I will always be ‘in recovery’ from my eating disorder
It’s a journey that never ends
When I was 17, my therapist told me my heart was going to stop working if I continued living how I was. Hearing this news wasn’t necessarily the worst part — what evoked discomfort in my perfection-oriented brain was the numbness I felt at the possibility of near-future cardiac arrest. The concept of death didn’t horrify me as it should have. It’s not that I wanted to die, but I was angry because half of me felt neutral to the idea.
Denial was my strong suit. “I don’t even have a real eating disorder,” I remember saying to my friends and therapists. From what my doctors were saying, I had generalized anxiety and panic disorder that resulted in an eating disorder. The eating disorder was actually diagnosed before my anxiety: I had been white-knuckling things my whole life, and the development of my eating disorder led to my diagnosis of multiple anxiety disorders.
The sensory overload I witnessed when people ate around me traumatized my nerves. I feared lunch in high school — all I could focus on all day was how I was going to devise a plan to avoid eating my next meal.
When lunch approached, my body would go numb and I’d feel an odd sensation that made me want to rip my skin off. I was trapped in a shell of a body that caused so many overwhelming senses. Sounds, light and even people bumping into me in the hallway made me feel as if my bones were going to shatter into a million pieces if I couldn’t find some way to stop the feeling.
Scratching my skin and pulling at my hair and ribs was only a temporary distraction. Food became something I could fixate on when my anxious ticks weren’t enough to distract me.
I hated my body and wanted to punish it for allowing my nerves to blow things out of proportion. I wanted control, and not eating was the only way I could feel like I had a legitimate sense of power.
Self-destruction is a scarily intimate form of abuse. I felt detached from my body and wanted to disassociate from myself. I was aware what I was doing was awful for my body (and maybe worse for people who loved me to watch). Truthfully, I cared more that the people I loved had to find out this way that I had been suffering for so long.
Initially, I made the decision to get better for my parents and friends. Maybe if I faked recovery impressively enough, then everyone would feel at peace about my mental health. Then maybe, just maybe, I would feel better.
To my surprise, that wasn’t necessarily how it worked, though it did get things started.
My after-school activities transitioned from track practice to therapy and going to the nutritionist. Not being much of a crier, it surprised me when I would tear up at the nutritionist’s office. She would simply request I eat ice cream with my lunch on Wednesdays and that would be enough to send me into a crying fit.
The first month or so of recovery, my eating disorder had more power over me than I would ever admit. I would give away the snacks I was scheduled to eat every morning and afternoon.
The majority of the time I spent recovering, I thought I was simply faking it and didn’t believe I would ever actually become healthy. There never was a dramatic shift. Slowly I began to adapt better habits — one of the most important of which was learning to be nice to myself.
The difficulty of giving up an irrational-yet-comforting thought process seemed impossible. But once I could distinguish real thoughts and feelings from irrational thoughts brought on by my eating disorder, living became easier. I battle my eating disorder every day in small decisions. I am at a normal weight and eat a healthy amount, but I still have to make sure I am giving my body what it needs. There are still days when I have to remind myself to make sure I am being healthy.
I don’t have to be in a treatment program to make the conscious decision to be a healthier human. My eating disorder helped me realize recovery isn’t only necessary when you hit rock bottom: It’s a journey that doesn’t have to stop just because I am no longer dangerously underweight. It isn’t a term I view negatively anymore. Recovery is about constantly working towards inner peace and treating myself with respect — and those are two things I never want to end.