Greed is the future?

I’m GenX, and finding big financial success was all the rage when I was at university. Money was on almost everyone’s mind. The commerce faculties were flourishing in the nineties – people had taken all the wrong lessons from the movie, Wall Street – and many of the people I interacted with on campus had big plans to make big bucks.

I wouldn’t have been averse to a big payday, but I didn’t graduate from the commerce faculty. My degree is an Arts degree, with Political Science and Economics as my majors. Ethics have always figured heavily into how I roll. Which often makes big money a challenge.

Luckily, my eating disorder kept me nearly fully occupied, meaning any career ambitions were for later. I took what was easy to get. The main requirements were that it paid enough, and let me stay focused on what was truly important in my life – getting thin. That I often co-opted my work into my pathology is just another unfortunate feature of the disease. It demands perfection from you in every sphere.

Eating disorders take, “If it’s not Scottish, it’s crap” to ridiculous heights.

If you don’t plan for the future with an eating disorder – and who can make plans when the date of perfection’s arrival is uncertain – you also don’t fully exist in the present. You can’t because perfection is required in the here and now too. This is part of what I mean when I say that eating disorders steal your life. You have no now, and no plans for a later either.

I often felt not quite here in my life. I often felt not in the moment. My tendency to dissociate when I’m stressed or in distress also makes being present hard at times. Even when I look like I’m here, I’m often not, not really.

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Be present first.

Many meditative practices work to teach you to be in the moment. You practice letting go of past and future thoughts and concerns. You practice being present and sitting with your thoughts. You practice being present without any thoughts. You learn to pull yourself back to being focused on the moment when the mind drifts. You can do this on your own, or via a guided practice.

I preferred guidance when I started meditating. I found the external reminders helpful as I sat. I still prefer to meditate with music. We all find our own way, and no one way is the correct path. It’s what works well for you that’s important.

Learning to stay in the moment has been an important part of my eating disorder recovery. Learning to first accept, and later to (sometimes) embrace what is. Reality is reality, despite our at times best efforts to say otherwise. Staying in the moment forces you to face reality. I found that very difficult in the beginning. And why not? I have decades of practice at doing the opposite. Denial is one of the cornerstones of an eating disorder.

When I first started practicing sitting with uncomfortable thoughts and eating disorder urges, I was sure the anxiety would kill me. It was straight misery. I wasn’t sure I believed the people who told me it would get better. I persisted because I was already at the bottom. But I didn’t believe, not really, that I could sit with my feelings, and survive.

Imagine my chagrin when they were proven correct. It does get easier to sit with feelings. It does get easier to stay in the moment. Being uncomfortable won’t kill you, and it lasts for much less time than you imagine. Emotions are often fleeting. We’re fickle creatures that way and isn’t that lucky.

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I live in the now.

I didn’t look to the future when I was younger because I needed to be perfect before I gave myself that option. I don’t look to the future much now or speculate what my life will be a few years hence – though I do obsess over the environmental and geopolitical future – because the present is where we actually live, and the present is where recovery and growth lie.

I developed an eating disorder at age eleven. That is, it went fully online, though I’d been struggling for much of that year. I started throwing up what I was eating at age nineteen. I’ve had therapists and doctors since the age of nineteen. I’ve been through extensive inpatient programs three times. The last time was a three-month stay from late 2014 to Spring 2015. I threw up for the last time on October 31, 2019. It’s been five years since I last made myself vomit.

Every day feels miraculous in that regard.

I missed much of my present as I lived it because of my eating disorder. I was very focused on a perfect future that would never come – it couldn’t: perfection isn’t how we roll.

But as much as I still struggle with the idea that I’m not really earning my air in this world, I’m also quite enjoying just existing. Just living through each day without my eating disorder. I’d be even more pleased if depression quit hanging around, but we’re functionally conjoined twins.

On the bright side, depression also benefits from learning to just be.

What will my life be like in three years? Hopefully, more and better. When a large part of you never expected to survive, the current sober eating existence remains a daily gift. I should probably take time to appreciate that personal truth more often.

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Do you struggle to stay present and be in the moment?

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