Recovery - An old journal entry.
This may sound like just another idealistic, cringing type of post about the journey through recovery from an eating disorder; nonetheless it’s one I very much find worth sharing. It is not some empathetic, or fatal way of accepting one’s faith by thinking that everything happens for a reason, or by trying to see the positive in all the shitty and mind-blowingly hard parts of recovery. No. Beautiful things do happen when you recover from an eating disorder, beyond doubt, and that I must acknowledge.
Do I wish I never contracted this mental disorder? 100%! Do I more often than not cry every time I think about my life before the onset, of course I do. Nothing about recovery is nice, nothing about it is worth getting sick for in the first place; I truly mean this. Any day I would choose life without anorexia. That being said, this new stage of recovery -the one where you progressively realize how far you have come, specifically the amount of internal growth that took place on the heels of all the battles- that stage is almost worth the suffering.
The difficulty of the physical and mental torments drove me to see life through a whole different lens. In a very spiritual, rather than masochistic way, I started to appreciate the journey, for seeing progress always brought bliss.
Recovery invited me to ask myself how on earth did I end up in this place, which made me reconsider my past, only to realize that I don’t have the smallest clue about “who I am”. As I progressively overcame the battles, I saw myself as a person a little bit more, and then a little bit more, and a little bit more.
As I regain physical strength, I finally see the future as this great unknown, and because I am much better equipped in knowing what my values are, the idea of being able to start shaping my life in the direction I want it to go, feels very empowering.
There is contradiction in the way that I feel every day, because while the pain I endure makes me wish this never happened, the internal transformation I sense and the compassion I found for myself can, at times, override this feeling.
The moment I stopped longing for the old days to come back or waiting in inertia for a new reality to hit me is when I started developing a vague idea about which direction I’d like my life to take.
My mental and physical debility to instantly shape it full force carried great frustration. Even so, I accepted the hardship of recovery every day, and then every other day, and every third day... I accepted my progress in the present, until the present became what I envisioned my life to be.
The best advice I can give anyone in their journey is to accept their true human nature, the one of being. That, my lovelies, is who I am.