WHAT IF IT ALL WORKS OUT?

I've spent so much time allowing the fear within my mind to prevent me from allowing the spirit within my soul to run free. This post is for every moment I've not been strong enough to let my actions align with my deepest desires. What if... I waste a life believing something that ended up being a lie? I fear the other side not being everything I hope so strongly that it keeps me stuck in what I know. So, maybe I cannot always be strong enough to walk my talk and maybe I'm not there yet but I know that for now, I can be strong enough to think about, imagine and give opportunity to what it would be like if I was and it all worked out. 

---

At higher weights, I've despised everything about myself. My body is the first thing that others think I'm referring to when I say this. But it's more than how I think my body looks, it's what a healthy body means.

Insecurity is the bone that my actions have ravished over the years.

I have lived with innate insecurity for all of my life. In my younger years, it took the form of matching my opinions and actions to my friends, not wanting to be even slightly different. My insecurity only progressed with my age and its increasing concreteness became coupled with my secrecy of it. Insecurity plagued me for years. I spent years drowning in it before anorexia became my way of reaching my hand up, out of the water. 'Help me', 'Notice me', 'Save me'. But by the time my body displayed an outward representation of my internal suffering, the insecurity was so engrained that it was permanent. Once people began to see my physical body shrink and morph, I was offered help, complimented and noticed in a way I never had been. Although I wasn't attention-seeking intentionally, the attention dissipated some of that insecurity. Admittedly, it was undeniably gratifying. People asked, they cared, and suddenly, I was speaking about my internal suffering. To me, the idea of a different body is the idea that people will think I am okay. But I'm not. My mind stretches far beyond my anorexic thoughts and delves into thoughts and feelings of perfectionism, obsession, lack of control, worthlessness, perpetual sadness and emptiness. To live in a body that hasn't been starved feels like giving up my lifebuoy, falling back into the deep blue. Wouldn't that feel wrong to you? Wouldn't that make you afraid?

But if I let myself surrender to the purpose of this blog post, I then have to challenge what feels wrong and fear-inducing. What if I go against every instinct in my body, every neurological pathway I've formed and ask myself: What if at the other end, it all works out?

What if for the first time in my life, I allow myself the pleasure, the spectacularness, the relief of loving the girl I've never even liked?

---

When I think of giving up anorexia, the first thing I equate to it is a loss of control. Whenever there is ambiguity, dysfunction and stress in my life, anorexia is the thing I resort to, hold on to and clench to catch a breath of air. I've been in and out of recovery since I was eleven. I remember having weeks or months when everything would be going well and then a bad argument or an exam week would arise and suddenly I was in my room writing down everything I was going to eat and how many days I was going to exercise to feel the relief of knowing I could control something. And every time, the familiarity of punishing myself created a sense of relief that was instantaneous. The times when I don't experience this feeling are the times I strive for recovery: Eating more, experiencing more and feeling more. I fear that getting to the finish line means that I'll be categorically disjointed in a world where my head feeds me the same disgust and shame, yet no physical body to use as my coping mechanism. I fear that I would feel completely out of control eating without structure, regiment and time frame. I fear that I would feel completely out of control existing at a weight I didn't know or worse, one that I knew and was ashamed of. 

I was writing: 'Nothing else thus far in my life has proven to be as comforting and safe as anorexia' before I stopped myself mid-sentence and questioned the truth of that thought. Anorexia hates me for admitting this but if I stick to my word and confess everything to you, Dolls, there is one other thing in my life that has...The love of my parents and my friends. For the sake of this blog post, I'm giving life to the possibility of a world in which I discover a new sense of control in surrendering to and relying upon those special relationships. What if an ability to be spontaneous allows me to feel in control of my will? What if an ability to act on my desires allows me to seek control in discovering the person I truly am, leaving behind the part of my mind that's ridden with toxicity, manipulation and destruction? What if having the capacity to dedicate my time to my interests allows me to seek control over leading a life of fulfilment? 

What if these ulterior avenues of control uncover that I was never really in control, not even at all?

---

Most of my mind believes that what I've let myself imagine in this blog post is a false fantasy that can only exist in my wildest dreams. And the minority of my mind is scared shitless that that fantasy holds more truth than what anorexia allows. What if I let my fear outweigh a beautiful, righteous, exceptional truth to the point where I'm robbed of a life? It's easy to sit from my computer and poke and prod at places that don't want to be poked and prodded at because they're simply words on a page. But it's the movement within my body, my psyche and my aura that mean more than those words. I sit uncomfortably, squirmishly, reluctantly because although 'What if it all works out?' sounds too good to be true, I know it isn't impossible.

Kisses, COS x

---