What Life In Color Looks Like

by Lindsey 0 Comments

At treatment, we are given “Agendas” which is really just a fancy word for therapy homework. This particular one I’m choosing to share is “What Does Recovery Look Like?” Real talk- I hate writing about this topic, because it brings up a lot of fear and hopelessness for me. I fear that true, lasting recovery will always evade me. I feel hopelessness looking so far ahead at a future I am not sure I believe in. Despite this, I can tell my thinking has shifted…did you notice the “I am not sure” in there? It used to be absent. I did not believe in recovery for myself. The way I see it, the eating disorder is an exhausting cycle that goes round and round- I can’t get off of it because it won’t stop. In the last few weeks, I have seen that this cycle can be paused. When it is paused, I can have a moment to breathe. When the cycle is paused, that opens up the possibility of me being able to step outside of it. And just maybe, that means the cycle can be stopped and I can begin to walk away from it.

Just like there is no part of my life the eating disorder hasn’t touched, there will be no part of my life recovery doesn’t touch. I call this “life in color”. When I say that, it means I won’t be drifting through my life as a shell of the person I could be. It means life for me becomes a lived experience, where I feel like an active participant, not just someone going through the motions to stay alive. There will be much more space in my mind because it is not occupied with eating disorder thoughts, anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation.

Recovery, or life in color, means having a healthy relationship with exercise, especially yoga, which I spend several hours a week teaching. I will have space to create more with yoga, and brainpower to continue learning about what yoga is both on and off the mat. I will truly be living what I learn and teach.

I imagine a greater deal of financial freedom, when I don’t spend an painful amount of my personal income on outpatient treatment. I won’t be as stressed about money or feel as guilty about spending it, even on necessities. Recovery will allow me to have more time doing things I’ve discovered I love, and less time in appointments. I’ll be able to do EMDR and trauma therapy and not slip into my eating disorder. I would use my healthy coping skills successfully. Recovery means the hard work I am doing now paid off later.

I imagine life in color involves speaking my truth and living my truths without fear my story will hurt others by the way they choose to feel about it. It also looks like me not feeling like I have to protect my family from the real me.

I imagine recovery no longer means nights where I lay in bed at night begging God to let me die, because the suffering I am experiencing is so intense. Life in color allows me to watch my goddaughter grow up and be a guide for her, and a continued friend to her family. I imagine a life with my husband where he doesn’t have to worry so much about his wife, or see her sit on the floor crying, hopeless that recovery is attainable. Life in color means being able process trauma that keeps my relationship with Drew stunted at times, and trusting my body is a safe place to exist in.

I imagine life in color will allow me to have adventures with my family and friends, while being fully present. Traveling will be part of my life again. Traveling without the underlying anxiety the eating disorder brings will allow me to be present. I won’t be worrying about exercise or compensation for eating, and I’ll enjoy what different cultures and locations have to offer. Recovery looks like living as if I believe my body is a sacred, temporary vessel that allows me to engage in life. I won’t have to be constantly at war with my body.

Even though this exercise feel to me like being told to write about my dream job or what it would be like to win the lottery, I’m also discovering it can be broken down into smaller, more attainable pieces.
What does recovery look like when I am done with this residential level of care?
What does it look like as I transition to day program treatment?
What does life in color look like when I get home?
What can I start doing to create it? What does a life in color look like in 6 months? A year?
And so on.

I do know this: recovery means creating a life worth living. Life in color is living that life I have created.

Average

by Lindsey 0 Comments

I remember when the family therapist at the first treatment center I went to told me the average amount of times someone with an eating disorder goes to treatment. I don’t remember what that number was, but I know it wasn’t one or two or probably even three. I remember my family telling me that I wasn’t average. The real or imagined expectation was created that this time- my first time in treatment- would certainly be my last.

But the thing is, I am average.

Really, we all are. We are just average humans, trying to figure out this thing called life.
There are certain qualities and traits that make each of us exceptional, but certainly not the exception to the rule that life will continue to happen.

I’m in treatment again.

I swore I wouldn’t ever seek a higher level of care other than outpatient after my last treatment center experience. It was traumatic and unhelpful, and the little bit of foundation I was able to build there quickly crumbled after marital problems popped up. You see, being married to someone with mental illness is not for the faint of heart or lacking in courage. All it took was a few weeks of miscommunication, that turned into no communication, that turned into two people trying to take care of each other without actually asking the other what they needed. Thankfully, we dug ourselves through and out of that hole, but we couldn’t leave the eating disorder behind. Mental illness is never a choice.

I put bandaids on my wounds after that round of treatment: the crippling anxiety, the deep depression, the PTSD. The thing about bandaids though, is they don’t stick very long and they most certainly aren’t a long term solution. Even when you desperately want them to be, as you press your hands against the bleeding that seeps out from underneath, trying to make it stop. Eventually, it gets out of control.

