This process sure isn't always as linear as I would like it to be.

*Breathe*

Patience.

Intention

I thought recently that perhaps it was important to make a post about my intent of this blog as I don’t think that has ever been clear.  Blogs of the journal variety could be seen as a bit narcissistic.  Please understand that I do not carry an inflated sense of self-importance.  I initially set out to create a public space where people could choose to follow my progress in my recovery from an eating disorder and nothing else.  Soon, I discovered that as my thinking really started to change, my life was becoming whole lot more pleasant and I realized that I had the ability to share the changes I was making in a bit more detail.  I am finding the words to explain myself – my past, my present, and what I can see as my future.  I also realized that a lot of the changes I was making were not specifically ED related but that they are related to a pattern of thinking that fuelled my ED that so many people struggle with without manifesting with anorexia or bulimia or compulsive overeating.  The examples I use to illustrate my thoughts are often ED related because that is the journey I am on, but I can also see how they expand to encompass so many aspects of life and issues related to control, negativity, and most importantly, the need for hope in every life.

Hope, that’s a big one.  For a number of months here, I was referred to as being an inspiration to some people.  That weighed heavily on my shoulders as I didn’t see myself progressing and changing for a long time and “what if” I wasn’t successful?  I still held onto the idea that my life was of little value and that I could never actually be inspiring.  I thought that I had abandoned the one way that I felt I could affect the world and that was through enabling people to learn from my death.  Then, when I really accepted that this was it, that I was going to make it and really be okay, I realised that yes, I have the ability to inspire people to keeping fighting.  Despite all odds, I wasn’t just going to be alive, I was going to live and love life.  I’m not saying I’ll be everyone’s inspiration and I don’t want to be.  However, I have a voice and I have the experience now to say loudly how important it is to never give up.  I’m getting better and I’m ready to talk about it.  So, for the ED population, there is always hope.  I’ve been that person who people were waiting to become a statistic of the mortality of eating disorders and lived to tell the tale.

So in that sense, I feel I have a bit of an obligation.  Some days, I don’t want to talk about my story.  I want to put anorexia/bulimia/self-harm behind me and move on to different things and just forget it but I can’t do that.  I know I can’t save the world, but if I can reach one lonely, scared, and quiet person out there who is privately googling “recovery from and eating disorder+is it possible” when maybe no one in their life knows they are suffering so much then it will be worth it.  If they can read what I write here and see themselves even for a moment and let it in and know that all things are possible and be given a bit more flame to the wellness fire, then I am so happy.

Lots of people will recover and live their lives and not share their stories.  I have been blessed with the gift of honesty ability to express myself in writing.  I have healed from the shame surrounding my past, I have walked through hell to get out of the hole I was in before I got here, and if I can be the mouthpiece for someone else, that’s great.  If a parent can find this and see their child in me and know that there is always hope to be had, then this has purpose.  If my family and friends can have a more intimate experience of my journey despite the physical difference between us, then that can be a purpose of this space too.

Sometimes I look back on my entries and notice what was important to me in that phase and think, “Oh boy, did I really put that out for the world to see?”  In speaking with my sister yesterday, I said how after each visit with family throughout the program I usually thought that it would have been better to wait a little longer before seeing them.  That I was still doing x, y, and z, and now that I’m not it could have been more enjoyable to be with them.  In both instances, I nearly immediately let go of any embarrassment or hint of regret I might have and understand how important it is to involve people in every step of this progress.  Many people watched me dying and I wasn’t quiet about that so why should I wait to tell people how I am getting better?

That’s another thing, the How of all of this.  I always wanted to get better but the big question was How.  I digress, for a lot of this, there is no How.  It just happens or you just Do but for some things, some very important things, I can explain How and that’s another thing I want to provide for people: the insight to how to get from dying from an eating disorder and drowning in negativity to coming out the other end.  Some aspects of this have been extremely phasic and that’s okay.  I did what I had to in those times.  There is no problem with being honest about that.  At times I was very convicted about certain things and when I did go through those phases, it said a lot about where my head/thinking was at.  Al I can do is explain the How that was real for me.

