Will I ever love me?
Love is something I find easy to give to others, so much so that I'd say I love to love. In my childhood, most people in my life showered me with exceptional, unconditional love. Throughout my childhood, there was a love I wasn't shown but I know it wasn't this alone that led to my development of suicidal ideation, criticism and self-hatred. I know this because my earliest memories of these experiences came before those loveless periods. Subsequently, I've been left to wonder if my destiny unfolded before me or if it was planned all along. Was there ever a world in which I was supposed to love myself? Or was it inevitable before I was born? No matter what variables change, the truth has always seemed to remain that I don't love myself. And truthfully? Its repercussions feel overbearing, relentless and cruel.
It is because I do not love myself that I need a degree of reassurance that compensates for my porous foundation. My eating disorder, subconsciously, looks for reasons to prevail, twisting what is minor into major, turning fear into impossible and good intentions into bad ones. It is not easy for the ones who love me because my immediate predisposition is that I am a burden, that I do not make their world a better place and that they do not value me, are proud of me or want certain things for me. As they grow tired of providing me with what feels like, from their perspective, an unnecessary amount of validation, I begin to dislike the person I'm asking them to love for recognising the stress I am invoking. I am exhausted from failing to the point that I begin to sabotage situations because my default presumption is that they have failed. Although I know that my thoughts are not always facts, at the point in which my brain sees an absence of love, my overwhelming feelings of rejection immediately eradicate the realm in which facts exist.
My feelings outrun my brain and my brain outruns reality.
My adoration for fashion is something that has only ever grown. When I was scouted at 13, the industry became my world, one I soon so desperately desired to be a part of. I have never stopped loving fashion but unfortunately, I have stopped (if I ever started) loving my body. These two facts create an inescapable web because it is through the use of our physical body that we express our style. Due to raging insecurity, there are so many clothes I've bought and never worn and so many outfits I have assembled and never executed. If I had to choose one thing I was most envious of, I think it would be the unmissable, beautiful and powerful men and women I see confidently walking the streets in outfits I only dream of wearing. I occasionally showcase my outfits online, however:
I do not have creative freedom dressing up as I allow my fear of how different clothes shape my body to outweigh my anticipation that I and others will like my style.
It takes me hours to take photoshoots because I struggle to find the perfect medium between others being able to appreciate the fashion and me being pleased with how my body looks showcasing the fashion. Sometimes I choose not to use any of the photos at all or to opt for the ones I'm least insecure over how well they highlight my outfit.
Fashion experimentation should be because of an opinion entirely linked to fashion and completely detached from anorexia. I want to love myself enough to one day establish my style.
You experience a full life on a full stomach and you experience an empty life on an empty one.
It's quite a big deal for me, a person with an eating disorder to recognise this because the life I consider to feel the most full is the one that people who aren't unwell consider very empty. Despite having anorexia nervosa, I have suffered with this illness for long enough and severely enough now to have learnt that the full life I feel is a fabrication of reality. The breaths of life are not the ones where you inhale oxygen but rather memories, insight and energy. It is impossible to do this sustainably when engaging in an eating disorder, as your body's sole focus becomes breathing oxygen, fighting for life time and time again as sufferers disregard and discount the necessity and importance of staying alive. Anorexics are convinced that the breaths of life are the intoxicating ones that occur during starvation. Those breaths fill up our bellies with the indestructible feeling of being special, dangerously walking through life, somehow not dying despite the death that to everyone else, is so clearly, awaiting us any day now. The temporary gain is a sick illusion that inevitably results in long-term pain. To this date, developing this awareness hasn't resulted in another outcome, an outcome in which I manage to love myself to life and not to love the illusion to death. Will I ever come to view life as 'enough' without the validation my eating disorder provides?
'Will I ever love me?' isn't about a simple 'yes' or 'no' answer. 'Will I ever love me?' is about trying to understand the thought patterns that result in the same behavioural patterns so as to hope for or at least, imagine, a new outcome, an outcome in which I ever do love myself.
Kisses,
COS x
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