Tell Yourself A Beautiful Lie
Dolls, I understand better than anyone the fears that coincide with a restrictive eating disorder. Anorexia creates brick walls that keep you enclosed in a small life. And if you consistently tell yourself that you aren't enough, that it's not worth it and that you can't do it, (I won't say it's impossible but...), it's difficult to live any life that resembles something grand and exceptional. We only reach for the stars we know we can touch so, if you can't see beyond the barrier of your personal fear, Dolls, lie to yourself! Tell yourself you are enough, tell yourself it is worth it and tell yourself you can do it. You need to be prepared that the more beautiful the lie you create, the more beautiful will be the feeling of its succession.
I've spent many years in and out of a system I despised, one that made me feel unheard and misunderstood. The life I imagined away from this seemed so out of reach that its beauty was indescribable: A life where I experienced adulthood, had the capacity to work, money and independence. The lie was so beautiful that I didn't even dream of it because I so firmly believed my illness was the decider of my destiny. And not just me, but everyone around me. Although you may believe that 'easy' would be living the life I wanted, it wasn't. 'Easy' was succumbing to others' expectations of me, crawling back into their open arms and their ability to repel against anorexia in a way that I've never been able to. So when I wanted to give up and prove everybody right? That would've been the easy route. And I'd come thus far that I couldn't. I couldn't tell everyone their greatest fear: That anorexia was so engrained into me that LIVING would kill me. I had to try to create a destiny that nobody saw coming, even if it included anorexia, because, Dolls, I was tired of running. And when a severe case of anorexia is stuck in a system designed out of recovery, that's all the person becomes - the person who is running from recovery. I got tired of running and lying and losing and crying. I just wanted to live in a world where me, all of me, existed and was free.
Beautifully lying to myself meant that its destruction or achievement lay within the realms of myself. Perhaps that's what made the lie beautiful... that primarily, it affected me. My grandma tells me that this world is mine, of course not in a selfish, egotistic sense, but rather in the sense that when you create a destiny for yourself, the destiny begins to create, mean and define you. To put it simply, if the life I tried to make for myself went to shit, it was my world and my world only that was flushed down the drain.
Just like the mind becomes intertwined with anorexia, so does your intuition. It's so hard to distinguish between what is my gut feeling and what is merely anorexia's desire. I didn't truly understand, nor do I now, how many of the beautiful lies I told myself were for the benefit of Luka or a twisted eating disorder. And in those moments, I paused, I breathed andinstead of trying to think, I felt. Did it feel good? Did it feel exciting? Did it feel tangible? Did it feel meaningful? I put everything, all of my fears, all of my worries, down to that feeling. Even in the times when the aftermath of my decisions feels incredibly overwhelming and inextricably overstimulating, buried beneath the piles of gasoline and wood, I feel good, really fucking good. And that's why the lie is a beautiful lie, Dolls because normal lies feel ugly.
Here I am, replaying this beautiful lie in my mind, singing it over like a lullaby during the first nights in months that I haven't cried myself to sleep, tuning a vision to reality and humming away my worries because the alternative can't exist. Not here, not right now, this is my time to live with this beautiful lie I've turned into a beautiful truth.
Kisses,
COS x
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