My eating disorder turned my life around; it changed me in every way. I feel like free. There's a certain freedom in knowing you could die after taking diet pill after diet pill until you're in the emergency room, dehydrated, with IVs hooked up to you and nurses running around as you sit there smiling - nibbling on a bag of pretzels that you'll throw up as soon as poison control let's you leave. You smile because you're getting exactly what you want. You get everyone around your hospital bedside crying over you. You're special. There's freedom in knowing you could die from organ failure and heart failure. It becomes exciting. Your life becomes unpredictable - which is a contradiction because you are a perfectionist; everything needs to be in order, on time. You think in all-or-nothing terms. You are either starving, organized and structured or you fall off binging, purging, snorting cocaine, running from guy to guy leaving their bed before they wake. You can't sustain perfection so you lose control. That to us is freedom - for a short time - until anxiety makes us go back. We are anxious people. That could be why we have an eating disorder; anxiety could drive us to starve our bodies. Anxiety could makes us ill.
We never fully recover. The anxiety never leaves. We take a bit of a burger on a bun, scoop up some mashed potatoes soaked in butter - take a bite. Chew. Swallow. That for us is success. We finish it all. We do not purge or exercise compulsively or take 30 laxatives and 10 diet pills. We however are not recovered. People look at us, they smile, we walk away - we cry. It's so hard to bring that burger to the mouth. It's harder to chew. It's even harder to shallow. For some it might be even harder to not purge. But we consumed the food and it stays down. We feel out of control, anxious, imperfect. We have lost. We cry ourselves to sleep holding on to the waist; a size 0, hoping our hips don't grow, hoping the ass doesn't expand and the stomach doesn't blow up like a balloon. Impossible is what rationality tells us; however the disorder, our mental illness that we do not recover fully from tells us we are worthless, we lose, we are imperfect. We believe it so we isolate ourselves. This is not recovery. There is no recovery.
We never fully recover. The anxiety never leaves. We take a bit of a burger on a bun, scoop up some mashed potatoes soaked in butter - take a bite. Chew. Swallow. That for us is success. We finish it all. We do not purge or exercise compulsively or take 30 laxatives and 10 diet pills. We however are not recovered. People look at us, they smile, we walk away - we cry. It's so hard to bring that burger to the mouth. It's harder to chew. It's even harder to shallow. For some it might be even harder to not purge. But we consumed the food and it stays down. We feel out of control, anxious, imperfect. We have lost. We cry ourselves to sleep holding on to the waist; a size 0, hoping our hips don't grow, hoping the ass doesn't expand and the stomach doesn't blow up like a balloon. Impossible is what rationality tells us; however the disorder, our mental illness that we do not recover fully from tells us we are worthless, we lose, we are imperfect. We believe it so we isolate ourselves. This is not recovery. There is no recovery.
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