These days I have been thinking a lot about recovery, as I receive comments and emails from readers of this blog, encouraging me in my unabashed rediscovery of good food.When I sat down to write my personal bio on this blog, I struggled with setting a date to my recovery. It was important for me to indicate to you, my readers, that I was writing from a place beyond the disorder, I wanted to offer some of what I have learned in the process to other women who are going through what I went through four or five years ago. I felt that there are simply not enough models for life after recovery, and I wanted to be one.
So that was the confident side of me, the one who thought she knew everything about recovery and how to pass it on.
It surprised me a bit to realize, over the course of the months that I have been writing, that my recovery is not a staged event, but an ongoing revelation. Since I began to write and participate in the ED blog community, I have changed. The ways that I look at food have changed. I am eating wheat again. I have fewer digestive problems. I am weighing myself less. I am less anxious about getting "enough" exercise. I look at women who are heavier than I am and don't feel sorry for them; and when I look at women who are thinner, that doesn't seem so appealing anymore, either. I am learning to rest with myself.
Perhaps writing is healing, in this case: through writing, I bring the past closer and find some way to integrate these disparate parts, these disparate countries, all of this whole and this emptiness that contain me. I am learning to be humble in this renaissance, to accept that this is not the end of the path, after all.
And if this is not the end, then it bedazzles me to think of how deep we can go. Life is an interminable onion, layer after layer after layer.
And yet -- what work is there but this?
4 comments:
Beautiful words! When you have an ed it is so so nice to know you can recover, that people do it. And to be honest, you're eating sensibly and posting about how you enjoy food for food, not so much the emotions of it, is very encouraging to hear. Thanks for blogging sister! Ciao!
check out my blog pretty-little-head@blogspot.com
Dear Ai Lu,
I, for one, have found so much healing in writing. Both the writing that's been mostly for myself, and sharing in writing with other women who have had similar struggles.
It is a journey, isn't it?
I'm glad you started writing and our paths crossed!
with love,
~ej
*cheers!*
At my most recent therapy session, my therapist was asking about the Ed, where I was in it, etc. I told her I still had a ways to go, but I was better, that some behaviors had diminished.
She asked me what changed, what was different this time. I told her one of the things that has helped a lot is blogging and reading other blogs that have been recovery oriented. I may have replaced blog reading for forum reading, but I find the former a much healthier avenue for me.
I think you are very right that there aren't enough people blogging about life after ED. You are, however, a great example of what you're doing and how you come to that place in healing, layer by layer, searching, and discovering.
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