I pretended to be ok when I was not because I did not believe I would ever be ok.

I still am not sure I will, honestly.

I am more hopeless than hopeful, and fearful that this life with anorexia and all that comes with it- is all there is for me. I would say I want my life back, but the truth is, I don’t remember a life without an eating disorder. I remember fake hope and telling everyone I am fine and convincing myself that I am. And until I was sitting on the floor of my therapist’s office crying and saying over and over again through my tears “I’m not OK,” I did not truly realize the bandaids weren’t sticking. I realized I had to do things differently and I needed more help to do that. So I am getting it.

I’m in treatment again. It’s the fifth time. I hope to God it’s the last, because I am not sure I can reconcile that this is the cycle of my life. I probably sound like a broken mess right now, but I want to make this clear: it is OK not to be OK. And it is OK to be average. What is not OK is giving up, and that’s why I am here in treatment. Because being alive in my life as it was twelve days ago was straight up suffering. The weight loss? The physical symptoms? Those were side effects of the constant suffering with suicidal ideation, unrelenting depression and anxiety. Our outsides don’t always match our inside, but I’m learning to accept that we absolutely have to acknowledge what’s inside. Secrets- they will keep me sick- and I want a life. I want more than life, I want a life in color.

Eating Disorder and Recovery Story

by Lindsey 0 Comments

A while back, I shared my story on Instagram in a seven part series during NEDA Week. This post is a collection of those captions.

I’ve struggled from disordered eating since I was a teenager. I remember worrying about body image and food at age eleven. However, I played competitive sports growing up and was also a college athlete, so for the first several years of my eating disorder, the excessive exercise I did was considered “normal” and even “dedication.” I ate as little as I could while still maintaining my status as a star athlete. Starving myself completely would have affected my performance greatly, and it would have devastated me to lose my starting position on any team. I spent most of my teenage years at a perfectly normal, healthy weight, even though I was suffering mentally and emotionally. I began to struggle with anxiety and insomnia, further exacerbated by the restriction and exercise compulsion. I stopped enjoying things “normal” teenagers did because I was fixated on food and exercise, but hid it behind my outgoing, tough demeanor. Before entering college on an academic and athletic scholarship, I vowed to myself I wouldn’t gain the dreaded, “Freshman Fifteen”. 

I didn’t just avoid the “Freshmen Fifteen” in college- my eating disorder and compulsive overexercise spiraled out of control. Anxiety and stress from nursing school and playing college soccer dragged me deeper down. If I thought we didn’t “work hard enough” at a practice, I would go running afterwards. Sometimes I ran 2-3 times a day, or for 1-2 hours at a time. I lived on Diet Mt. Dew and cereal, and my idea of a meal was fat free ranch and cucumbers. I was plagued by constant respiratory illnesses, asthma, and extreme exhaustion. Still, I managed to receive my nursing license at the age of twenty, lead my soccer team in minutes played, and run cross country on a scholarship my senior year. My weight? All over the place, from what I remember. But that number was irrelevant to me.

I graduated in 2008 and moved to Nashville, TN to start my career as a nurse at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital. By that time, me eating disorder was so engrained in me that I didn’t really understand I had a problem. Working nightshift and maintaining the restriction and exercise patterns led me to constantly be sick- doctors even testing me for immune dysfunction because of the frequency and severity of infections. Not once was I asked about exercise or eating habits. I was more bothered by my anxiety. I ended up reaching out to someone- I’ll call her C- at my church who helped me find a therapist. We met for coffee one afternoon, and she asked me various questions, one being “Do you have an eating disorder?” I paused, and said no. After some thought, she gave me someone’s information to contact. As we got up to leave, C said “You know what, wait a minute. The Lord is telling me that you need to see someone else. Let me give you her information.” I didn’t know it then, but in that very moment, God had started writing my redemption story. A story that is messy, ugly, and far from over. I truly believe if it were not for divine intervention that day, I would not be here. 

I am endlessly grateful for the time I spent with my first therapist after that meeting. It was in her office the first mention of an eating disorder was brought up, due to my therapists’ own experiences, but I pushed the hints aside. It wasn’t until I hit a new low- an absolute rock bottom- that I realized how very little regard for my own life I had. I owe so much gratitude to my friend Tara for sticking by my side during my absolute lowest. The ways in which she loved me, cared for me, and fought for me are living proof of God knowing exactly what we need when we need it. Because of Tara’s friendship and my therapist teaching me that I had a voice, I went for an assessment at The Renfrew Center, which was located where I lived. I was clueless. I was lost. I was sick, but in denial because I “looked fine.” It didn’t matter that I was ruled by anxiety, food rules, and exercise schedules. It didn’t matter that I hated every ounce of myself and couldn’t remember the last time I ate a full meal, or ate without compensating. When Renfrew immediately recommended hospitalization or residential treatment, I blew them off. I had just accepted a travel nursing position in North Carolina, and didn’t have time for that. At the urging of my therapist and Renfrew staff, I found an outpatient treatment team in North Carolina before moving there. “No big deal,” I thought. “A few months of that, and I’ll be fine.” I didn’t know I was about to begin a journey that would shatter everything I knew. A journey that would break me, again and again. A journey that would give me a second chance at life.

