trust-the-recovery

[trust-the-recovery]

DON’T hold onto clothes that fit your sick body but no longer fit your healthy body. That’s like holding onto your tricycle and periodically trying to switch back to it from the bike you ride every day. If you think it won’t trigger you, trust me - in a moment of weakness, it will and it’s just a matter of time so don’t even risk it.

DON’T hold onto friendships that are can potentially be triggering or toxic to you in any way. Unfortunately, this often includes people you’ve befriended in treatment but isn’t limited to it. This is a very important albeit difficult step to take but it’s time for you to think about YOUR health and wellbeing here. If it’s not part of the solution, then it’s a part of the problem. It’s not you being mean or cruel, it’s you making sure that you can live the ed-free and full life that you deserve.

DON’T hold onto your scale - food scales included! Your weight will fluctuate from day to day (as will the amount of food you eat) depending on a variety of factors and let’s face it - whether you’re just starting to recover or are almost there, having an ED-past and owning a scale just doesn’t add up to anything productive and can potentially be a trigger for a downward spiral in the future. I haven’t owned a scale in 5 years and my life hasn’t been negatively affected in the least - toss it and forget about it guys!

DON’T hold onto ED mementos (photos, diaries etc.) if they’ve ever served as a trigger for you in the past. If you have days when you’re feeling off balance and you tend to reach for your thigh gap pics from way back when to motivate unhealthy behavior - you need to get rid of them NOW. If when you feel sad you tend to re-read journal entries outlining your minuscule intake of ED-past and dwell on eating like a normal human being now - you need to toss out these journals and not look back. Clinging to the past is a direct link to potentially ending up right where you started so don’t go there.

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[trust-the-recovery]

Acceptance, the zone of magic and miracles!

[trust-the-recovery]

two boyfriends

I have two boyfriends. One is a caring, dedicated boy who tries as hard as he can to make me happy, to make me feel loved, even if he cannot quite contrive those feelings in me. The other is my toilet, who does not try at all to make me feel loved, yet, as the toilet water splashes up on my cheeks as my partially digested food burns my tongue on its way out of my body, I feel loved more than in any other moment, any other scenario.

I am soft spoken. My voice is quiet, weak. My mother tells me to stop talking under my breath, to stop mumbling, but I don’t think she knows that I do not have enough strength in my diaphragm to push the words out any louder. If I was stronger, maybe I could tell her. Maybe I could finally say, “This is what I’ve become, and no matter how hard I try, I just cannot seem to accept myself.” Or maybe I could push the vomit out with more gusto when I find myself on yet another late night date with boyfriend #2.

I recently went 8 days without ever coming face to face with my darling porcelain partner. I had a really great streak going, ‘cause I’m trying to recover and shit. But as we all know, if there’s a wagon, there’s a chance you’ll fall off of it, and fall off I did. My salivary glands are swollen and the blood vessels around my eyes burst and my throat is sore and I’m dehydrated, but, hey, at least I’m skinny, right? At least I got rid of most of the 3,000 calories I just inhaled within a short 30 minutes that I almost can’t remember because my mind was gone fishing somewhere.

There I go again. I just avoided another social event in a long chain of social events that I’ve come up with excuses for why I will not be present. They go along the lines of this:

“My mom is making dinner so I’m going to stay home.”

“I’m going to a movie with my family, sorry!”

“I’m grounded. Ugh.”

If I told them the truth, the real reason why I’m not there, they might be horrified. They might shun me. Or worse, they might even express concern or worry for me.

“Sorry, I have to stay home because I need to eat until I think I might die and then stick my fingers down my throat on a date with someone who will never leave me. Ever.”

I guess I’m afraid of intimacy? I don’t really know for sure, but that’s what some self help book told me. Because I thought I could selfhelp my way out of this relationship with my toilet. When I think someone is starting to get to know me, to see me, as I am, this boring, pathetic shell of a human, panic sets in. It dawns on me that this someone will soon realize that I am not funny, I am not interesting, I am weird and I am clueless. I need to distract them, I need to make them think I am cool for just a little bit longer because if they see through this facade I am putting on they will surely leave me. Keeping everyone at a shallow level, never forming any deep, satisfying, gratifying relationships is the way to do this. No one will ever leave. You’re just the surface level friend, the fun, light girlfriend who never even considers allowing any thoughts having to do with anything deeper than a puddle or more profound than a bowl of oatmeal enter the small, small universe that is her mind.

I am trying to recover, though. I really am. I practice mindfulness. I have some coping skills. I really want to get better. It’s just, how can a therapist or a psychiatrist or a nutritionist or any other -ist teach me how to love myself? Because I can’t seem to figure it out on my own, and I’ve been trying for years upon years of disordered eating. How can they have the answer? How does anyone? How does anyone just….love themselves? How does anyone just….eat normally?

I’ve been watching a lot of standup comedy recently. My therapist told me it might be a good way to distract myself from my binge/purge urges. It did distract me, at least for a little bit, but then I weighed myself again and realized I gained two pounds. I think I blacked out after that.

I told someone recently that I was in recovery for an eating disorder, and she didn’t freak out at all. Not one bit. She just said, “Oh, good for you.” That was it. Do you realize what that means? Do you realize the incredible weight of those words, the concrete-smashing, glass-shattering force behind that remark? It means that my eating disorder, my obsession with eating but also with not eating and also with getting rid of any proof in my body of having eaten since I was thirteen years old, the thing that has ruled and dictated my life but somehow convinced me that I have some semblance of control over my body and ability to manipulate my metabolism, was not nearly as important to her as it is to me! She didn’t care! At all! This fucking obsession, these fucking compulsions, they don’t fucking matter. It’s just fucking food. I think I should be able to fucking get over this. I ought to tell more people about my recovery, it seems to give me some perspective.

I’ve been trying to break up with my boyfriend. The inanimate one. But I seem to keep on coming back to him, because he offers me some level of comfort, some type of feeling like I’m doing the right thing, some kind of feeling like I can keep any bad things from happening and any bad feelings from surfacing if I can just puke out my food, if I can just get rid of it. I know that that’s not in any way true, but I believe it with almost my whole being. I am firmly convinced of its reality, of its ability to impact my life.

I have to go have a snack now, because my meal plan reads, snack #1: watermelon smoothie at 10AM, and it is now 10:39AM. I can’t mess this up because Lord knows if I do, then I not only might but am obligated to throw caution to the wind and just binge and purge already because you already fucked up once, might as well just fuck up your whole day, right? Wish me luck–the kitchen is one of my most feared rooms in the house, besides the basement when the lights are off, of course. Oh, and the bathroom. Where the toilet is.

Bulimia’s a fucking bitch.