swimmingtorecovery

[swimmingtorecovery]

The C Word

Three months since I left treatment and yet it feels much longer. It was such a drastic change and maybe part of me is surprised that it felt so jarring. I tried my best to prepare for the transition, but what I have found is that I can never prepare fully for a transition in life. It will always hit suddenly and without warning even though I know it’s happening. Change is hard and change in recovery is especially hard. I left Tempe the first time with nothing. The few things I did have, I gave up to commit to treatment. When I came back I knew that I would have to essentially start from scratch and maybe part of me thought it would be easy. I would just start doing everything that I ever wanted to do right away. Finally, I would have the perfect life that I could be proud of. Deep down I knew that wouldn’t be the case exactly, but I’m a dreamer and I can’t help dreaming big.

This week especially, but maybe the last month or so reality has set in. I’ve had more free time and I haven’t liked it. It feels uncomfortable and unfamiliar, it feels like how my life used to be when I didn’t have much of a life. It’s so easy for me to follow into this pattern where I think that the past will repeat itself and so I settle in, doing the things that I would have done before treatment. It’s been a miserable experience, full of tears, lots of phone calls between friends and more than once I have thrown around stuff in my room out of frustration.

I think that’s what happens when you expect perfection right out of treatment, or maybe in recovery in general. When things don’t go perfect, you don’t know how to handle it. I was perfectly fine when I was busy and things seemed to be happening, but the moment things slowed down I didn’t know how to deal with it.

I think the universe threw me this curveball for a reason. There is an important lesson in all of this. Life is never going to be perfect and neither is recovery. And three months isn’t a long time. Rebuilding a life is going to take time and I hate when things take time. I’ve been trying to force life to speed up to feel more comfortable, but it won’t do that for me. Life moves at its own pace. Throw in other people into the mix and it gets even more complicated. However, if I think back at the changes that I made while in treatment, I realize none of them were instant and all of them were painful. No matter how much I tried to rush through it, I just couldn’t. To build a life worth living I must do it slowly. If I want something to last I have to take my time, let it grow. I have a lot of things I want in my life and I have taken steps to get there, but it’ll take time for those things to come to fruition.

Patience have never been my strong suit, but trying to rush through things will only make it all fall apart. That’s just what my eating disorder wants so that I can run back into its arms. I have worked too hard to let my eating disorder win this time and I refuse to throw it all away to be comfortable. None of this is easy and a lot of it will hurt. I might have to put myself into situations that won’t work out to learn valuable lessons. Things will take longer than I am comfortable with and I will stumble and fall sometimes. At the end of the day I know it will all be worth it. The people I’m meeting, the things I’m setting up for myself will all be worth it. I’m becoming the person I always wanted to be without an eating disorder dragging me down and for that I am grateful.

[swimmingtorecovery]