In North Carolina I began to work on recovery and had a very huge reality check. I struggled to function working full time and maintaining my health. Only my friend Tara knew I was getting help- I felt so very alone and scared. My outpatient treatment team urged me to go to residential treatment, but I had no insurance, no medical leave as a travel nurse, and no support. I began researching scholarships for treatment and met an angel of a human named Lynn, who had a foundation known as Melissa’s Voice. Lynn has lost her sister Melissa to suicide after a long battle with an eating disorder, and was interested in helping me. With her support, I told my family about my eating disorder and started to let friends in. Lynn graciously gave me a scholarship and connected me with a friend she had who ran a treatment center a few hours away. I took a chunk out of my savings, and with help of my parents, entered residential treatment in 2012. By this time, I had been enslaved to my eating disorder for nearly fourteen years.

In those weeks at the treatment center, I realized this: eating disorders take everything. Mine had taken my teenage years, my voice, my identity. It had taken my life while still leaving my body physically here on this earth. Life with an eating disorder isn’t living, it’s existing. I know that to be true with every cell of my body because I spent so much time drifting through life. It breaks my heart. I regret it. I have little to no memory of what others thought were the best times of my life. I was there, but it was just a shell of myself. I had myself fooled, and everyone else.  I am forever grateful for the amazing souls I met in that big blue house where I found my heart and learned how to fight for my life. I am forever grateful to the people that helped me get there. But, I was still ignorant to the recovery process. As much as I hoped eight weeks of intense treatment would be enough to “cure” me, it was not.

A report in 2017 analyzing the results of 27 studies regarding relapse rates of anorexia sufferers, showed that over 25% relapsed within six months of completing treatment…that percentage increases after one year to 50% or higher. Six years ago when I discharged from residential treatment, I can honestly say that I never believed I would join those statistics. A few months after completing treatment, I moved back to Nashville, and found myself in full blown relapse, and the most physically ill I had ever been. I found myself back in treatment for several months, discharged, and pushed onward. However, I am fighting against something so strong and so dark, and my journey continues to be rocky. I spent 18 weeks in treatment starting last June. I spent most of 2018 wishing my life would end as I dealt with a degree of depression and anxiety I didn’t know was possible. After two treatment centers, an amazing psychiatrist, and life-saver of a therapist who refused to give up on me, I am slowly getting back on my feet and moving forward.

I still struggle. Daily. But I am still here fighting, which is an accomplishment in itself because I did not see a future for myself even 6 months ago.

I have anorexia, I have anxiety, I have PTSD, and I have depression…but these things do not have me. I am not a diagnosis, I am not a failure, I am not too much. This illness that tries everyday to tell me otherwise and convince me my life is not worth living, is wrong.

2,190 Days

by Lindsey 0 Comments

I don’t write when I’m sick. On Instagram I do; little snapshots into my life; but I do not write here. This blog was started simply as a space to share my words with the universe- wether that happens to be one person (hi mom) or a hundred. This space has been silent lately. It became blank when I became silent because I had slipped once again into the turmoil of my eating disorder and everything that goes along with it. Six years fighting this. Seventy two months. 2,190 days. I remember being told the average time it takes someone to recover is six to seven years. 2,190 plus days later, I am here…fighting my way through the blank, silent space and trying to reclaim my life.

Exactly one month and one day ago today, I discharged from treatment. I discharged myself, making one of the most difficult decisions of my life as I walked out of the treatment center that day. After fourteen weeks of tears, angry outbursts, and confusion, I saw little progress. Honestly, I still don’t know how much I see. In some ways I am worse off than I was before. In the same number of ways, I am wiser, and learning my journey looks different than I pictured.

I haven’t written because when I am sick, I am ashamed. Ashamed of looking just fine on the outside, but being a mess on the inside. Ashamed for needing treatment again, and feeling like I came out no better than when I started. When I am stuck in shame, I don’t write. I don’t eat. I can’t rationalize. I can’t see the severity of my depression and destructiveness. I can’t escape the paralyzing anxiety that often cripples me from doing little but exercising or sleeping.

