Black, white, and grey.

I’ve had many a philosophical discussion about how much of life is about the moral greys. About how as children, we tend to think in binary terms about situation, in black-or-white ways, but as we evolve, we come to recognize that much of life is more nuanced than that.

I’m hard pressed to find an example of an absolute wrong without going to grotesque extremes. Even when it’s a behavioural example such as “eating other people is morally wrong,” one can identify situations where extenuating circumstances shift the act from black to grey.

Perhaps serial killers are the black.

I understand the ambiguities of life intellectually, at least insomuch as they apply to other people. When it comes to myself and my situations, I’ve been more wedded to the “either-or” style of thinking.

It’s good or it’s bad. It’s perfect or it’s worthless. It’s emaciated or obese. It’s Scottish or it’s crap. ¹

My binary brain.

I’ve struggled to find the grey when it comes to my own behaviours, and part of that is due to maladaptive, magical thinking where perfection will act as a guard against future bad things happening.

Grey is a lot of things, but perfect, it ain’t.

My brain and neuroses used the rules around perfection retrospectively, as well: that bad thing probably wouldn’t have happened if you’d been [insert modifying adjective here].

The adjective bar I’d failed to clear varied by situation, but I could usually count on “thinner” as being one of the unmet hurdles.

The binary bent of my nature is a function of depression, but it’s also a feature of eating disorders, and that commonality means they’ve always played well together. It’s good to have friends that reinforce the worst in one another.

(anxiety enters the chat)

One of the nice things about co-owning depression and an eating disorder is that I don’t have to pick a side in the nature or nurture argument when it comes to figuring out a a defining contributor – I can lay claim both.

Winning is a sliding scale.

It’s not the best idea to look at recovery through a binary lens. Recovery is a process, a gradual movement towards sustained change, and that often doesn’t work well when you look at it as a “yes-no” situation. There is not finish line to cross, no ribbon to tear.

That truth about the prolonged nature of recovery was something I struggled with in the early days following my last eating disorder hospitalization. In-patient treatment gets you started on the road to recovery, but you’re nowhere close to the finish line when you return to the world, and that just sucked.

You don’t come back “fixed,” you come back with a roadmap and an idea of a direction. People need to have a little bit of grace around that.

I am also people.

I tend to forget how much work recovery has been. I yada-yada the effort and agony. Looking back and rereading some of my earier writings, both from the thick of it and from the early days of post-Cedars when I started getting, for the first time in nearly four decades, better, is probably a good idea.

What I’ve accomplished is actually no small thing.

This is true of too many of us in our lives, I suspect. We don’t give ourselves sufficient props. We look at how far we want to go, and feel let down by the distance that remains, ignoring our progress, forgetting to look back and see how far we’ve come, and all that we’ve accomplished.

An unexpected benefit in recovery for me has been an increase in ethical cohesion between my personal values and some of my behaviours, a boon not to be overlooked. I did a great many things that conflicted with my personal beliefs and values while in the depths of my eating disorder, another stick it would beat me with notwithstanding that the eating disorder was the cause.

I can find the grey in some of my behaviours these days, and that’s an important evolution. Perfectionism is not only binary, it’s rigid, and lacks grace. It is also the road to relaps. I forget that at my peril.

You don’t want your recovery to be smug.

november 1, 2018: the only winning move is not to play

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1. One of a handful of Mike Meyers references I have in my stable. ↩︎