Me, Right Now

I started my recovery journey almost two years ago. Last night, as I was laying in bed trying to fall asleep, I thought to myself, “I think part of the journey is complete.” I no longer use food to cope with my emotions. I no longer keep a strict count of how many drinks I’ve had because I don’t use alcohol to numb anymore. I don’t feel out of control anymore. I’ve made peace with food.

That was a shock to my system. For the past two years, my relationship to food felt like an insurmountable beast. I never thought there would come a day where I wasn’t constantly thinking about food. What my next meal would be, would I be able to control myself around comfort foods, would I feel the need to starve myself in front of others and binge later at night when no one could see me. Gone were these thoughts. Now, I simply eat.

Of course, it’s not so simple. The healing didn’t happen overnight. And it’s far from over. Now I stand on a precipice in my recovery journey. As I healed my relationship with food, my body changed.

I noticed the change gradually. One day, my face looked a little different. Another, the way clothing fit felt different. I realized that my body wasn’t used to being properly nourished. But it wasn’t just the food. Over the years, as I dealt with extreme stress, fluctuating mental health, and intense trauma and mental abuse in my career, I shrunk myself down and blocked out the feelings however I could.

As I unlearned diet culture and old food habits, there was space for those deep pockets of my past to come out. Just as my priority had once been to save myself by fixing my relationship with food, my priority now had to be to work through that anger to save myself from the darkness of what I had been through.

Through my triage, my relationship with exercise and my self-image had to take a backseat. They were not the major threat to my system. The anger was.

This has been an intense year with my recovery team. My eating disorder is so much more than my eating habits. I didn’t realize that until I was no longer under siege from my life. Once I burned it to the ground, I realized in the ashes what I couldn’t see in the midst of the fire.

I was deeply broken, and it went so much further than learning I didn’t need to drive to Taco Bell at midnight to get my mind off a bad day.

I feel at peace with my past now. Not all has been forgiven, but I feel ready to move on. The threat has been neutralized. So this is me right now. In a body that looks different than it might have two years ago, but in a body that takes up space for the girl who needed to feel her anger. To grieve the life she thought she would have had and mourn what she had to leave behind to find her smile again.

Me, right now, in this body that lost some of its strength, but found its power again.

Me, right now, in this mind that sometimes betrays her, whose thoughts haven’t caught up to the fact that the physical danger is gone. Who knows that she is safe and loved and cared for. Who knows that she can weather any storm.

Me, right now, who looks towards this next stage with light in her heart and hope in her voice, for the first time in a very long time.