Many recovery stories sort of go from A-Z without any inbetween.  That was something I really struggled with.  The “I’m very sick and have to go to hospital” to “after xx months in hospital and xx pounds, I am better.  It took a lot of therapy and effort but I’m better”.  I usually thought, “Well, good for you! But that’s not happening for me.  I will die if I gain weight.  It’s impossible for me”.  Or the stories end with, “I still struggle today but things are a lot better and I will never go back but I’m always fighting” and that, as explained in my post about recovery, was not what I wanted.  Oh yay, I could gain weight and act normal and still struggle every day?  No thanks.  I wanted the nitty gritty of people’s experience.  What really worked for others?  I found it very difficult to find.  I spent long hours searching the internet for how people dealt with their bodies, clothes shopping, meal plan changes, etc. and couldn’t ever find much that didn’t always lend itself to ongoing struggling.  I wanted to know if other people felt that they couldn’t handle getting better and enduring the therapy that would be necessary.  I wanted to know what exactly changed in people’s minds to make them move from simply “wanting” to get better to actually getting there.  It’s not easy to find those details and when you’re walking through the abyss of self-destruction and looking for something to hold onto, one wishes there was more out there.  There’s certainly no guide book but I can do my best to illustrate what the process has been like for me.

On that note, I open myself up to questions.  I believe the comments section of this is no in English and I am happy to write my thoughts and experience on almost anything.  You don’t have to identify yourself, you can just ask.  I don’t believe for a moment that what works for me will work for everyone and I can only share my subjective experience of this journey (that is ongoing) but I know, as different as I feel at times, I’m not that different from everyone else.  No two stories will be the same but I believe there is a lot to be learned from each other.  Plus, there’s no right answer in this process or in life in general and sometimes it’s important to try out a few ways of thinking before you find one that works for you.  Here, I can explain what’s working for me and maybe someone else can try it for themselves and see if it helps.  I know that I am living a delightful life.  I love my life!  The grass is greener on the other side?  Pfft, the grass is pretty darn green on my side, actually!  And how does the rest of that go?  The other side must be fertilized with horse s**t?  Exactly.

So, I hope this gives you, the reader, a bit better idea of my intention here.  I said at the beginning of this process that if I actually got better, I was never going to stop talking about it and I’m sticking to that!

Happy Easter!

I'm back in the Algarve safe and sound.  The apartment I'm in is amazing and coming together nicely.  I moved my things out of the villa this afternoon with my sister's help.

I have a lot to say but no regular internet connection at this point.  I will post more as soon as I can.

<3

Recovery

I’ve recently come to a deeper understanding of what recovery means to me.  I have generally avoided that term because I felt stigmatized somewhat or at least labelled by it in a way I can’t really explain.  I’ve worked hard to put my own words to terms that have become so clinical to me over the years:  recovery, trigger, symptoms, quality of life, relapse, etc.  Now, I feel more confident in my definition of recovery and am more comfortable applying it to myself.

For the longest time, recovery to me meant quite simply being eating disorder symptom free and functioning in a “normal” capacity – whatever that is.  I thought that if I maintained a healthy weight, ate a varied diet, didn’t make myself sick, maintained relationships, held down a job, and didn’t cry myself to sleep every night…that was recovered.  I thought that life would always be sepia toned for me, so to speak, and never in HD.  For a while, I wanted that because that’s the best I thought I would ever have and I did want to get better.  Through my earlier attempts at treatment as an adult that’s what I strove for and felt supported to attain but it wasn’t enough to hold me for longer than a few months and eventually not longer than a few weeks.  In retrospect, I realize that that coping was all I had to look back on as a possibility for the future.  Hearing over and over that I could “get my life back” was so empty.  I didn’t want that life.  I wanted and needed something different.  I had “all that”.  I had had a great job that could have turned into a successful career; I had lots of friends; I travelled; I dated; I had a great apartment.  But tell me that when I recovered, I could have all that back?  No thanks.  I was burnt out from nursing; I was lonely; I was used and hurt by men; I was lonely All. The. Time.  But, I had my eating disorder.  When everything else in my life was painful and chaotic, I had that one steady.  Prior to my adult manifestation of my eating disorder in the severity that it became, I had other “quirks”.  Diagnostically: OCD, severe anxiety, and depression.  However one looks at it, the fact remains that I was not living.  I was coping for the most part but life isn’t about merely coping.  Somehow I’ve known that all along.

