Relapse is not an option

Today is a national Portugese holiday...I think it's for religious reasons.  This is also the day I was supposed to get married on in...hmm...2009 I think?  On eof the staff here is getting married today...it's all her's!!!  ;)

I was thinking recently about recovery and relapse.  I often think that it won't make a difference how long I stay, that I'm just not going to get better.  I will always hold on to some aspects of my eating disorder and when I start thinking like that I go in the direction of 'well, I may as well give up now if I'm never going to get better'.  Then my mind goes to how much that would hurt my friends and family and by being sick, I would be causing them so much pain to watch me slowly die and that gives me more fuel to keep moving forward and also makes relapse a non-option.  I could not live with myself if I continued to hurt those people closest to me.  There is just too much guilt around it so that makes me believe that I can endure the pain of recovery and maintaining wellness after I am back in the real world.  Living through my own pain and challenges is not pleasant but it is so much more tolerable than hurting those around me.

Anorexia/bulimia were often ways of me showing the world that I knew I was a bad person and wasn't letting myself off the hook.  I would justify how much it hurt others by telling myself that it was the only way I could protect people from the badness that is me and that people on the outside just couldn't understand that it was not a loss for me to be withering away, it was in their best interest from inside of me.  That extends right to the concept of death either from my ED or from a swifter action of my own...that the difficulty experience of loss as anyone has when someone passes would be so temporary that it would be better for everyone around me.  I KNOW that the pain of losing a loved on eases...even when you don't want it to and one almost wants to hold onto that pain and grief.  But we heal inspite of ourselves and gradually or quickly the sharpness of the pain becomes less and less.  Eventually we forget anniversaries of deaths and realize only after...we can still miss the person but we carry on with our lives because that is our role as the living.  That still makes sense in my head but the difference now is that I don't feel like I have been given the responsibility to dictate my life and death so by allowing whatever to control my fate I am passively choosing to live.  Therefore, I have a great responsibility to use my life to the best of my ability.

1+1+1=3

If I am to use my life to the best of my ability, I need to be well.  To be well, I need to let go of the notino of holding onto any portion of my eating disorder.  And at the end of the day, with that equation, everyone is happy.

I have let go of the idea that there is a ball of 'badness' churning inside of me.  I am not a perfect person and I never will be but that does not indicate that I am rotten and worthless as my negative mind concluded before.

With that all out there, I continue to step forward, however tenuously, live through the pain and reach towards total wellness because relapse is not an option.