Day 5 – Capability of Recovery?

As the days pass I am beginning to show some progress. I’m trying to eat more of my meals and although this is a struggle, I’m working on just eating more than the day before. It seems that the only way I can do this right now is to shut down emotionally whilst I’m in the dining room and in a sense tune myself out so that I can run on autopilot. It’s almost working…but not quite. Afterwards, when I’m back in the privacy of my own room it hits and I sit there waiting for something terrible to happen. That’s the way it’s always felt when I have eaten though, as if I am waiting for the consequences to take place which confirms how wrong the whole process is. The thing is I couldn’t actually tell you what that whole consuming horrible thing would be. I don’t know. Everyday I am breaking rules set out by my Eating Disorder and there is this thought in my head that you can’t break the rules and not expect to get away lightly. There was a reason why they were created, even if I no longer know what that reason is.

I keep taking it all in, all these thoughts and feelings and I worry that one day I will buckle from underneath the weight of them and I will walk away from treatment and away from the chance of ever having a future. Daily I have doubts about my place here. I feel undeserving and a little like a fraud. It’s hard to accept that I need as much help as anyone else and figure that somehow I should be able to manage on my own. The sheer sense of my personal failure to cope is one that has knocked my pride right out and I guess I’m wanting to recapture it. I think that’s why I sit and cry in my room instead of going to look for a member of staff to talk it out. I feel myself getting weaker in that way and it creates this feeling of shame that I cannot shake. I’m a grown woman for goodness sake, why am I letting food reduce me to a child? Why can’t I tolerate myself?

There are times when there is nothing more than what I want is to disappear. Not die or start from scratch but to just no longer be present. I think what I want is to never have existed in the first place. How do I begin to explain that? I go through around 1000 different emotions in one day and at times, just when I think I can’t fall any further…I do. In those moments I don’t have any ideas on what is going to help and instead of acknowledging that when someone asks me if I’m ok, I’m smile politely and confirm that I am. It’s easier that way sometimes. It’s easier than trying to find the words for something you I don’t understand myself. Equally I worry that if I continue to hide in this way, or continue to spend all my time supporting another patient that is currently here rather than listening to what I need then recovery will always be out of reach. It will be the same as it was before. Plastered over but not healed or repaired. If that happens, the cycle never ends, does it?

I feel so lost and untethered.
Maybe the reality is that I will spend my entire living with the Eating Disorder in my head and I either live with it or die because of it. Recovery seems like an unfunny but funny dream that other people deserve to have and will have but for me…despite my words on how much I want it, I don’t know if I’m capable of achieving it.

I hope you are being good to yourselves.