How Long Until I’m Recovered?

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.