I have been experiencing a bit of a shift in my thinking recently.
It started after listening to some of the podcasts by Tabitha Farrar and after I began therapy sessions with a different therapist.
I will be honest, I have been in quasi recovery for a long time. I have been eating more but maintaining a lot of rules and restriction. I don’t think I’ve been trying to recover as hard as I could have been.
I have just come out of a tough relapse so maybe I’m being too harsh on myself but even so.
Anyway, recently I have decided that I do want to recover, I want to be fully free from anorexia. I don’t want to live with rules about food in the background of my life forever.
I am putting more effort into eating proper meals and having regular snacks. I have started to plan what snacks I will have each day to avoid the panic of knowing I need to eat but having no idea what to have. This is also helpful for making a shopping list that I can stick to.
At first, eating more was very challenging, especially because I felt so full all day and it was almost as though I could feel myself turning into a balloon. After two week of trying to be better at eating, the bloating and constant fullness is beginning to be less uncomfortable but I am still not getting hunger cues and my body seems very confused.
I have begun to challenge some of my fears and rules too. I baked two batches of cookies the other weekend and I have been gradually working my way through them. White chocolate and cranberry cookies are amazing! I also ate an extra snack one day because I was getting hungry, I’d already had my morning snack and lunch was too far away to wait without my brain going crazy.
The voices in my head still go wild and try to bully me. I still end up crying over food and having mental battles about eating, shopping and cooking. However, I am trying to go against the voices more regularly. I don’t want to be controlled by anorexia. This last relapse has proved to me that, whatever anorexia tries to convince me, she does not offer a better life than freedom.
It is exhausting to keep fighting. There are many times when I tempted to stop trying. Yet, I have come this far, I have been through so many uncomfortable feelings and circumstances, and if I turn back now I’ll probably just to have to go through all these things again when I try for recovery another time. And I don’t want that. I’ve had enough.
I know that there are many more food rules and fears that need to be challenged and that this will take a long time. It will probably take months to overcome my fear of pasta and to feel comfortable with going to a café and having hot chocolate.
Furthermore, I want to be able to have no foods labelled as safe in comparison to others. At one point I would only eat rich tea biscuits but then I managed to challenge myself and found that I like fox’s golden crunch biscuits. I thought I was being adventurous, and I was, but now these have become safe too and I am scared to try other biscuits. I need to keep trying new things and branching out, not letting the new things I try to become safe and still having rules and restriction present.
As I am eating more and trying to take back control of my eating I am finding that the urges to self-harm are getting stronger. My mood seems to go up and down a lot more than it used to within each day and week but I am finding that I feel happy more than I used to. And being happy seems like less of a thing to be guilty about which is awesome.
I am putting more effort into finding ways to distract myself and stay occupied when I get strong urges to self-harm. Sometimes that is just lying on the floor with a blanket and not moving anywhere because I am scared I will hurt myself in some way. Sometimes that is playing with my fidget spinner or tangle to keep my hands busy. Sometimes that is scrolling mindlessly through Instagram or Facebook because it distracts me but doesn’t take much effort. My self-care box is really useful too, despite sometimes forgetting that I have it for this purpose.
I feel that I am more motivated to recover. I feel that I am more determined to recover. I feel that I have a good idea of what I need to do to recover. I just need to put in the hard work so that I can get there.
As long as I don’t overthink things. As long as I don’t think too much about all the changes i need to make and barriers I need to overcome. As long as I don’t think too much about all the things I’ve lost or damaged. As long as I focus on the positives and believe I can do it, it’ll be fine.
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