the-recovery-diaries - Tumblr blog

[the-recovery-diaries]

“I felt like crying but nothing came out. It was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. But I think I have known it pretty often, too often.”

— Charles Bukowski

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Hanif Abdurraqib, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

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For some of us, tumblr is this book we’ve been writing in for many many years. No one from our personal lives has read it, most of them don't even know it exists, but it's a journal full of everything we would want to share but keep quietly to ourselves and our mutuals.

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Devon, England (by Taylor Cowling)

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26th February 2024

There are these teen runners achieving unbelievable things: breaking records, attaining Olympic qualifiers, beating world champions.

When I look at these teens, I recognise the strength and fullness in their bodies. Their photos are splashed over social media and I wonder, "Do they look at their bodies and will themselves smaller?"

Don't get me wrong, I do not think that they are too big. They look fit, healthy and strong. Yet I know that 17 year old me would scrutinise every minuscule details of those photos and say over and over, "Not good enough".

Since puberty, I cannot remember a time in my life that I have felt comfortable in my own skin. Even when achieving success, I would still be hyper critical of how my body appeared to others as though that was the most important part of my existence.

Of course, I have had a mental illness since then. That is apparent to me now. So I wonder how freeing it would be to not have those thoughts, that snarling voice that chatters in your ear excessively. I wish I knew what it would be like to be that successful in sport and not fuel for appearance, rather fuel your body for the benefit of your performance. Maybe my life would have looked differently if I didn't feel so conflicted about my weight and shape.

[the-recovery-diaries]

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Abiah Root written c. May 1852

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So much time has gone by, I didn’t know how much I would change

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@e-pisky poems made me feel less alone in the depths of my relapse. She is so incredibly talented and I feel like a complete fan girl.

“For too long now I’ve been chanting my myself that food is medicine and squeezing the tears back behind my eyes where they belong I’ve watched myself expand and flinched and the softness of my body but I have eaten and gained and made the “perfect recovery” and I just want someone to tell me when this will change Yes I may eat chocolate pizzas and laugh and smile my jeans may stay up without a belt now but that doesn’t take away the aversion I have to mirrors and the war that commences with every bite I wasn’t born to be a skeleton and maybe I feel too big because not so long ago I was too small but I am tired of fighting and hating and calculating the numbers in my head never turn off and I am trying to lay down my weapons and be at peace but please just tell me it gets easier I know this relapse doesn’t erase my past but let me tell you, this is like learning to live all over again I am once again reduced to someone who does not trust herself and doesn’t know how to exist in her fullness All I want is to be able to sleep without counting and counting and counting and flinching each time my thighs rub together I want to go to bed and dream of stars and boys and dancing nights rather than hospitalisations and bingeing and flashing scales I do not want to plan to relapse from my recovery of a relapse once again but I also do not want to spend this life justifying every bite and crying when my clothes tell me different things from last time I wore them I will work, I will eat but please just tell me that this horrible middle land passes.”

— Food is medicine.   (via the-recovery-diaries)

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Somehow I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.

Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

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Rebecca Arendse