The thing is, in trying to convince a person with an eating disorder that life is worth it, one takes on the insurmountable in my opinion.  I didn’t believe anyone who told me life could be beautiful for me.  There was a constant double standard.  I couldn’t see myself being able to tolerate the day to day of life and being okay.  All I felt that I knew was darkness and difficulty and with absolutely no reference point, how could I even begin to believe what others said?  An important message I received early in the program I’m in, is not only is this life of wellness possible and attainable for me, they were going to show me it.  I understood from them from the start that they could not begin to describe the world I might experience as a well person so they had to get me there to see with my own eyes.  It’s kind of like trying to describe the mountains to a prairie girl who has never even seen a picture.  Or the sky to a child who’s never left a deep cave.

I find it interesting to think of how afraid of the word recovery I was and the concept I had of recovery.  In my mind, to recover was to fail at my eating disorder which had become my one successful thing.  Recovery wasn’t healing from what fed my behaviours and thoughts it was just applying yet another guise to cover what was happening inside.  I’d long given up on acting the part of a well-adjusted 20 something.  

Honestly, recovery is not about managing and coping.  It’s not about hiding feeling miserable behind a normal body weight and shape.  It’s not being “strong” enough to keep it together with all sorts of superficial tape and glue.  And what’s so difficult for me also, is that recovery is not measurable.

I often had scales for my progress (or perhaps a metaphorical ruler stick if we want to avoid the weight reference).  If I was doing x and not z than I wasn’t sick anymore.  Or if I had increased my calories to x/day then I was just about recovered.  If I managed x more weeks out of hospital than last time, then I must be recovering.  As I see it now, these measures often just reflected how in need of guidance I was because I was constantly coming up with new rules that might explain me to me and my teams one way or another.  The emotional nurturing and growth that needs to happen in order to feel safe enough to move away from these false structures is not at all measurable.

 So, what does recovery mean to me now?  My goodness…Most importantly it means life without fear.  I lived with a lot of fear that was moderately numbed by my symptom usage.  “Feel the fear and do it anyway” ruled my life from getting out of bed, to checking my email, to getting dressed, to measuring my daily milk allowance for my coffee.  I did all those things despite the anxiety and dread but there was an underlying fear to nearly everything.  I’m not scared anymore.

It means actually not needing the symptoms.  It’s not a constant fight mentally or emotionally.  It’s not always painful without an escape. 

It’s being safe with me; being comfortable with me; liking me – and thus never being lonely because I have Me! 

It’s finding and accepting comfort from others and from myself.  Being able to break down if I need to and feel overwhelmed, share that and get through it with the help of others and not feeling worthless and dependant for needing people and not being able to conquer everything on my own.

It’s making a life that is as often as possible full of what matters most to me and finding ways to work towards a career, living situation, and relationships that are reflective of my core values.

I also thought that recovery would mean someone taking away what I felt defined me.  It felt so real that by giving up the eating disorder, I would become an empty shell of a person and then what?  Another very meaningful but confusing in the beginning idea that was told to me was that my team “would bring me to myself”.  And it’s happening.  I’m not there yet.  I’m still discovering who I am more and more every day.  This person I’m meeting and getting to know that is me is certainly not “normal” (or even typical) like I had feared (fear of losing the feeling of being special to put it simply) but definitely not diagnosable by any means!  Regardless, I’m a growing and developing person.  With this understanding in mind, the whole concept of recovery seems to lose such significance and much of its definition.  Recovery is about coming into myself and that’s going to be a lifelong process.  I suppose that’s why people say that suffers of eating disorders are “in recovery” for life but to me that idea poses a risk of relapse.  That’s not my experience.  Once being fully brought into myself and knowing that I am okay and understanding me a little better “in recovery” boils down to just living like everyone else.  It puts my eating disorder as part of my past and something that I can draw on for insight but it is not the looming threat that I need to guard against at all time because with the real me around, I don’t need that definition at all.

