#you are so much more than your disorder

[readingcoco]

TW: eating disorders, recovery

Hello, I don't normally make posts like this but I feel ✨compelled✨

I am a 31 year old lady and I rejoined this website last year to scream into the void about Arthur Morgan (which I have very much done) but I have also made amazing friends and started writing, a hobby I had never considered before, in part because of how inspired I was by the people around me. All of which was unexpected.

The last time I was on this website was over a decade ago, when I was 17 and things were very very different. I was here primarily to find community with other people who were in the depths of their eating disorders, just like I was. It made me feel less alone but it also made me sicker in many ways that I still struggle with today. The only way I was able to find recovery was from removing myself from those spaces and thus leaving this website and others like it for the next 14 years.

I bring this up because I have just come across someone with an ED focused blog interacting with some of my posts. I'm not trying to shame anyone, certainly not the person, because if they are anything like me back then I can only empathize with the level of pain and self hatred they are experiencing. But I can't deny it made me feel weird. And it constantly shocks me that even 14 years into my recovery journey I can still feel unbelievably triggered by discussions of goal weights, calorie counting and thinspo pics 😬

I'm not sure what the point of this post is really, maybe just to articulate the complicated mix of feelings I had towards it. But it did make me think that the biggest thing that I was looking for back then was community, I felt so lonely and thought a space built on the shared experience of being depressed and starving would help ease that loneliness in some way. It in fact had the opposite impact. We were just making each other sicker and I lost more than one friend during that period.

I wish I had found fandom back then instead, which is all about joy and creation, even though many of the people participating are experiencing many of the same issues. It forces you to connect around shared excitement rather than struggle and feeds the soul rather than starves it.

[swagging-back-to]

it should be a cut and dry case if you go to a restaurant and get glutened by them. and by case i mean criminal. not just suing for damages and distress.

[tea-and-secrets]

would it be ok to ask that this one is posted soon? i could use reassurance about it if thats alright? things are just... really hard.

im trying to come to terms with the fact that im going to be disabled for the rest of my life. i accept that im disabled *now,* but i have a degenerative disease, its not going to just stop being there. its going to keep getting worse slowly over time.

its especially hard because... even now i cant do my favorite hobby, rockhounding, because i cant bend without risking falling, i cant get on the ground to pick things up and/or dig because i wouldnt be able to get up on my own, and i cant navigate most off-road areas where the rocks im interested in are most often found.

i also desperately want to be a geologist. but i wanted more than anything to be doing fieldwork, like going out and taking samples from various areas, making maps of what could be found where based on my samples... that sort of thing. but ill never be able to do it and i have to come to terms with that.

it will get bad enough that i will need a wheelchair at some point in my life too. like, at some point within the next five to ten years.

ill also never be able to pick people up again. my whole life ive prided myself in picking people i love up during hugs, spinning them around, that sort of thing. i especially loved picking up my best friend.

they understand that i cant do that anymore and theyve never expressed sadness over it, but i cant help but think about how delighted theyve always been about me picking them up and spinning or wiggling them during hugs, and how they used to ask multiple times each hangout to be picked up and hugged.

and even if they arent upset about it, *i* am. i want to be able to do what i used to be able to. but i cant. and i never will again.

its just hard, knowing ill never be able to reach my dream career, continue my favorite outdoor hobby, continue giving love to my friends in the ways i like to... theres so much i can no longer do, and so much ill never be able to do again.

its just really hard. i dont want to be this way. but i am and i always will be, and it will get worse even if i do things like meds and physical therapy. those would just delay the collapse of my disease.

im just sad. i dont want to have to come to terms with it. but i have to or else im setting myself up for even more grief.

and its all because my mom wouldnt get me treated when i was injured in my teenage years. that injury going untreated for so long is what caused my degenerative disease to start so early. my mom has it too but she didnt start developing it until her fourties.

and then for years after my injury when talking about my back pain she just kept saying it was because im fat and that it would stop hurting if i lost weight.

which of course sparked the eating disorder i had previously recovered from.

which ive been struggling with now again for years because of that. but i was getting better again.

until now. because my body hurts too bad to get out of bed often enough to eat a healthy amount so im rapidly losing weight and my brain is saying i have to keep going and going.

and, the wheelchair thing... all my friends live and are going to live places with a lot of stairs. and *i* live somewhere with a lot of stairs too. and the doorframes in all these places arent wide enough for a wheelchair, nor are the bathrooms large enough.

its just all so hard to think about. i hate it. i want to get better and heal like a normal person would, not be in pain constantly and get worse like my body is going to.

thank you for listening. sorry for how long this is.

if i could get reassurance in tags or replies that would be really nice. this is all just so hard and i only have a few people i can confide in about it.

<3

[sillyscientists]

Self proclaimed empaths on their way to "advocate for the mentally ill 🥺" by demonizing every cluster b personality disorder

[doesdarlingexe]

get out of the main selfship tag you pred

ctrl v much

anyway posting this in main tags again, but anon, you can always just use the safeshipping tags if you don't want to see proshippers. we aren't invading your space, it's a communal space with subgroups. that can apply to any fandom or any community, there will always be subgroups you don't like, but fortunately there's usually more specific tags that cater to you! there's also the block button if my content makes you uncomfortable in any way, and I highly suggest you use it if that is the case (though, something is telling me you didn't look at a single post i made).

