What I've Learnt In Recovery

So far, what I've learnt is that you learn something new every day and you have to be open to what it's trying to teach you.

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My fear of being called 'healthy' was overwhelming. It prevented me from starting recovery.

I thought 'healthy' was a bad word that symbolised that I'd failed at being anorexic.

But once I started becoming healthier, on my own terms, not being forced, so did my brain. Slowly, I stopped being so scared of being healthy. Slowly, I realised that when people used that word, it didn't come from a bad place, a place to call out failure, but rather from a place of relief, love, and admiration. I learned that it was a good word. People used that word for the right reasons. It stopped mattering that anorexia perceived it as a bad word because now, in recovery, I realise that I don’t have to give one single fuck about what anorexia convinces me is important and true.

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Sometimes, people just don't understand, and that's okay. They haven't seen the immense mental struggle you've been going through for years, they haven't seen you crying over food, and they haven't seen you face death. And when they don't understand, it doesn't mean they don't care; it just means that they haven't been through what you've been through. I've learnt that this makes it easier to detach from comments and understand that malice was not intended. The people who don’t understand allow space for being a part of your next chapter, the chapter of your recovery. Sometimes having people around who don't understand your past can allow you to grow in different and new ways.

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People fuck up all. the. time. And a part of recovery is dealing with and coping with that truth. The right people will try to say the right things, and when the right people say the wrong things, you have to focus on intention over delivery. It's important in recovery to know who the right people are; the ones you can count on to have your best interest at heart and to mean well. It is in this space that you can learn to have trust in intention.

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Your worst day in recovery will always be better than your best day in addiction.

I’ve spent 14 years living with anorexia yelling at me, screaming at me, and troubling me. SO I know about the good days, but boy, do I know about the bad. I know that sometimes the rain has to pour before it can shine. And mostly, I know that life doesn’t come easily to everyone; some people, like me, find comfort in the notion of not existing anymore, suffering with the daily pain, fear, and self-hatred. I remember my best days in the eating disorder. Even if I saw gold and silver lining the clouds, I could sense the rain forming. Everything that felt good was tainted. Things felt good on a surface level, and that was it. During my best days of addiction, I’d still never menstruated due to years of starvation, my bone density was off the charts, I was dizzy when I simply existed, I was broken from crippling depression, I was terrified of food, of eating, of relinquishing control, and I still felt so alone. Nothing was good enough to make me forget that type of pain, not even on the good days. On the contrary, the days that felt hard in recovery are only hard on a surface level. Cemented in the roots are family, friends, life, experiences, and connection. Nothing is that bad anymore, not in the agonising, painstaking ways they were before. And when my brain tries to fool me about that, I think of all of the friends I lost, the trust I broke, and the fear I instilled.

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In my lifetime, I’ve been petrified of recovery. I’ve been so afraid of giving up my coping mechanism, my sense of worth and my ideal of beauty. Those things still scare me. But every day, I do my best to take it one day at a time, and even one moment at a time when I have to, to decide what is most important to me. And now, life is the answer to that question when, once upon a time, it was anorexia.

Kisses,

COS x