Choices

I can’t believe it’s already August, the end of August at that.  I can’t believe that I am still in treatment. As soon as I got to PHP I told my friends that I was planning on being there for a few months. I was just going to learn the skills that I needed to live a normal life and then I would go. That was it, simple as that. That’s what I truly believed at the time and now four months later I realize that supremely important work has happened here and that not a moment of it has been a waste. I have learned so much in my time here, more than I could have imagined. I thought that I would learn to properly portion and how to do the meal plan on my own. It turns out that was the least important information that I have come across in my time here. It isn’t that meal plans and portioning aren’t important for my recovery, but without the other stuff I just don’t think I would be able to keep to it. What’s more important is I learned that I won’t be able to do this meal plan perfectly. I will slip up from time to time and it will get messy. I found myself eating ice cream quite a bit without enjoying it and you know I was following my meal plan with it so it’s okay, right? No, because another thing that I learned is that it is all about my intention and my intention was because I was feeling sad and it felt comforting somehow. It became a habit of mine. Variety was starting to take the backburner because it felt good to have the same stuff, but did it? That’s another thing I learned that when I start to do those things I am reinforcing my eating disorder. I gave it a chance to get its foot in the door and it hurt. It really hurt. It told me that I should feel guilty and I listened to it. I didn’t want to say the amount of times I had dessert because my eating disorder told me that I should feel shame about it. And so I did feel shame. I have been truly miserable listening to my eating disorder. Thinking of ways that I could “get back on track”, which was code for eat in a way that would make me feel less shame and guilt. I have been beating myself up, telling myself that maybe I can’t do this recovery thing. Telling myself that the answers lie in cutting things out of my diet. At the same time my recovery voice told me that was bullshit and I knew it. I didn’t know what to do, not at the time. The answer however, it was there all along. It has never been about cutting things out of my diet, nor is it about what the scale says. The answer has always been moderation, which funnily enough is something that I have been shouting about for months now, but at this moment it feels different, it feels right. There is no reason to be guilty when my diet is balanced. However, my eating disorder wants me to eat in an unbalanced way and too feel that guilt because it distracts me from the things underneath that hurt. See, my eating disorder doesn’t have a lot of confidence in me and for good reason. It began because my emotions were too much for me to handle and I needed it to survive. It doesn’t understand that I no longer need it to survive. In a way, my eating disorder was my strength that got twisted somehow and it started to hurt me. It will continue to protect me if I let it, but it will also hurt me. That’s another thing I learned in PHP and I wouldn’t have been able to learn that without all this happening. I can see very clearly now that life is going to hurt either way. My eyes have been open and I can’t deny that engaging in eating disorder behaviors is painful and sometimes life is painful as well. It hurts to remember all the pain in my past and to move through it. I have a choice and in both cases that choice will result in some sort of pain. While that may sound terrible, I’m grateful that I know another truth. I know that if I allow myself to move towards the pain in my past and away from my eating disorder that for the time being it will hurt, it will hurt a lot. I also know that by moving toward that pain I am giving myself a brighter future. The pain doesn’t last when I move towards it, but it does last if I allow my eating disorder to win. I know that by making the choice to turn my back on my eating disorder right now will result in a domino effect of wonderful things to come. I know because I have been in that wonderful place before and I will fight tooth and nail to get there once more. I will get to a place where I accept my body 100% because I know I deserve it. I will hold my head up in confidence because I know that I have the strength to endure anything that is thrown at me. I will walk through life with a smile on my lips knowing that I am doing my very best and that will be enough. I will be enough. I won’t have to change anything because I will accept every part of me the good parts and the parts that I deem not as good. My eating disorder will keep trying to trip me up and sometimes I will fall prey to it without realizing it right away and that will be okay because I know that I can always get back on track. That every single moment is a chance to do something different. This has been a wonderful learning opportunity for me and by realizing that my eating disorder was trying to deceive me in this way I’m making it harder for it to deceive me next time. Tonight, I am deciding to make the choice that I know will lead me to the life that I want, the life that I deserve. Tonight I am deciding to make the choice that also includes pain and that’s okay as well because I know that pain isn’t something that I have to live in. Each and every moment is a chance to distance myself further from this fucking eating disorder. And I’m so proud of myself for making the right choice at this moment.

[swimmingtorecovery]

How much did Florence Nightingale weigh when she founded modern nursing? How much did Rosa Parks weigh when she took her seat on that Alabama bus? How much did Malala Yousafzai weigh when she started writing about the lives of girls in Pakistan under Taliban rule? You don’t know? That’s the right answer! Because it doesn’t matter.”

Martha Beck (via embracingwild)

[swimmingtorecovery]

[swimmingtorecovery]

Apply for that job. Date that person. Buy that plane ticket. Move to that city. Do all the things that scare you, because they’re worth it.

(via emilylouiseb)

[swimmingtorecovery]

[swimmingtorecovery]

[swimmingtorecovery]

Feel free to message me

[swimmingtorecovery]

Take pictures of yourself everyday, when your hair’s a mess and you are too. Find things to like about them. Write songs about yourself like you’d write about the love of your life. Look at yourself in the mirror. You are a brain and a heart and a smile, but you’re so much more than that. You’re a soul and work of art. You’re something nobody’s seen yet. So show them.

/Oliver (via the-blank-verses)

[swimmingtorecovery]

[swimmingtorecovery]

[swimmingtorecovery]

Food is More Then Fuel

What a black and white, boring way of looking at food. By saying that food is simply fuel I am denying myself and that’s not what recovery is about. Recovery is about seeing that food isn’t the enemy as well as acknowledging that it is more than just the gas that keeps us going. I feared acknowledging how important food is because I thought that it would drag me further down the rabbit hole of obsession, but the truth is that it was born from a denial of something that makes me human. There is no escaping food, it is everywhere and for good reason. Not only does it keep us alive, but it connects us all because food is universal. When words fail food can be used to communicate. A homemade meal give to children by their Mother can say, “I care about you.” A dessert can be baked by a friend after a fight to say, “I’m sorry.” And a perfect stranger can give a homeless person a sandwich to say “You are not alone.” Food engages all your senses. We can hear the sizzling of a pan, smell the delicious aromas wafting in the air, see a beautifully presented meal, feel the textures on your tongue and taste the individual flavors coming together to make a wonderful meal. As human beings we have the advantage of being biologically able to enjoy a wide variety of foods, more than any other species on Earth and it would be a waste to not take advantage of that. Some experiment with different flavors, colors and textures to create something new that they will then share with people. I will probably never meet the people whose recipes I use, but by simply preparing and consuming their creations I have made a connection between us. As well as with all who have consumed it before me and all who will after me. Food isn’t just about fuel, it’s about something that binds us together in this world, it’s art, and it’s communication.

 I will not deny myself anymore.