Disclaimer: Please do not take any of this personally. What I say here applies only to me and I can only speak for myself. The things I state are not generalizations of people with eating disorders, mental illnesses, or anything of the sort. It is what is happening with me - no more. (And no, nobody got offended by this, I’m just thinking ahead.)
I have been doing really well lately.
I know for some readers, that may be a shock. When I tell people this in person, they usually make a somewhat confused face and ask, “Really?” Yeah. “You’re not just saying that?” Nope.
I have gone nine whole days symptom-free. And I have been leaning on the Lord more than I ever have before in my life. And He’s been so merciful and patient and real.
Today, in the last class period of the day (we had a half day), I experienced a sudden dire urge to get home right now and binge (and purge, of course, but that is never thought of until the aftermath). My anxiety went through the roof and I was tapping and bouncing my foot like a crazy person. I’m sure it looked odd. But I didn’t care. Throughout the entire bus ride home, I was thinking about this binge, what I was going to eat and how horrible and weak it was going to make me but, OH CRAP, we don’t have any GOOD food, but oh yeah we have peanut butter. That’s all I really need. Oh, and sushi, jelly, bread, cereal, yogurt, granola, nutella, hummus and pita and cheese and fruit and oatmeal. Yeah, that’s all I really need - not really a binge, or anything. It’s HEALTHY food, come ON. Oh wait. That’s a LOT.
And then I thought to myself, why am I doing this?
Recovery, I mean - not the binge part. I knew why I wanted to do that. Why, after just three and a half years of being a bulimic am I not just apathetically allowing it to fester inside of me for the next 10, 20, 30 years? Why am I choosing to make such a political statement by pulling my head out of the toilet, learning to love the thump of my steps, the implication of weight and presence and taking of space, learning to understand myself as more than a brain attached to a bundle of bones? (Ideas and phrases from this sentence taken from Abra Fortune Chernik and Marya Hornbacher.) Why this, why now? Why me, surely I don’t deserve this? Why am I giving into this need of being healthy, nurturing my body? That simply does not make any sense, not any at all.
I’ve been doing this all rather mindlessly, well no I’m trying to not use symptoms, why? Because that’s bad for your body, it harms your body. So? I’ve been doing this simply because I feel as though I have no choice - after two consecutive hospitalizations within the span of three weeks, my parents must have been pretty frustrated, and it would be incredibly bratty, selfish, and stubborn of me to just continue on killing myself as if nothing ever happened. So I got over myself and decided to actually try to get better.
It would be really easy for me right now to just sit back, say, “Nah, recovery’s not really for me,” and lifelessly watch myself royally screw up my life. It would be really easy for me to just fall back on the eating disorder and hide in my little bubble of opposites - thin is fat but fat’s not thin, good is bad and bad is good, up is down and down is up. It would be really easy for me to keep silent, sluggish, and self-suppressing and to not pursue anything fun or good. Depression is a passive act, the easy way out that I very often would much rather take. But I won’t.
So why am I doing this?
I am doing this because I want to graduate high school on a good note. I am doing this because I want to be a nurse, and that’s kinda hard to do when you’ve got issues of your own. I am doing this because I want to write a book about my life and God, and I want it to have a happy ending. I am doing this because an eating disorder is really quite inconvenient - it gets tedious after a while figuring out 3+ times a day what I am going to eat and where I am going to throw it up. I am doing this because my big sister Gabrielle, who is a professional photographer, is dying to do a photo shoot with me, but wants to wait until I am, in her words, “graduated” aka recovered. I am doing this because I won’t be allowed to go on the missions trip to the Dominican Republic I am planning to go on this summer if I am sick. I am doing this because I want to eat the dinner and cake at my wedding and still feel like I am at my wedding and not prison. I am doing this because constantly feeling like I swallowed two tennis balls that are sitting side by side in my throat is pretty uncomfortable. I am doing this because I want my body to be able to withstand the demands of pregnancy and life in general. I am doing this because I realized it’s rather pathetic to have only one purpose, that being getting rid of my food and getting sicker. I am doing this because 15 years from now when my husband offers to take me to dinner and a movie, I want to gladly accept, not having the slightest worry about getting home to purge. I am doing this because 30 years from now when my kids ask me, “Mom, what was college like?” I refuse to tell them, “Well, it was great - every day I would starve myself all day and then when I got back to my dorm I’d just eat everything in sight and make myself throw up! But that’s really all I can remember…”. I am doing this because bulimia, actually, rather than recovery, simply does not make any sense at all. I am doing this because I hate Satan with a burning passion (pun intended) and I desperately want to show him just how very much my God is more powerful than him and just how very true it is that he will NEVER defeat me. I am doing this because sickness is boring, and health is interesting. I am doing this because I strive to love as Jesus loved, and each morning when I wake up and ask myself if an eating disorder is loving, I decide it is not. I am doing this because the Lord is just too plain amazing for me to not have my eyes fixed completely on Him.
So I did not binge today.
And I won’t. I will sit here and I will not get up until it is time for me to go to the rink. Because I have a rational fear that if I do get up, my legs will somehow take me to the kitchen and then to the refrigerator, my eyes, hands, and mouth consecutively to all the binge foods, my fingers down my throat, my vomit down the toilet. And that is just not going to happen today. I’ve got better things to do.
“Love to me is when you put down that one more thing and say, ‘I’ve got something better to do.’ Love to me is when you walk out on that one more thing and say, ‘Nothing will come between me and You - not even one thing.” ~Sara Groves