I had to heighten my standard for recovery in order to want it.  I made it all or nothing:  no behaviours, no thoughts, no urges, no shame, no fear, no relapse…or no recovery.  I’m a bit of an extremist at times and in this case, if I couldn’t have it all, I didn’t want to live a half-assed life anymore.  I was either well or sick and either way, the world was going to know it.  I wanted to be able to live life, not manage or cope.  I have all the skills in the book for ‘coping’ with life but I wanted to really live in all aspects.  I still hold that standard for recovery because I finally know that it’s possible.

I'm off again!

Tomorrow I begin my journey back to Portugal.  I’ve wavered so much on how much I want to go back.  I’m feeling fairly neutral right now which is actually great.  I could go, or I could not and that says a lot about the success of this visit.  When I arrived, everyone, including myself, held their breath a little and held onto the hope that I would be okay.  We all had said positive things and anticipated a good result but there was underlying anxiety everywhere.  I felt strong enough to come for the most part.  If not strong, I was at least stubborn in a positive direction.  I was anxious about seeing so many people again and wondered how they would receive me and my new outlook and attitude.  I was, of course, nervous about what people would say about my body.  I had prepared for as many hurdles as I could think of but I knew all along that the most challenging difficulties would be in those situations that I hadn’t or couldn’t have predicted.  It almost felt like a public speaking event where I had my speech ready to go and felt confident with that but I had to moderate a question and answer period after.  I had a bit of the jitters as I approached the stage, my presentation went well and the rest I just had to take as it came.  Was I going to be ripped into for what I had presented?  Was I going to be faced with questions that I didn’t know the answer to even though I was familiar with my material?  How prepared can one be for that?  I had to constantly reassure myself that this wasn’t some researched topic, it was me!  I know me, finally, better than anyone else.  I am me through and through and nothing externally was going to shake that if I could help it.  I put my shoulders back and swept my hair out of my face as I faced my old world not because I knew that’s how a confident person presents and I wanted my body language to fool people but because that’s really how confident I felt.

Throughout my visit I found myself questioning myself a lot.  Before I left and for many many years, I’ve been very good at telling people what they wanted to hear.  I used to be such a smooth liar that sometimes I didn’t even recognize what was coming out of my mouth in response to people.  I used to believe in “faking it til you make it” and by doing that, I tried so hard to hide what was real – the effort it took not only to stay alive but to act like I was okay.  This time, when I heard myself responding spontaneously to people in a positive and assured fashion I sometimes had to smile a little and be very curious about my response.  Was it real?  Or was I doing “it” again and pretending that I was okay?  I can actually say that it was always real.  It always felt authentic.  That doesn’t mean that all my responses were positive but when they were, they were real.

It hasn’t been easy to be back and to be testing out this life without my walls up.  I’ve had a few difficult lessons interpersonally and on my own.  I’ve become aware of other people’s insecurities and how they affect me.  I’ve had to make some difficult decisions about whom and what I want in my life, as familiar and comfortable as they/it might be and as much as I really wanted things to be a certain way – I had to be objective and really ask myself what’s best for Julia.

I have been made very aware of how imperative interactions are for me at this stage in the process.  I crave good conversations, discussions, and to be challenged on different levels.  I’m learning how to seek those interactions out.

