I’ve not been a “go with the flow” kind of person for most of my life, for all that I can be impulsive. I plan the days and weeks though not in a goal and growth-oriented kind of day. This is about making sure I know what to do with my time. I was about making sure that my life was one of order and control. Safety lives there, or so my brain assumed.

Nothing bad can happen when corners align squarely, and when you arrive for your appointments five minutes early. ^[i]

Anxiety promises that all will be good as long as nothing untoward will happen, at least as long as everything goes to plan and you follow the rituals and routines. Unfortunately, life didn’t get the organization-equals-safety memo. Alphabetized books don’t fend off pain, and no amount of cupboard reorganizing will keep risk at bay. Safety isn’t guaranteed when it comes to living: efforts to guarantee it do little more than stop one from living fully.

Almost no one aspires to a small life, but it happens if you’re not careful.

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An eating disorder is a small life. The eating disorder promises safety via control, and a big, perfect, wonderful life in the future, but it’s a pathological liar: believe nothing your eating disorder tells you. It only wants you dead anyway.  

“Control” is one of the most important rules when it comes to eating disorders (beyond, “We don’t talk about Eating Disorder Club”). There are many ways to control, but all roads lead to rule formation, and rules are an eating disorder’s happy place.

You live with rules, judgment, and rigidity because of the promise of reward, and even when you start to believe that the reward is a lie, the idea of abandoning the rules generates panic. I couldn’t see my way to setting myself free, notwithstanding the fact that I’ve always secretly lusted after a more casual and bohemian existence.

People living with less rigidity seemed happy in a way that felt impossible for me.

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My desire to live a different life was never strong enough to challenge the eating disorder’s “truths.” I wanted freedom, but I was sure that it came with obesity. It’s hard to embrace freedom when the imagined consequences seem worse than death. It’s hard to live the life you want when you don’t trust yourself to make good (correct) choices absent a rigid structure.

I’m not sure what it is about bohemian that appealed to me, whether it was the perceived ease of lifestyle, the long hair with daisy chains, or the dresses that flow and dance around the ankles. It’s possible my perception has been coloured by advertising. I can be sold. They all seemed so happy and thin in the advertisements. For a very long time, both of those qualities held equal weight in my mind. And if I was required to give up one, the eating disorder would always sacrifice happy.

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I didn’t love dresses as a child, perhaps because the ones my mother chose didn’t for me didn’t appeal to my sense of taste – kids are picky – but I grew into an affection for them. They’re so easy. I especially like long and flowing dresses. With pockets.

I like to imagine myself spinning ‘round and ‘round in flowery meadows as my skirt twirls about with enthusiasm. I also like the silhouette-dusting nature of floaty dresses. We prefer clothing that hang loose and envelops, my eating disorder and I.

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I’m in recovery from my eating disorder, but an eating disorder is a multifaceted thing. For me, dealing with one thing at a time has proven to be the best approach. Getting used to no longer purging after a meal, and to eating enough to survive was the priority in the early days of recovery. I’m at a point now, however, where I’m ready to work on those secondary issues. Getting comfortable with clothing touching my flesh is something I’m working on. My brain is geared toward thinking that if the clothing doesn’t hang on my frame, I’m too large.

The fault is never in the clothing. It has taken a lot of work for me to sever my belief in the connection between clothing size and value. It’s not solely my fault – the weird vanity sizing engaged in my clothing producers encourage all of us to treat scraps of fabric as arbitrators of worth.

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I had more than a dozen maxi dresses hanging in the closet in my twenties and early thirties, and I’ve kept my hand in over the years despite the vagaries of style. I added a new one – spaghetti straps, pockets, clearance rack – just last summer. If I add a pair of combat-style boots a la Doc Martins, I’ll look as I did much of time at university. I wore that dress-boot combo a lot during my UBC days.

I like to think of the nineties as my gamine era. I was thin-ish, and I had dark, very short hair. I’d cut it myself in a post-purge, despair-induced head shave. Britney Spears did it publicly, I did it in the ensuite. Repairs were needed – despair snipping doesn’t produce the best result, but lemonade from lemons is deciding you’re channelling Audrey Hepburn a little bit.

Though the fierceness of Katherine (Hepburn) is more where my aspirations lie when it comes to personal spiciness.

Is “gritty, bohemian gamine” a thing? Can I roll with that now that I’m in my fifties?

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This is where menopause enters the chat. My eating disorder was concerned with how everyone thought and felt about me. My eating disorder was about making sure I and my life were perfect because anything else was a failure. Is it good timing that I entered recovery as my reproductive system was shutting down?

You lose more than monthly menses with menopause. Caring about other’s expectations drifts away as well. Perhaps worrying about other people’s opinions is burned away in hot flashes. But not caring about what other people think about you – not your business anyway – takes much of the heat away from eating disorder attacks.

Part of recovery for me has been getting my life back and learning to live authentically. Letting go of expectations – mine and other people’s – is a part of that. The menopausal brain isn’t much interested in other people’s expectations, and it has no interest in prevaricating. This is helping me stay the recovery course. Though one should never put off recovery because one hasn’t hit menopause. I missed a lot of life – recovering early is always the better choice.

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I used to worry about everything and everyone all the time. Nature and nurture, anxiety and eating disorder. My worry level’s not down to nothing, but every day I worry about this, that, and the other a little bit less. I’ve started to come to terms with how little control one has in the world, especially when it comes to other people.

I’m slowly evolving into the “no more fucks to give” kind of person that I always admired and sought to emulate.

Though I wouldn’t complain if my personal evolution picked up the pace (we’ll pretend that the pace isn’t up to me).

I’m ready to set fire to the idea of the “one true way” across all the metrics.

“Go your own way as long as you harm none” has a much nicer ring. ^[ii]

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^[i] I’ve recently adopted a dog. A new dog sends order and control for the hills as well. Even if there was no decompression and no getting to know each other and no creating a new workable schedule for both of us, there’d be dog hair. I forgot that about German Shepherds. When she’s better at separation, I’ll pop into the thrift store and acquire more vacuums. One for each room seems about right.

^[ii] I remembered while writing this that my mother also wore boho dresses and had a cropped haircut to go along with them. No boots, however.

She wore her version of the look in the early nineteen-seventies – my “memory” of that time is more about what I’ve seen of her in photos. But our style-twinning reminds me that nothing is ever really new. We’d even have been of an age, both in our early twenties.

I must look for those photos. I think the dress was yellow with a peasant-style skirt, and I have a vague recollection of embroidered edges. Give it ten years and it’ll likely be on-trend again.

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