Popping A Bubble Of Love With A Prick Of Hate

Many people believe that because I exist in a bubble with anorexia, I must choose that, want that, love that. My fierce attachment to anorexia, my slavery to its desires and commands and my identity intertwined with it can appear as love to myself and others. At times I wonder if in this bubble love does exist, especially when outside sources relay their interpretation of our bubble to me and state: 'You love anorexia'. As the bond inside our bubble strengthens over time, the severity of anorexia's destruction does, also. This post is to remind everybody who bestows an eating disorder, including myself, of all of the reasons an eating disorder is to be hated. Because it can be all too easy to fall into its lies, believing it isn't that bad, believing that you can manage it and believing that you don't want to leave it. And then before you know it, your bubble of love has become so bad that it can't be pricked.

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Even for all of the times I feel utterly miserable, lost and hopeless due to anorexia, there is always a coexistent underlying feeling of happiness from the falsely skewed sense of achievement stemming from restriction. However, that happiness is only felt by me, the girl with the mental illness. For everybody else who witnesses my restriction, frequent struggle and weight loss, it is nothing but misery, loss and hopelessness that they feel. There is no enjoyment for them like there is for me. I'll be sitting in the bubble of our love, relishing in how safe I feel, for example, until jarringly, I hear the desperation in my family's voices as they beg for me to fight, to increase, to gain. It is in times like these that our bubble becomes pricked with the hatred I feel towards anorexia for being anywhere near as strong as the love I feel for those who matter, who never deceive or fail me as my eating disorder does.

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In many areas of my life, I experience immense freedom. I would hate for it to seem that I do not have gratitude for my many privileges such as having the right to education, being born into a wealthy family and living in a first-world country. My mental illness robs me of an abundance of freedoms that I know people from all over the world only dream of having. I think it is because I am so aware of how much freedom I have access to that I feel so ashamed of how much of it I deny myself to use. I feel as though I don't deserve my lucky place in the world because every day I throw away opportunities that others spend their lives fighting for. Nonetheless, the freedom anorexia deprives me of is hellish to manage.

I desire the ability to relish in my existence of fortune, yet I am weighted by the difficulty of not being able to touch the freedom that I hold in my hands.

• My life is ruled by calorie restriction.

The freedoms this prevents include sharing food with family, having the vibrancy to pleasantly engage in activities, using my intellect to my full capacity and pleasurably spending quality time with those I love. Calorie restriction affects these because activities require physical strength, accessing intellect is reduced in the presence of brain fog and quality time is tinged if anorexia is using it as an excuse to restrict.

• I am unable to ever say 'yes' or 'no' to something without feeling conflicted, fear or difficulty.

I find eating such a difficult task that over time, my family and I have adopted small routines that allow the process to be more manageable. For example, I can't eat in front of others, I only eat at certain times of the day and I can only eat a handful of 'safe' foods. Often, this means that occasions and spontaneity go against the grain of this way of life which evokes anxiety for everyone involved. How will I eat? How will I cope? Sometimes it causes them so much stress that the idea of saying 'no' just feels easier. But saying 'no', for me, brings with it just as many challenges as I grapple with feeling like a burden, a failure and a loner. Such feelings weigh down my heart so heavily and hurt me so deeply that the words themselves just sound diminutive to the impact they have as I write them on the page.

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It would be far more difficult to have anorexia if a false sense of enjoyment wasn't a part of its criteria. For all of the missing out, for all of the hunger, for all of the declining, for all of the arguments, for all of the tears of suffering, there will always be a percentage of the illness that convinces you all of this is worth it. And most of the time, that percentage is just large enough to make me believe it. Although anorexia hates for me to recognise this, I think that somewhere, deep down, a part of me knows that it isn't love I feel in our bubble. The hate that pricks our love is the fact that nobody I know could imagine finding a single drop of joy from engaging in the behaviours and mindset anorexia entails. What I hate most about this is the feeling that I don't belong in a world that others do, for what is wrong with me that I spend 95% of my life chasing a 5% high? Another contributing factor to my hatred is the shallowness I feel in knowing that a part of that 5% includes an element of materialism. Chasing materialism leaves anybody with a sense of emptiness. But the longer I've chased it, the more crippling the emptiness of living a life that is so heavily void of natural, complete, pure fulfilment has felt.

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When I reflect on how much there is to hate anorexia for, I wonder how much of my devotion to our bubble of love has been as real as it's felt. This aspect of anorexia is incredibly conflicting for sufferers. Whilst we can see the havoc caused, we also reap what it tells us are its many rewards. Perhaps the definition of recovery is when that bubble of love becomes pricked to the point where one day it pops, allowing you to finally see it for what it truly is. But I have not reached that moment, so I live with a daily conflict within myself in which I yearn for the freedom of a love that doesn't taunt, torture and kill me.

Kisses,

COS x