I am also noticing my need for balance which is not easy to attain!  I have a lot of physical energy that I need to expend and I feel good while putting my body to use.  However, I have a lot of mental energy and my brain needs exercise too.  In my first few weeks home, I pushed myself physically to soak up every waking moment I had but after a little while, I found my vocabulary slipping and my conversations becoming limited to my daily activities and that didn’t fit for me.  I realized I had to entertain my mind a bit more so I started doing random word and vocabulary games and reading-comprehension tests.  Those helped entertain me and refocus the more academic side of my mind but then there was emotional energy.  I found myself really looking for deeper interactions.  I am a passionate person, when I’m geared up about something I need to talk about it and get excited and feel my experience with people.  I’m tired of keeping my reins on, I am dynamic and animated, and that’s a new part of me for a lot of people and sometimes it seems to require a bit of adjustment.  I also crave input not because I need someone to tell me what to do but because, in many aspects of life that I’m currently considering, I want to make sure that I’m not missing an opportunity or direction that might work for me and deserves my consideration.  I want to say, “This is what I’m thinking, what do you think” (about many things, not just me) and listen to other people’s responses.  Some people are hesitant to share their opinions for fear that they might say something wrong or they feel that their input is not valid.  Other people are so forceful that their opinion is fact to them and anything that is different is absurd and/or wrong.  Some people really don’t have an opinion on some things.  In all these circumstances, I am exercising my every growing patience but continue to make an effort to engage with a variety of people in this way.

I set out to type, “Not every day is wonderful…” but that’s a lie.  Not every moment of everyday feels good, true.  But as a whole, yes, every day is wonderful.  There are moments where I notice familiar thoughts racing through my head and it I still need to make a very conscious effort to choose what I will give strength or even air-time to.  There are also some familiar patterns that pop up that are almost automatic.  They are often behaviours that are not what you might initially suspect or that appear overtly as specifically eating disordered, although those random urges do still rear their ugly head and pose momentary challenges for me.  An example of a behaviour that I might experience now is during a time of low mood or energy, I might find myself mindlessly walking towards a room with a mirror with the intent of studying my body.  This is something very familiar:  feel badly? à Make it about my body.  I have caught myself more than once on my way to a mirror and have been able to think to myself: I know that I am going to be hypercritical of what I see and that I may or may not be accurate in my perception of my physical self in this moment and that after I do inspect myself in the mirror, I am likely going to feel even more miserable and potentially bring my environment down with my mood.  What purpose does this serve?  And in that moment, I need to turn myself around and actively distract myself.  That doesn’t necessarily make the feelings that prompted this potential body examination go away but it helps prevent it from becoming needlessly worse.

There are many days, also, where I need to make a conscious effort to make life “worth it”.  Sometimes real life is boring, stressful, difficult, and painful and every day is an opportunity to see those unpleasant experiences for what they are.  Objectively as big or small as they really are and choose how much of an impact they are going to have on me.  I am open to feeling whatever my limbic system hits me with.  I’m not trying to shut down or avoid painful experiences by minimizing them.  If I lean towards sadness, I allow myself to feel sad but I have to look beyond that momentary feeling and keep my eyes on the “up” that will inevitably come next.  I will feel happy again despite the very real feeling of gloom or anger or grumpiness or doubt.  That’s just how feelings are.  Other times I might feel like what my life currently holds isn’t enough and if this is it, why not go back to being sick?  In those moments I have to pack myself up and do something that I wasn’t able to do when I was sick or try something new that might add to my life to make me feel like I have more purpose and more to look forward to.  I have to create not only the present, but the future moments that I want to have.  This is a wonderful balance that I am succeeding at: the real experience of being human (not super-human and not sub-human) and living a life with peaks and valleys and allowing myself both ends of the spectrum and everything in between.

It’s quite simple:  each experience is no more and no less than it is.  There are no feelings that do not pass – good or bad -and none don’t come again.  And there is no hurdle that I can’t overcome, learn from, and overcome with more grace the next time.

