Part Of Your World

I fear that in having made you a part of my world, there is a world I’ll never get to know. It is complex for me to be part of your world like it was for Ariel. Just as Ariel had a worried, concerned, lying father, I have an indecisive, confusing, lying mental illness. The world my parents, my friends, and most people know allows for experiences involving free-thinking, travel, confidence, pleasure, spontaneity, fun, happiness, memory-making and adventure. There is a reason I am not part of your world. It is because for me to live in your world involves enduring some incredibly uncomfortable, painful, conflicting emotions. Those feelings are the reason I created the world for myself that I live in now. I wanted to be a part of this world more than anything, though instead of becoming a part of it, I was entirely removed from the world I once knew, becoming consumed by the new one. I want to cast a light on this sticky web, illuminating how one moment I was spinning it and the next, I've never been more entangled, stuck and trapped in anything. This blog post is dedicated to exploring the thought?... The possibility? of your world.

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'What would I give if I could live out of these waters?

What would I pay to spend a day warm on the sand?

Bet'cha on land they understand

Bright young women, sick of swimmin'

Ready to stand'

Some days I love the familiarity and dependancy of swimming in my water but on other days, it feels torturous to the part of me that yearns to feel the freedom of running and dancing on the sand. In the moments I am ready to stand and harness the strength that would allow for the possibility to be part of your world, these are the parts I want to know:

• I want to travel. I want to pick spices from spice markets in Spain, I want to sip on white wine on a restaurant's terrace overlooking a typical burnt orange and yellow sunset in Santorini, I want to have lattes and macarons with my mum as she navigates us through her sentimental secret nooks of Paris and I want to make friends with the 20-year gelateria owners in Venice. 

• I want to know confidence, not the cocky kind that's horrible to be around but the level that's just right, where you believe in, trust and respect yourself enough to stand behind your words and actions, beholding a sense of self that leaves you feeling like you have a place in the world. In your world, I'll be a bright young woman who knows self-love and self-belief. If I were a part of your world, I'd find my legs, ready to stand despite that I don't think the world will understand. But I hope I'll learn to be strong enough in my stature for that to be okay.

• My relationship with food and body image primarily, but also exercise, is troubling beyond belief... debilitating. I can't go a minute without thinking about them. My innate fear of weight gain is so intense that it makes it nearly impossible to eat, let alone with any kind of ease. And if I do manage to eat more, the guilt afterwards is so harrowing that truthfully, it makes me want to die. I want to be part of your world where eating doesn't induce omniscient guilt leading me into a deep depression or quest for any and every means of compensation. To have a healthy relationship with food, body image and exercise is the only way I could be part of your world because, without this fundamental, I am left with no energy, soul and joy to do the things I want to do: Sing karaoke, dance on tables, fall in love, to name a few.

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'Legs are required for jumping, dancing

Strolling along down a, what's that word again?

Street'

Bodies are made to be filled with vitality and energy but in being sick, it's been complicated for me to accept and grapple with this truth. I have spent many years now, unforgivingly weak. I find it difficult to be so vulnerable as to share with you just how dire the turns it's taken have been. Sadly, the occasions in which my weakness has hit such extreme rockbottoms that I've become severely concerned for my safety or been forced to accept the likelihood that my life would at that point, end, have been far from infrequent. I went from a world where my legs did everything from far and few and in between jumping, dancing and strolling along (that word called) 'street'(s). I explored the world I was a part of with sheer delight, moving without thought. Naturally, I'm left to wonder, is the world out there one I'll ever again get to know? Will I run through fields of lilies and skinny dip in forgotten bays and play a match of volleyball on a beach in Venice? Will I be a part of your world?

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'Up where they stay all day in the sun

Wanderin' free, wish I could be

Part of that world'

For some people, the ocean is their 'happy' place. That place where I feel safe and free is in the sunshine. I imagine the sunshine that is a part of your world is the most beautiful, iridescent, giving sunshine. Mental illness has impacted me in many ways, but mostly, it's my resilience, or lack thereof, that affects me daily. Triggers that once hit me, now beat me down, for hours, days, and increasingly so, weeks. I am desperate for the resilieince to overcome triggers because I don't just suffer the pain of the trigger itself, I experience the pain of living with it for the extended, insufferable period afterwards.

I feel so far removed from a feeling of freedom in my life. It's hard to feel freedom because every decision that I make is touched with the tongue of anorexia, OCD or depression. A tug of war is the best analogy I have to depict the constant state my mind is in as I am pulled back and forth between any one of these given illnesses and myself. For example, with OCD, I experience such a struggle as I debate whether I give into a compulsion and soothe its fears or harness the strength to ignore a compulsion and give myself a break. To spend all day in the sun, this magical place in your world where I am free sounds nothing less than luxurious, warm and safe. My difficulty in seeking the desire to attain recovery is not what makes me saddest about Ariel's visualisation. My illness has spiralled me so out of control that I have declined to below the cutoffs of the most severe southern ends of nearly all of the scales (take a weight and hormone chart as two of multiple examples). So what makes me saddest is that if I woke up tomorrow, wanting to begin embarking on an upward trajectory pathway, it would take such extreme mental strength because I fear recovering would not take even months but most certainly years and most likely, many at that. In fact, it seems many markers of my health will be permanently affected, meaning impossible to reverse. And it's incredibly frightening to imagine finding the will to begin fighting a battle that you know from the get go will a) take such a very long time to win and b) in some areas, will never even be able to be won. I draw attention to this not to create excuses but to depict just how scary it is living in a world so dark that even the light has become tainted with that darkness too. Because even to be a part of your world cannot be easy or simple, not anymore.

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I relate a lot to Ariel and what it must've felt like for her to want to be a part of a world she felt she couldn't know, not easily anyhow. I understand the agony she faced in dreaming of something that was told to her as being forbidden. And I understand the overwhelmingness of imagining being a part of something as big as a world. Anorexia has taken a lot from me, but I hope that it never takes from me my imagination, oh my imagination.

Kisses,

COS x