'Why' In Recovery
- Luka
- 2 hours ago
- 6 min read
For many, recovering from a chronic case of anorexia will be the hardest thing that they will ever do.
You have to know why you're doing the hardest thing for yourself; otherwise, you're setting yourself up for failure. I know this because when I've tried recovering without a solid 'why', I have, time and time again, failed. For me, right now, there are clear reasons as to why I am recovering, and this post is aimed at inspiring others with 'why' ideas so that they, too, have a chance of recovering, which is what I wish for my readers more than anything. Everybody deserves success in recovery.
My family is my first, my number one, and my easiest why. I'd give up anything for them, and that includes my eating disorder. It hasn't always, but it does now. I have learnt over the years in inpatient settings, that many eating disorder patients' families have not stuck by them, facing utter perplexion and loss, over the destruction that is this illness. So I know that considering my family have always stuck by me - holding my hand, visiting me in hospital, and watching me sip coke through straws so I didn't have to taste the rubber of nasogastric feeding tubes being shoved down my throat - that I am one of the lucky ones; the ones whose family come closer together in times of crisis and not the one who fall apart. Somehow, we have all pulled through, and love has outweighed the darkness in my mind and body. The concrete history behind me is my cushion when I begin to fall. If they ask me to have suplements, I have suplements, if they ask me to eat over my calorie limit, I eat over my calorie limit, if they ask me to stop working, I stop working, if they ask me to tell them my weight, I tell them my weight, if they ask me about my intake, I'm honest. And this relationship built on pure care, consideration and communication is one that's been years in the making, tested time and time again by my dishonesty, my fear and my defeatedness and nonetheless, made, has it become. I want to reiterate, the place we are all at now in our relationship with one another has truly taken years. The endless fights, tears, hopelessness and despair have paved the way for what we have now, and we absolutely would not be where we are now without all of the bad. I don't want to glamorise our family life because we have almost fallen apart on countless occasions.
But it is our tenacity to what we had before anorexia and our tenacity to what we have despite anorexia that has been our saviour.
Don't you remember what it felt like to be happy beyond the walls of anorexia's demise? Because I do, but only when I am, and once I start recovering. Throughout restriction, substitution and portion control, anorexia convinces me that joy is brought. But it's in a sick and manipulative way, one that if I'm honest with myself, removes me from feeling whole, complete, and the best, most capable and transparent version of myself.
But when I'm recovering, I feel alive, I feel free, and I feel safe.
It is through recovery that I begin to relearn the meaning of joy. It is a joy that isn't saved for just myself. It is a joy that hundreds of friends, families and followers feel, one they congratulate me over and one that lets them breathe a breath of fresh air. It is the same breath that everybody who knows a person with an eating disorder breathes. And isn't that worth more than the breath of one sick, bitter and twisted individual named anorexia who sustains that breath with every calorie counted, every meal skipped and every declination of being offered food; the sustenance of life?
When I go into treatment, I feel that I need to be at my worst. It is the only way I can accept treatment because, although I believe it's impossible for an anorexic to feel 'sick enough', it is the closest bargain I can make with myself - that I'd spent enough time restricting to be granted the grace of eating. But this means that if treatment falls regularly, in between those admissions are birthdays, Christmases, and anniversaries. So whilst I'm spending all that time trying to make myself sicker, I'm wasting away over holidays, missing out, not being fully present, and not participating. I realised that if I wanted recovery - being home - I needed to make a change. This change looked like not spending every waking hour of my year restricting, trying to be thinner, and forcing illness upon myself, and instead focusing on doing all of the right things that allow me to spend special occasions at home, in the loving arms of my family, not in the lonely four walls of a hospital bed. Because doesn't that sound like a life? Doesn't that sound like living? Doesn't that sound like love?
I've spent so much time away from the comfort of my own bed that I can sleep through the end of the world, anywhere, any time. Sometimes those close to me joke about how deeply I sleep, and to be honest, it kills me a little bit every time they laugh because the reasons behind it are troubling to me, they keep me up at night, and I'm sad they've happened to me. I've had to sleep in hospital beds for months with mattresses as thin as a book. I've done it with nurses I've never met before, watching over me at night instead of my mother, waking me up multiple times to take my blood pressure or blood sugar or make me take showers because feeds have leaked all over me through the night. I can't tell you how lost and alone I felt in those moments; moments where the only thing I wanted in the world was to have my mum and dad sleeping in the room next door to me and Archie, my puppy, in my arms, me listening to the perfect rhythm and noise of him snoring peacefully, fast asleep. I would do anything to escape those nights forever and chase an eternity in which I have the security, familiarity and comfort of my own bed, my own family, and my own home. And that avenue is more than possible with recovery.
My gorgeous girlfriend Darcy always reminds me that I deserve a life beyond the hospital. And for a long time, I felt that the hospital was the only place I was safe from anorexia, because I hadn't been strong enough to recover on my own accord. The hospital was the place I went because I had nothing left in me, my veins bled dry, my heart shattered, not broken, and my family crumbled like apple pie.
The hospital wasn't about what I did or didn't deserve; it was about not dying. So whilst I knew she was trying to tell me something big, I could never quite grasp the love I knew her words withheld. But I'm beginning to learn how good recovery feels when it's your choice, beyond those hospital walls, beyond the suffering felt, and tears shed of hundreds of other eating disorder patients who've been in those same rooms before you, just like you. It feels like a drug when you learn to say 'yes' because you want to or because finally, you can see that you're worth free will. So to Darcy, I don't just say thank you for holding that hope for me for all these years I've not believed I deserved more, known how to attain more, and not believed in myself more, but I say, Darcy, you deserve it too.
I've spent a lot of years falling in and out of love with my eating disorder, and in and out of love with recovery; conflicted all the fucking time. But I know now that the only way out of this sadness, this Winter, this heartbreak is to do what scares me more, all of the time, not just when I feel like it, but because I wasn't put on this earth to be the smallest, quietest, most 'perfect' version of myself.
Life isn't about perfection; it's about making mistakes, making up, and falling in love, falling out of.
Kisses,
COS
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