Looking back on the years I lived with anorexia nervosa there are a few things which stand out as utterly ruling my existence. Today they are so far from my reality that I often forget it was any other way which makes it difficult to remember let alone to connect to all those things which were once so important. But if I had to give a broad descriptive term for what was permeating throughout them all, it was my inability to voice my needs.
I just Could. Not. Ask. For. Anything.
Partly because I truly had a hard time recognising I had needs, let alone what they were and partly because when I could identify I was unable to feel “worthy” of asking.
It was a pathetic and ridiculously exhausting existence and underlying all the confusion there is one simple thing I wish I’d been able to shout.
In fact, I wish I’d had it printed on a shirt or tattooed on my forehead because well, it may have just changed things years earlier. However, I know now that disconnect from my needs was the precise thing which was allowing for anorexia to persist in my life so if it had been that way and I had been able to express my needs, I wouldn’t have been sick in the first place…
I share the next 8 short and simple words for all those who are going through and yet to go through recovery because if you can apply them you will find these words perhaps more useful than anything else to ensuring your recovery becomes recovered.
And they are…
Yes, I Do Need to Eat “That” Much
Sounds simple right?
That’s because it is. There is no magic to achieving recovered. There is no hidden secret as to what someone in recovery from anorexia nervosa must do in order to recover.
Your cure, your loved one’s cure is 100% possible.
It is the doing part which is unclear and fragile and which quickly shifts “simple” to what can too often become years of lost opportunities, living a life that wasn’t yours, irreversible physical and psychological damage and death.
There were countless times in recovery where I smashed my way through weight gain in the hopes that weight gain would make it all go away.
When I really set my determination to it, I wanted to eat.
What very few people saw was my insatiable appetite.
What very few people saw was the vast amounts of food I ate to regain health.
What no one understood and what I only understand in retrospect was that it was all necessary.
A part of me knew it was necessary, but that part was not the biggest nor most influential part of me when faced with external judgement (more often than not very well-meaning external advice).
My mental desire to eat outweighed my physical capacity for food and that, caused emotional and physical pain and confusion beyond belief.
I now know that this makes perfect sense and I wish I’d not only been able to give myself full permission to eat to what my body was saying but also to make it known to other people that their comments were the opposite of helpful.
I can literally pinpoint a number of my “relapses” to comparing what I was eating to others or other people commenting on the large amounts of food I was eating.
It sounds silly to me now that other peoples opinions over the food I ate would have had such an impact upon me but I truly didn’t have the ability to make a distinction between opinion and reality at that time. This is not unique to me, it is a common experience of people living with anorexia and living in fear in general because the more uncertain we are the more we tend to look to the outside world for examples of what to do and when the examples we find don’t apply to us but we take them on anyway the results can be devastating.
With my whole heart I hope you find this information useful and inspiring.
Become Great. Live Great.
Bonnie.
1 thought on “What I Wish You’d Known: One Thing I Wish I’d Told You When I Was Sick, but Couldn’t”
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