The Most Challenging Choice

Recovery is the hardest thing I have ever done.  Sticking it out through all those unbearable moments, those moments when it would have been easier to surrender to the eating disorder, was the best and most challenging choice I have ever made.

Choice?  Yes, that's right.  Choice.

I chose recovery.

Don't get confused though--I never chose to have an eating disorder.  I never thought to myself, "I want to be skinny.  I'll just be anorexic."  I never thought that a diet would get deadly.  I never understood that at some point a deadly diet could become a disease.

Our society beholds thinness as a god.  We worship the thin and beautiful in movies, television, and magazines.  We seek to be like them, and though that goal is unattainable for the masses, the media sells this ideal as achievable through "willpower."  Yet, when taken too far, nothing but derision ensues when a person reaches beyond "perfection" and becomes anorexic.  Suddenly, that diet--which is really a biologically-based mental illness--becomes a choice.  The media attack switches from "put down that burger" to "give that girl a burger."  No, eating disorders are not choices.

To choose recovery is to be willing and open to change.  It means having blind faith in oneself and one's treatment team.  It involves tortuous physical pain and mental anguish.  It is climbing Mt. Everest with only a stick, hoping that stick won't snap. 

Choosing recovery means accepting that recovery isn't linear, that it won't go smoothly or seamlessly.  Setbacks and relapses are inevitable.  Ambivalence, inevitable. Feeling like giving up, sometimes giving up, but climbing back up--all inevitable.  

I didn't always want to recover, nor did I believe that I could recover.  I chose to face, and subsequently fight, the demons haunting me.  I chose to go to treatment, to do outpatient care, to attend groups, to journal, to practice yoga, and to risk trusting others. 

There are so few aspects of the eating disorder that I could control, but I could control me.  I could control my choices.  Because of that resolve, I am thriving.  I am living.  I am free.

No one chooses to have an eating disorder.  No one chooses to be ill.  But following doctors orders, doing what is hard, sticking it out through all the tough moments, those are choices.  Make them.  You are strong enough, trust me.

Cheers!