Relapse In a World That Doesn’t Care

For the past four years, it has been easy to segment my life into three, cleanly cut parts: before, during, and after my eating disorder. Unfortunately for me–who thought myself entirely separate from the girl who spent four years in the hospital relearning to feed herself–this was a lovely (and very convenient) lie. 

I’m realizing that there is no severing of the self–no forcing out of internal hurt. No, what happens inside our heads is much more stealthy. 

For me, it was a kind of hierarchical shuffling. See, during the past four years, other things were allowed to become important to me–school, writing, people I love. Because I’d grown more comfortable with food and existing inside a body, I believed myself to be through to the other side. 

I have, during the past four years in recovery, sat in wonder at how my brain functioned during my illness–how it, at the expense of all else, drove me to a singular goal. Be small. Don’t need. My disorder seemed to 23, 24, 25, and 26 year old me, illogical–a state of mind I had outgrown. 

Sitting here now, I realize that is a crock of absolute shit. See, just when you’re sure you’ve left a part of you behind, there she is. Waiting for you. Right where you left her. Hasn’t moved an inch. 

The part of me that seeks safety and sanctity in emptiness? Still there. I see her and I know her and I’m scared. 

Recovery comes with more of a choice than I’d previously believed though, which is cool. When we are faced with the self we thought we’d left behind–the self that drives us to reject our bodies at all cost–we get to make a choice with knowledge we didn’t have last time. 

Starve her out, or invite her in. 

The night Trump was elected, almost eight years ago, I felt something terrifyingly familiar–I had no control over an outcome that would change absolutely everything I knew. I felt this way when I found a lump on my body when I was 16, when my mom cried late into the night when I was 4, when I felt a sharp pain in my chest that I couldn’t explain. 

I developed strategies to deal with this feeling–this lack of control. At 8 years old I started quietly saying phrases over and over again–tapping places on the wall of my bedroom–washing and rewashing my hands. Every night before bed, I repeated words in my head until they burned through to my scalp, until I felt I had gained a kind of control. 

I did not know how to hold this fear inside my body. I couldn’t do anything to save myself or the people I loved from the chaos that I felt. I couldn’t stop it, couldn’t blow it out, couldn’t extinguish the fact that we were all vulnerable to pain and loss and fear.

I could not live knowing this, so I made up rules to make it go away.

I found out later this was OCD. I was not told this was normal–was not diagnosed–until I was 18 years old. Until then, I was alone with the white hot words inside my head. Alone with the belief that I had to control everything around me in order to survive. 

The night Trump was elected, I felt this same fear grab me by the throat, heard it tell me I’d better hold on to something because holy fuck this was going to be bad. 

The thing I held on to (and eventually discarded) was my body.

The upcoming election that the media is attempting to shove down our throats in place of what is actually important, has brought her back–has plopped her down right in front of me–that girl who seeks control above all else.  

I have no control over my government funding genocide. I have no control over whether or not we decide to let democracy fall while we do nothing. I have no control over my own fucking uterus in this state. I want to destroy myself because of it–want to control my body because it is all that I have without having to buy it. 

I won’t though–and here’s the knowledge I didn’t have before: I have even less control without a body. Insignificant and vulnerable and selfish as she may be, I need her to carry me forward. To do something–anything. 

I have to choose to give up control so that I have a body that carries my voice forward. 

I’m not going to lie to you it is so fucking hard.

Do it anyway.

I love you.