One evening at treatment, I refused dessert. A staff member put me in someone’s office with worksheets and a pen, and left. I was told that by not eating, I was choosing not to participate in group, and could process on my own. She was down the hall but I was alone, in a room, and in my mind, this was my punishment. I filled out one of the sheets and turned over the paper and started writing.
“The things no one will say to me.
Angry.
Broken.
Chronic.
Defiant.
Disconnected.
Failure.
Not enough.
Non compliant.
Self-sabatoging
Treatment resistant.
Too much.
Too late.
Unwilling.
Underserving.
Waste of resources.”
As I wrote, the tears came. The silent kind, where you don’t even blink or scrunch your face but they keep on falling and falling and you don’t know where they keep coming from. The kind of tears where there aren’t even any sobs, just all that damn water pouring out of your eyes like its never going to stop because it comes from a place so full of hopelessness and defeat that maybe it can’t be dry.

I left that night and began to plan how to end my own life. I’m a nurse. I don’t have to google how to, don’t have to wonder what will work, etc- I know. I always have, its medical knowledge and basic common sense. But this was the first time I thought out when and how. Something in me made me pick up the phone and call my best friend. I was crying so hard that I don’t think she understood much of whatever I was trying to say, but she left where she was and came to meet me at her house immediately. I am here today because I have an amazing support system and a God who says my story is not finished yet. I did not want to make that call to my friend, and still think maybe it wasn’t my own power that made my hands do it.

You see, that’s the thing about the last 2,190 days…nearly every one of them have been spent in a fight I am not winning. It adds up. To being hopeless. It adds up to me concluding that I would very much rather die than continue to live like this. Something I do not talk about outside the four walls of my therapist’s office is how chronically suicidal I have been. I went to treatment this time in hopes of it helping with that. Treatment did not “make me” want to end my life that night- the thoughts were already there and have been for a while. They were exacerbated by the feelings of worthlessness of my impression of being given up on. It made those words I wrote on the back of the worksheet very real to me. My work is believing they are not, and believing I am not too much.

It has only been recently that I have begun to come to terms with accepting my humanness. Which means I may live with having an eating disorder, anxiety, depression, and PTSD for the rest of my life. But, that doesn’t mean that those things have ME. I am a fighter and I am hella resilient. In all of my weakness, I also have a God who is my strength. I know I am loved, beyond my ability to comprehend, by both God and the beautiful people He has placed in my life.

I’ll put these thoughts out there on to my blog and into space, and half of me will likely regret it. No one wants to talk about suicide. No one wants to yell to the world how much they are struggling. No one even understands mental illness. That includes me. And yet, I do. I talk about it. I do it for the one person who might need to read this. I do it for my family and friends, who I often can’t tell in conversations how much has been going on. I talk about it because this part of my life keeps me coming back to my yoga mat, and my yoga practice has healed parts of me I thought were unreachable. I do it to glorify God for continuing to bring me through the darkness- even when I don’t want Him to. Even when I beg Him to stop; when I’m angry at Him and think He made me wrong. I speak my truth for myself, because I am healing from the outside in, and I continue to learn that silence only breeds shame. Shame breeds sickness, and that is not how I want to spend my life. I will heal.

How Long Until I’m Recovered?

by Lindsey 0 Comments

October 15, 2012. My first week in residential treatment. I am scared, I am anxious, I cannot fathom that I am here in in this place.

November 5, 2013. “Dear Body, Why do you let me down? I can’t trust you.”

February 14, 2014. Four moths ago, my life was slipping away. I am stronger now, the second time around.

September 1, 2015. “Things are better. They really are. Recovery is worth it. Recovery is possible.”

April 11, 2016. The last time I journaled. DAMN. Sorry therapist. “In the big picture, my life is amazing and my problems are small. I am tired. I am so tired. I want an easy button. I’m human. I want myself to be fixed, but what if this person I am is all I will ever have?”

July 29, 2017. I stopped working so hard to destroy my body, because I didn’t love it more when it was smaller.

May 25, 2018. I need more help. Have for a while now. Since November, and I’m finally willing now. I eat enough to get by, I feel my clothes get smaller but my mind tells me otherwise. I feel like shit on my yoga mat more times than not, and I am usually too tired to practice. If I don’t practice, I can’t eat, and something I love is turning into the awful cycle of compensation now. Yoga saved my life but I don’t really want to be alive right now. I realize now my eating disorder will never not be a part of my life, and I mourn that. I realize that I struggle with something that will mean I forever have to be careful and aware that each big decision I make in life is truly what is best for my health. I learn once again I cannot run from myself by burying myself in a job, by throwing myself into new things, by denying that anorexia has crept into both the smallest and biggest parts of my life and I am starting to lose myself again.

June 3, 2018. A week from tomorrow I’ll walk through the doors of The Renfrew Center once again. I was for damn sure that I would never have to do this again, but I am also for damn sure that I will not continue to live this way.