So, with that all out there, I pack my things and leave behind snow-capped mountains and evergreens for sunny beaches and palm trees.  This time, it is so temporary and I feel very blessed to have had such a successful trip and warm welcome back home.  And to have the opportunity to go back to my people in Portugal to talk about this experience with them and learn a bit more that will propel me further forward and ready me for my next venture back to my home.  I take such peace with me in my heart that everything really is going to be okay.  It’s not as noisy as confidence might be (and was when I first arrived).  It’s just a quiet knowledge; like a gentle, comforting hand on my shoulder; that I will make it and I’m going to live and that the worst of this is over forever.

Recognizing CNC and other ramblings

It’s pretty neat and scary all the same to recognize my old patterns of thinking in others.  I didn’t know how many kindred spirits I had when I lived in a world of preparing myself for the worst in every situation.  Sometimes it seems almost like a protective mechanism of self to diminish all that one does in an effort to mask feelings of unworthiness, unfulfilled potential, and ineffectiveness as well as protect from disappointment.  When we deny the importance of what we are doing in any given minute or walk in life, deny how much it might mean to us and make such efforts to mold ourselves to what we think other people’s expectations are, we deny ourselves so many exceptional experiences.

These exceptional experiences don’t always feel good!  They might be very painful moments of learning that are crucial in propelling us forward in whatever we do but they remain so necessary and it seems we continue to revisit a lesson until we have learned it.  In retrospect, one can look back and see the missed opportunities for that learning and often wish that we had been more aware and done it earlier.  Sometimes it takes many attempts to learn something and get it right for us and be able to apply it to our lives.  This shouldn’t be a source of frustration but rather recognition that what we tried the first xx times isn’t working for us.  Then, we have opportunity after opportunity to solidify our learning and it’s difficult but not impossible to be aware that sometimes we are doing all the “right” things and we’re just offered many chances to practice what we know.

I identify with the negative thinking pattern.  I basically know that one inside out and backwards.  I know how hard it is to change but I also know the absolute freedom I have now and the joy I experience regularly when I seek out the positive and really experience it!  There are still many disappointments in life and countless challenges that have, at other times, might have seemed insurmountable but here I am!  Life happens and there’s not a darn thing I can do to stop that so why fight it - and now, why would I want to fight it?  Why continue to make it miserable for myself?  Because I’m scared of getting hurt?  I’m scared of disappointing others who, based on their judgement of themselves, apply judgement to me? Why would I lend myself to internalizing that and creating a me that pleases as many people as possible?  I don’t anymore, no thank you!  I am no longer subject to the judgement of anyone else.  Making this change has not been an easy road but it’s been worth it to the enth degree.  I still worry about disappointing myself and not living up to the potential I know I have but not in the same crippling capacity that I did before.

I used to worry a lot about failing (let’s use academic learning as an example).  I did get to a point on my own where I didn’t care so much that I would fail by someone else’s standards, I desired so badly to not be susceptible to external pressure that I just denied it and buried any hint of that pressure I felt.  However, the judgement I had for myself was and remains much larger than any of that held by people on the outside.  I had impossible standards for myself.  I wanted to be perfect.  If I had the slightest notion that I couldn’t be perfect or at least in the top percentile for something, I would often not try at all.  Or, I wouldn’t put in an ounce of effort so that I could justify doing “poorly” by saying I didn’t really try.  I was constantly worried that I would give something my best effort and still not reach my goal or live up to my own standards.  I never felt good enough.  This is another pattern of negative thinking that I made a self-fulfilling prophecy.  I thought I couldn’t do something, I would put in minimal or no effort and thus didn’t do it very well and confirmed that I couldn’t do what I had set out to do in the first place.

Now, I have accepted not being perfect.  I have confirmed that I have many skills that are good and with practice and help get better but I am a master of very little and that's okay.  I live so much in the moment that the effort of achieving something holds its own rewards because it feels good to give something my all, to work hard, and “just” to try.  Oftentimes I am finding that the process can be more rewarding than the result itself regardless of how “successful” it is.  I’m not scared of new things anymore because I don’t feel the pressure to be perfect, I can try and I can learn and have fun while trying and learning!

