MY FUTURE WITH ANOREXIA

I picked a card today that asked what my ideal, dream future looked like and I realised that I couldn't picture one in which I didn't have anorexia. Many people with an eating disorder aren't actively engaging in recovery but everybody I've met, recovering or not, manages to want and wish for a different future despite that status. I suppose I always thought that one day my eating disorder just wouldn't be there anymore. It was never meant to manifest into what it has. But it has, into what is now, a severe and enduring, chronic illness. Am I the only anorexic who has a part of them that doesn't think they want to recover? If so, then my words may hopefully reduce the isolation and ashamedness that arises due to understanding the impact such a truth has on my loving family, those who sustain a final ounce of hope toward me and the eating disorder community. But if it is just me, then perhaps the purpose of this post can be to provide a source of motivation to others currently contemplating recovery, to see what has happened to me, a girl whose rigorous treatment resistance towards anorexia has led me to this stage, the end stage, a point that is becoming more and more likely, one of no return. 

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Hope is a precious commodity to the quality of human existence. 

Hope allows for chance when life's mind seems made up. 

In imagining my ideal/ dream future and it becoming known to me that my eating disorder is so strong that I can't even visualise a life that others hope for me, I saw no light at the end of the tunnel. As I mentioned previously, my eating disorder has always been all-encompassing, though I used to be able to believe in the picture of a life without one. 

Anorexia doesn't let me hope because it wants me to remain sick...It likes being sick. 

But although I have the part of me, anorexia, that relishes in its dominance over my life, it doesn't mean that I don't have another part of me that feels hurt coming to terms with my future with anorexia. 

If I have no hope then I am left to live in that world where life's mind is made up. In this world I am living in, the days are very grim. I appreciate details, experience connection and feel moments of joy but ultimately, I feel like my heart is broken and my mind is failing. This makes it very difficult for those positive feelings to outweigh the fact that my hopelessness has, in many ways, reduced the quality of my existence. Because my existence is spent being robbed of even the freedom of dreaming of a different future, being robbed of even the freedom of believing in another outcome and being robbed of even the freedom of imagining I am worth more. This is the foundation that lies beneath a person who doesn't want to recover. It's a porous one, one where love, happiness and vitality get lost as they fall and fall and fall through all of the evergrowing cracks. 

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I see a future with anorexia based on a foundation of evidence. And that evidence is that 

I'm never able to be strong enough for long enough.

History has proven an overwhelming lack of ability despite the moments and periods where I've managed to seek and chase wills and reasons to fight. Whatever comes up, comes down and suddenly everything is scary again. Hitting rock bottom after things were finally improving became a pattern. Everybody who knows me began to know that pattern. They started to notice little things in a big way because isolated actions were now part of a bigger picture, the picture where I fell through the cracks, the picture of me not being able to be strong enough for long enough. Knowing this about myself made it infinitely harder to find the will to fight for recovery again when things took a turn. Ultimately, it made me concede. The eating disorder thought there wasn't any point in eating fear foods or gaining weight because every time I'd done it in the past, it led me back down the same path, the one where anorexia found a way to feel totally and utterly safe. How do I dream of a future when I have a voice screaming at me in my head telling me that no matter what, it will always make me lose all of the weight and amount to nothing more than what this illness provides? How do I dream when every day I'm told that that is the future set out for me? How do I dream when I have a promising history that's led me to concretely believe I can't instead of I can? How do I find spontaneity, recovery or hope when I have a past that makes me think I can't access those things, not with longevity, not with endurance? This is how and why I see my future with anorexia.

Dolls, do not doubt for a second that because I can recognise this, it makes it any less of a hard pill to swallow.

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After spending many years in various hospitals, treatment centres and areas of the community, I've encountered, connected with and kept contact with others who suffer from an eating disorder. In the time that I've grown worse, I've watched most of them grow better. I've witnessed and heard so many of them fight, overcome, continue to admit themselves into clinics and begin to lead inspiring lives. I haven't been able to help but compare myself to my friends throughout this process which is a shame because it's impacted my future with anorexia. It's done this because we all started out together as being a part of a sick community and suddenly that sick community became a healed community and I remained as the one who was 'too sick' to evolve with the others. Additionally, some of those people have even shared their ill feelings towards me in my inability to fight. They needed space from me, the girl who was too sick to be able to leave behind that life and fight for a recovered one. It was one thing for me to lose friends because they didn't have eating disorders and therefore, didn't understand, but in many ways, it hurt me more when the only people who could understand me didn't want to anymore.

There have been times when I've been envious seeing and hearing that my friends were in treatment facilities because of their ability to surrender to available help. My envy is derived from a longstanding, immense battle whenever it comes to getting help. Why don't I ever feel 'sick enough'? Why don't I ever feel like things have gotten bad enough? Why can't I find the strength they've found? Comparison to my friends who fought to recover led me to feel entirely hopeless about my situation. It forced me to see that I was amongst the sickest of the sick, the ones who can't dream, the ones void of a desire left in them, the ones who don't enjoy food anymore. 

I was amongst the ones whose eating disorders made them do everything to fight against, not for. 

This led me to realise how apparent it is that I may well be among those who never beat anorexia but get beaten by it.

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When people dream of their futures, it doesn't include them bestowing a mental illness. When anorexia is the mental illness at hand, it's especially complex because within its nature is a resistance to changing that fact. Although so much of me fights to keep my mental illness, it doesn't mean that I don't still experience grief learning that my future is becoming something I never thought it would be. Dolls, they say that when one door closes, another door opens. So if what lies ahead is a future you never strove for, imagined or predicted, maybe when you walk through that door, it can also hold other things for you that still make it a future worth knowing.

Kisses,

COS x