your body becomes increasingly weak. A slippery surface will make you cry because you know that if you slip, it's not out of the question that you'll die.

S is how simplicity has become a treasurable affair - One where the most insignificant events in the eyes of another mean the sun, moon & stars, for me. Such events include something as simple as a warm shower taken behind closed doors to something less simple like waking up to Christmas morning in your own bed in your own home with your own family. The life that recovery has allowed me to continue to walk through is a tainted one because I know that just a few weak moments away exists a life on the other side, in a hellish land on the loneliest of planes.

T is for the time I missed and didn't realise until it was too late. It's for the times I chose to do what felt 'safe' as opposed to having ice-cream at the park, going out for dinner to celebrate my writing achievements or having drinks with my best friend when her grandma passed away. It was only when I first attempted to recover and see a world beyond the one I knew so well that I saw how much time had been stolen from me and those I loved. Time is to love, time is to be free, time is to speak, to laugh and hope infintely.

U is for the ugly they never told me I'd become. The media tells you that moulding your body to fit their depiction of perfection will make you the most beautiful version of yourself. In many instances, I was told that I looked 'better' or had become 'more beautiful' but mostly, such comments coincideded with concern. People who knew me saw how what I was experiencing was so much more than a diet. They saw the intensity of my will, how something had its hands around my neck and that it had no intention of ever letting me go. They didn't tell me how people on the street will look away when they see you. They don't marvel or ogle because they're scared at the sight of you. They didn't tell me how when your extended family sees you they'll cry. They didn't tell me how when you look in the mirror you'll rarely be satisfied, feel beautiful or enough. You'll hear the same, relenting, evil voice telling you that you're ugly. Except this time, the voice will be right because you'll have lost the beauty of a happiness that only exists in the eyes of the person you used to be.

V is for the vaseline I couldn't bring myself to use to mend my appalingly broken lips. It was another battle anorexia had won, but at what game was it playing? What was fun about the piercing iciness of a July night that whistled through the holes and sores infiltrating my mouth? I have my illness but that doesn't always mean I understand it any more. Sometimes I am so perplexed by its desires that I feel I am a stranger to myself.

W is for the wins I make in the shadows. They are the wins that aren't to prove anything to anybody other than myself. They are the wins that receive no recognition. They are the wins without cause. These wins are often realised in hinesight. They are teachable moments that depict how far I've come but also, that I am worth so much more to myself than I thought.

X cannot solve for Y. When you learn that you were inherently perfect, just as you were, the loss you'll experience of a reality you swore against will haunt you in your sleep.

Y is the yearning I feel every day to be more than I am. I yearn for a pot of gold on the other side. I yearn to not be hungry. I yearn to not feel guilty. I yearn to be warm. I yearn to be more than I am because what I am now is not enough. I yearn because I can never hear or touch the moments I have. Instead, the moments I have are perceived through anorexia's eyes... I hear her as she drains out the bluebird's birdsong and I see her wherever I look. I am afraid to yearn in itself because yearning for anything beyond anorexia goes against her wishes. To anorexia, she is the bluebird's birdsong, she is the lookout, she is the only one, every day, in every way.

Z is for my zoo. It's the one where my foot is tied with a chain and people glare at me behind a barricade. It is maintained by those with anorexia fetishes, those who are judgemental, those who endorse eating disorders and those unwilling to learn. My zoo is cold, my zoo is scary, my zoo is a place where I am unmistakeably alone. There is nobody with me when the spectators stop staring and start commenting. And mostly, I'm not brave enough to refute their cruel clauses. So I sit in my zoo, I watch them observe me, I hear them laugh and point and stare and I do nothing.

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I leave you with my letter. It's the most vulnerable and honest alphabet I know however it has also proven to be incredibly brave and strong.

Kisses,

COS x

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