This took practice.  It took becoming painfully aware of a comfortable way of thinking, believing blindly that life could be better if I thought differently and thus challenging it constantly.  It took the help of many many sets of external and objective eyes to help give me regular doses of reality when I got lost in my negativity.  It took me developing a level of trust that I don’t think I’d ever had in people or in myself.  I had to trust that I knew that these people were telling me the truth.  I had to be confident in my gut feeling that these people cared about me and only wanted to help me live a life that worked for me. 

There have been a few inevitable “burns” where I thought someone had good intentions and that wasn’t really the case.  The difference now is that those times don’t diminish the trust I have in myself or lead to believing less in the goodness of people that exists in the larger human population.

Now I’m practicing seeking out those helpful external objective eyes as adjuncts to those of my own that I have developed.  This isn’t my practice because I necessarily need it in a self-doubting way but because it feels good to be connected (a common topic of mine!) and to have people to check things out with.  To confirm what I already know.

The odd thing is that when one is caught in the negative thinking patterns, we seek to confirm it through circumstance and thus lend ourselves to compromise and self-trickery.  I always found that finding confirmation of my negative thoughts through people externally was nearly impossible.  This can be illustrated simply by a very underweight me asking if someone thought I looked “fat” – always hearing the honest answer of “no” but never internalizing it.  I would then seek out confirmation in other ways like through contorting my body in bizarre ways in front of the mirror that I would never present in public to “prove” that I looked fat or at least strange.  However, confirming the positive and true thoughts is actually quite easy.  A very simple example of this could be a day where I am feeling a little shaky with my body image but in an effort to deny the negative and refocus I might say, “It’s great to have the energy and strength to spend the day skiing” and I might hear a reply of something along the lines of “Yes, I had a good time too.  You have a natural ability and your stamina is great!”  Thus, what is really important is reinforced: pleasure in activity and the strength and ability of my body.  In the past I might have labelled this as compliment seeking but that is not my intention and because I am solid in that knowledge of my intent, I can receive positive feedback.  Also, because of the people I seek it from I can trust that what they say is sincere.

The attempt to make this change in thinking was kind of imposed on me as I set out on my journey towards recovery - it was part of the program - but it certainly wasn’t handed to me.  No one could change my thinking for me, I ultimately had to do the work and now I have to find ways to practice this and make it habit in my old environment.  I was helped by a specific group of people but I’m finding every day that those people that I needed were right here in front of me the whole time, they just might not have known the language that I needed to understand and really believe and move forward.  My point is that it’s possible anywhere if one choose to help themselves.  People are here, people care…as cliché as it is: what are friends for?  It’s too often through distressful times that we discover who the pillars in our lives are and who we have put effort into that resulted in fair-weather friends.  It’s another painful lesson that often comes in acute times of need but through each and every trial, we come out stronger and when we seek out help in those times, we rise together – connected.

Body Image

I’m told that when my view of my Self gets to where it has always been meant to be that my body image will improve.  I’m not so sure I buy that though.  You see, I like my Self.  I might even venture to say that I love myself but that doesn’t mean that I like the body that houses this Self. I know that I’m not obese but I also know that I'm not thin.  I’m trying to find a place in my mind where this middle ground is okay.  I haven’t weighed this much in many, many years and it can be pretty difficult to tolerate.  I’ve known somewhere in myself that I would have to achieve this level of weight restoration to feel my best and be my strongest and really let joy and happiness flow through me with no restrictions but knowing that hasn’t made getting to this point easy and it rarely eases the discomfort in the moment when I notice my foreign-to-me reflection. 

At this point, how I feel about my body is purely based on the physical.  I vividly remember the days where my reflection was that of how I felt inside and that is no longer the case.

Anyone who has been treated for an eating disorder could probably write a book of techniques that professionals feed us to try and improve our body image as we weight restore and give up behaviours that manipulate our natural bodies however…

The fact is, I’ve gained more weight than a normal woman would during a pregnancy in the last 9 months.  I would venture to say that this would be a difficult experience for any person regardless of how beneficial  - essential – to my wellness it has been.  Put this experience on someone coming from my old distorted, anorexic mindset and we enter a whole new level of challenges.  This has been physical development from child to adult at lightening speed.

