August 5. That date will resonate with me for years to come. Two years ago, on August 5, I graduated from treatment. It certainly was not my first treatment, but hopefully, it will be my last. These last two years have been an incredible struggle, but somehow, I have emerged onto the other side. I am living a recovered life, free from the bonds and shackles of anorexia and bulimia.
Let me back up a little and give a brief history. I am 36 years old. My earliest memory of feeling fat was in 2nd grade, when I couldn't squeeze my cute little tummy into a frilly pink dress I loved; however, a taller, thinner girl could. Strike One. Then, in 5th grade, I clearly remember looking down at my ten-year-thighs and realizing that they were "fat." Strike Two. At age 13, I got a horrible stomach bug that hung on for weeks. Strike Three. Mix in a mother who dieted incessantly and promoted beauty as one's sole worth, coupled with an image-obsessed society, and an eating disorder was born.
For over twenty years, I vacillated between various degrees of severely unhealthy to quasi-healthy. The longer the eating disorder held on, the more it became woven into the fabric of my identity. I didn't know who I was without it. I couldn't even recognize that I was ill. Eating disordered became my normal, my only normal.
How does one unstitch the threading when it has become so seamless and unseen?
Very delicately.
I cannot pinpoint the moment or day when the eating disorder no longer controlled my every breath, thought, and action because there is no one thing that made it possible. All I know is that recovery is the hardest thing I have ever done. In many ways it hurt more that eating disorder did, but recovery gives what the eating disorder never could: true freedom, genuine comfort, and limitless joy.
I made it to the other side, and it is my hope that anyone reading this also will emerge to a world teeming with possibility.
Cheers!
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