A friend posted a meme on Facebook that caught my eye. It stated, “You can never truly feel at home in a body you view as temporary.” She prefaced the post with the following question: “What if the body you have today is the one you have to live with?”
An eating disorder is a destructive thing but also helpful in an odd, dysfunctional way. It acts as a kind of support structure. It’s scaffolding. It’s the glue that holds everything together when the emotions seem too difficult to manage. It locks up the pain, the misery, the anxiety, the inferiority complex, the self-hatred and all the neuroses and keeps them barricaded away so you don’t have to deal with bad feelings...
I’ve been gaining weight. I’ve mentioned it here before. I hate it. I’ve mentioned that too. I’m trying to learn to accept it. To be, at my counsellor’s behest, political about my body the way I am about other things. Social justice things. It’s time to start developing a sense of personal justice. It’s time to fight back against the nasty bits and pieces that drove me to develop a disorder that focuses on having the perfect body in order to feel acceptable...
Sometimes, I think if I take off the reins, the urge to eat will take over my world. I know where it comes from and what drives it, this feeling that I can’t ever consume enough. This feeling that if I start, I’ll never stop. It’s from the eating disorder, from a lifetime of restriction and deprivation. You can’t undo what’s been done. I can’t go back in time and eat the food now I didn’t eat then. But I worry that without the restrictions I still have in place, I’ll try...
Eating disorders disconnect you from your body, which is odd; ostensibly, that’s what they’re about. But they’re not about the body as a whole. They’re not about how it works. They’re not about functionality or strength. They’re about how the body looks and often, they’re about how it looks piecemeal...
Step one is sobriety. It doesn’t really matter what you’re recovering from. That’s the first step. Sober thoughts and sober acts. Walk the sober walk. Getting sober is hard. It doesn’t matter what your drug of choice is. Alcohol, pills, food, whatever. It’s hard to step away from the substance you abuse, even though, by the time you decide to do so, you’ve recognized that it’s harming you. Even though by the time you’re ready to step away, you’ve already moved to hell and have taken up residence there...
Things sink in at the damndest times. Thoughts I’ve had for years but haven’t felt in my bones percolate under the surface and then for no apparent reason, pop into my consciousness, but with depth and gut-deep understanding attached. They become more than words I say because I’m supposed to believe them even though large chunks of me don’t. I love “ah-ha” moments. That point in time when you finally get it...