I am trying to seek out answers for myself through other people’s experience which is not all that common for me but this is one department in which I’m finding it difficult to break my own trail.  I like answers, I like to do things right, and I generally like to do them as quickly as possible and get onto the next task.  I’ve grown in my patience as it pertains to my emotional growth.  I understand the need for practice as it pertains to the skills and knowledge that I am developing and I am trying to apply this patience to this concept of reconciliation with my body.

“There comes a time when the pain of staying a bud was worse than that it took to blossom” (wording changed slightly).  I hold onto this because I know it has to be true.  It hurts so much more to try and contain myself through manipulation of my body and efforts to shrink myself into oblivion then it does to tolerate a bad body image day in a body that enables me to live the life I want.  There is far greater joy in my day despite any thoughts, feelings, and distortions around my body that I can actually fully experience in this body than in one whittled down to skin and bones.

The thing is that now, any given day where I am crawling out my skin does not come with thoughts that make hurting myself to fit into a skin that I might feel temporarily more comfortable in acceptable.  Absolutely not!  Even when I look in the mirror and see a lumpy, large, and awkward reflection, a difficult-to-look-at person, a face that only a mother could love, etc. I do not think to starve, to purge, to do anything that would compromise me or my practice of solidifying the new habits that honour my being.  Perhaps the thoughts might flit though my mind out of habit, but I give them no room to stay.  They are merely automatic and habitual and more often than not at this time, they do not even arise. 

I do sometimes feel like I exist in a foreign body and to me, I am doing just that.  I hardly remember how to Be in a life vehicle this size and in fact, I have never done it with health.  I am relearning things as simple as putting on clothes “normally” and finding things that fit properly however differently than I’d grown accustomed to.  I have physical sensations that I can’t remember having before and I move differently in this body I’ve grown into.

It’s funny as I type that, I have a little whisper in my head rephrasing that sentence into “…this monster I’ve become”.  It’s a curious experience to view that thought so objectively.  To notice it, give a crooked smile as it comes into my consciousness, and realize that it is a lie.  It is something that I believed previously with great conviction.  I was a monster at any size and to consider that I would have become the physical self I have would have been the psychological death of me not so long ago.

So where to from here?  This is another aspect of attaining wellness that I don’t know how to navigate alone.  I can’t find the solution in my head.  I. Don’t. Know.  I don’t know what would or how to comfort myself in this department.  I want to know How?  How do I get there?  How do I accept this?  How do I love this for all that it is?  Right now, I’m choosing to abandon How and just Do.  Maybe there isn’t a right way, maybe it just happens like so much of the rest of this process.  Maybe I will discover a way as I keep moving forward.  Maybe one day it won’t matter at all beyond what this body can enable me to do and experience. 

I am almost constantly trying to internalize the positive feedback that I get that really matters:  “You shine from the inside”; “You are so you and not compromising on that”; “Your smile starts in your eyes”; the laughs I can share with people when my mind is active and quick witted; etc.  I’m finding that reaching out to the solid people in my life for reassurance and creating an army-like attack on my doubts and fears is effective in beating down the internal demon that tries to get me.  This eases the power of the negative thoughts that I have about my body but does not necessarily change what I see or the discomfort that I feel.  However, it is helpful to me to focus on what matters most to the core of Julia and the physical is very low on my importance scale.

I know that denying any negative thought directed at my body the power to ruin my day is essential.  Keeping my life as full as possible in all departments that are only available to me as a whole person is also essential.  Because of this, most days, body image seems inconsequential but there are days where I find it very difficult to exist in this body and it feels bizarre and so not mine – but if the answer is starving myself into oblivion to feel comfortable in my skin and thus losing everything else I’ve worked towards, I would take a life sentence of poor body image!