Loving & Hating Recovery
Recovering from any illness is difficult. It can't happen overnight and there needs to be consistency, patience and determination. Recovering from an eating disorder isn't hard... It's hell. Because you're doing the one thing you've habitually trained yourself not to do... Eat. However, alongside the hell exists moments that feel like heaven. It's those moments that make you endure the moments you hate. I love recovering as much as I hate it.
When I first got treatment for my eating disorder, I wouldn't let anybody around me use the word 'recovery'. Anorexia would hound my every thought and movement if that word was spoken because it was completely against everything that anorexia stands for. Recovery involves self-compassion, harmony and love, but anorexia involves manipulation, lying and punishment.
Whenever I start recovering, I am aligning my life with flexibility and choice, whereas an eating disorder is incredibly rigid, it meticulously plans out your intake and dictates what plans you can make. Initially, this leaves me feeling overwhelmed because recovery provides you with so many more options than you're used to. Suddenly, you can have whatever you WANT for breakfast, you CAN make plans to go to a cafe and you're EXCITED, not stressed, to spend time with your friends.
Sometimes people don't begin recovery because they want a better life for themselves. I've started recovering many times for the sake of those I deeply love and not for the sake of myself. It began to physically hurt me to see how as I was punishing myself, I was punishing my parents and friends. I think a big misconception people make is that the actions of a person recovering are a depiction of their thoughts. It's difficult when people think all of our eating disorder thoughts have subsided the moment we begin to eat. In fact, when we begin to eat, the eating disorder voice becomes louder than it's ever been because we're programmed to thinking that eating is the worst action we could possibly engage in. Additionally, long-term starvation has a considerable affect on the body. Even as one begins the re-feeding process, they will experience the same physical side affects as they would throughout restriction such as dizziness and blurred vision. Sometimes it will take months or years for those symptoms to settle. When we hear others remark how 'good' we're now doing, how much 'healthier' we appear or how much 'happier' we seem, the eating disorder goes from screaming at us not to eat, to bellowing at us 'Don't you dare eat that. You aren't sick. See? They think you are acting and looking fine!'
There is an added layer of difficulty upon receiving these types of comments as one undergoes recovery. Whenever I am triggered, I use my eating disorder to cope. This is because I am brought a moment of relief that disordered eating brings. But in recovery, the coping mechanism is being removed and we are left with the problem with nowhere to put our pain. So the person undergoing recovery is left to remunerate, hurt and isolate as they feel each and every awful feeling. You feel like you have nobody to talk to, that nobody understands and even when you try to talk to people about how certain comments affect you, most of the time they don't really get the effect it can have on a person who has an eating disorder wired mind.
Maybe you're thinking recovery isn't working, that trying will be too hard or that you don't want to start a race if you can't see the finish line. I know I thought this way and to be honest, most of the time I still do. But, Shopaholics, there are certain things about recovery that you can only learn for yourself and those things will be the steam for your engine on days when your recovery motivation is depleted.
I'll never forget the first day I went to work after being in hospital for over two months. Going up the hill was still hard but for the first time, it was the least hard it had ever been. I had a tummy filled with an adequate breakfast and I felt truly happy because I knew I wouldn't be scared at work in the way that I usually was. Energy is a gift of human life and it always feels like a superpower when I begin re-feeding, even moreso when the re-feeding isn't forced and you willingly take your medicine. Alongside energy exists not only a safety-net for the person recovering but for their families who, for the first time in a longtime, don't feel so terrified to include you in their lives. For so long, friends and family had left me out either because they feared for my safety or they didn't want the complexities, conversation and difficulty that came with my inability to participate.
I've learnt that the experience of life itself and all of the experiences we get every day are something we must never take for granted. They are precious, valuable and teachable moments, even if at the time it doesn't feel like they are. When I was a little girl, I would go to the park after school, swing on the monkey bars, have an icy-pole and then go home. And it was as simple as that. The few moments that I've experienced the freedom of a moment like that in the years that I've been sick have felt like finding gold treasure... Feeling the oxygen on my skin, as opposed to AC recycling in the same old, mundane room or experiencing time through a pleasurable lens, as opposed to being restricted to thirty minutes downstairs once a day, or delighting in the sticky sugar that's coating my tongue without fearing its nutritional makeup. In those moments, you'll remember what life should feel like, you'll relish in how simple it can be and you won't care how bad it hurts if you get just one more moment like that again.
Dolls, I'm no expert on recovery because I, myself, struggle to recover every single day. I wrote this post because I wish that somebody had told me that recovery isn't this magical fairytale that everyone makes it out to be. You don't just wake up, decide you hate your eating disorder and then you're fine, at least not according to my journey or the journey of anyone I know. I want you to know that recovery isn't a fairytale but doesn't trying to reach a fairytale, as opposed to propelling further and further into a nightmare, align more with the life that the little child you once were would've been proud of?
Kisses,
COS x
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