Have a great day anon! /gen

And to everyone in the main tags, anti or proship, I hope you have a good day and remember: your f/os love you!

[chicago-geniza]

At this point I'm still petitioning for Polish citizenship because Commitment 2 the Bit but mostly because the bureaucrat with whom I spoke did a Naomi Wolf "No! No!!" reaction to like. Who I am as a person (Russian first name, Jewish last name, American passport, family fled to USSR in 1939, speak Polish pretty well but with a Russian accent)

[somepoetwannabe]

I'm going to be honest, if someone tries to claim this disorder doesn't affect them all that much I do immediately believe they do not have this disorder. I'd never say it to their face because I'm not rude like that, but this is how I think

[pickled-flowers]

It might be I have anti social personality disorder 🤨

[lilalilan]

Putting this in it's own post to not detract but like. There is no such thing as sugar addiction.

If you aren't eating carbs/sugars, your body craves those things because it needs them. Your body depends on sugar for energy, and if you aren't consuming enough you're going to crave it so that you eat and correct the deficiency, just like with anything else your body needs.

If you are eating carbs/sugars regularly, especially if it feels like you can never get enough of them and it feels like you're addicted, please get checked out for diabetes mellitus.

What diabetes mellitus boils down to is the body being unable to process sugar, either because it doesn't make insulin (type 1) or because it can't use the insulin it makes (type 2). Insulin is a hormone the body needs in order to use the sugar in your blood. This leads to high blood sugar levels, weight gain, being thirsty often/drinking a lot of water, and frequent urination, because the body can't get the sugar out of the bloodstream so either stores it as fat or gets rid of it in urine (and has you drink a lot of water to make that happen).

Diabetics don't crave sugar because they're addicts who can't get control of themselves, they crave sugar because their body desperately needs it but is struggling to use what they're giving it, because it's having issues with insulin.

Going in for a diabetes diagnosis can be scary and stressful, usually due to the stigma and fatphobia/fatshaming diabetes patients often have to deal with. A lot of people are uneducated about diabetes and see it as a punishment for eating unhealthily, and if you have or have had this view in the past it can be really upsetting and scary to think that you might be diabetic. Despite what the stigma may have led you to believe, diabetes is often in large part genetic, and people who are predisposed to it can have it triggered by anything from stress to covid to seemingly nothing at all. But even if you did cause your diabetes or make it worse by eating a lot of sugar/carbs, you deserve compassion and you deserve care, you deserve accurate information about how your body does/doesn't work, and you deserve treatment free from judgement and blame.

Diabetes is manageable, it is something you can live with. Diet and exercise can help, but in the long term even folks who've made lifestyle changes usually need medication, because lifestyle changes don't change the fact that your body is struggling to make/use insulin.

For something relatively common, diabetes isn't well understood by most people, and the actual symptoms of it are often overlooked because of that. Hunger even after eating, especially after eating carbs/sugar, and constantly craving carbs/sugars, was what led my doctor to assess me for diabetes, so if that's something you struggle with please consider looking into diabetes.

[rxttenfish]

shoutout to all us personality disorder bitches who have been constantly accused of making the lives of everyone we're close to worse, or even abusing them, by doing nothing other than being severely mentally ill.

[collaredkittyboy]

It's so funny when people try to manipulate me by complimenting me hoping I'm gonna get attached from the praise when I'm already a mentally ill narcissist. Irl my default response to any compliment is just "I know"

[subconsciousmysteries]

there's an outbreak of BPD in men and it's called The Manosphere.

Since they are men and we villainize men more readily, everyone's insisting that "no it's not BPD, it's Covert NPD / Compensatory NPD". Failing to realize that these two conditions are the exact same thing. BPD is literally just the unstable and more openly wimpy version of NPD.

The core psychology of both disorders is the same solipsistic, self-obsessed sociopathy where you are completely driven by your insecurities and you view other people as mere tools to ease your constant suffering.

[kebiday]

okay i'm sorry i'm not done thinking about thoroughbreds kandrew. (hyping myself up) it's fine. it's fine. it's my blog with no followers & i can be as delusional as i want

[waitineedaname]

ritsu has the flavor of nd where he went undiagnosed for years bc his sibling's autism was much more obvious to people so he slipped through the cracks

[ziracona]

You know how there’s therapy for people with specific issues that’s very necessary for them? Because it fits their issues. But then sometimes people go ‘whoa actually, to ofc a lesser intense degree but very real degree, we actually all need to be doing this for our mental health and introspective growth.’? That’s so important. And I wish it happened more and with more issues. But there’s so much you don’t look at internally at all until something shatters inside you and forces you to. And the thing is, we all have those things going on. Just because your bow hasn’t snapped under the weight doesn’t mean you aren’t under enormous pressure. Just because you don’t flee at a sound doesn’t mean you don’t flinch at it and grind your teeth. And if we spent time acknowledging and exploring this kind of thing more throughout life, less people would end up in situations where they have no choice but to unpack mountains, and people would have more understanding and less fear of them when they do.

[ourceliumnetwork]

oh *now* she wants me to see a doctor about my joints doing things joints don't normally do.

bit late ma.