As long as I stay sick with the eating disorder, those who hurt me still are winning.
The best revenge is living well.
Part of why I’ve never recovered is because I’m scared that my life will never be abuse free when I’m well.
But that is in my control. I am the one who has the power to not let people breach my boundaries in the future. I have that control.
Another excuse destroyed 
There will never be a reason to recover, not for me anyway. There will never be a guarantee that life will be awesome, that I’ll be happy, or that I will be okay.
I am the only one who can change my future in any way – and that is directly from my choices right now. So when I ask myself if life will be better, if I will be okay, I have to answer myself with “How badly do you want it to be that, how badly do you want to be okay?” If I want to know if I’ll dance again, the answer is, “How badly do you want to dance?”.
Because the only way I can find out, is by getting there. Through getting better. And the longer I stay sick, the worse my chances get of things being better or okay or me being able to dance or any of the things I ask when I ponder getting better.
I came across a really good blog entry by Marya Hornbacher (author of Wasted) in which she talks about her recovery. She said that there never WILL be a right time, she would never have been ready to do it. She had to just do it. She’s right.
The choice to get better is like the choice to jump out of a plane. You can’t see that your parachute will work. There is no guarantee of that. No guarantee that you will land in the right place, that your landing will be safe and soft. You have to blindly trust. And in the same way, with getting better, you have to blindly trust that it will be okay and just do it.
That’s exactly right. I wasn’t sure if I was ‘ready’ to recover, but I was completely 100% fed up of the alternative.
I won’t know if recovery is worth it, as everyone says it is, unless I’ve at least given it a really good go. So that’s what I’m doing
. You can’t wait around forever for the light-bulb moment when you want to change because it may never arrive, you just need to bite the bullet. That cat picture is hilarious by the way x
That is exactly what i’ve said to myself, that I have to give it a go, that I can’t let this win, not if I have not tried everything to the best of my ability. I know everything else I’ve tried hasn’t worked but i haven’t tried actually giving recovery a good go – only a half hearted one.
xx
Thank you for reminding me it’s worthwhile
Great post! Get well soon…
That pic is hilarious!
Thank you
I loved it so much I had to write a post for it lol 
You are amazing. Honey, you are right where you need to be (NOT IN FLIGHT) … god no! Drop the parachute. HOWEVER, the metaphor (or simile) sp, is perfect.
That is EXACTLY … EXACTLY what i thought all those years, just before getting “better”.
This is what i promise:
(1) Life. A really “PRESENT” Life.
will have a bounty of wonderfulness: Many more days of wonderfulness than days of crap.
(2) People, really present with people
(3) With Activities.really ATTENDING those activities
(4) No canceling those activities
(5) Joy for you
(6) Joy for others
(7) YOU, my friend, with your heart and your determination and your belief in God and animals
(8) Sensitive people will feel crap. The harsh world WON’T disappear, but you will have friends, and you will experience distress, and then you won’t experience distress …
AND YOU WILL BE PRESENT THROUGH THE WHOLE LOT! You, beautiful Fiona!!!!!!!
Course, you’re beautiful Fiona now, but i know you feel disconnected and doubting and that you want “BETTER” now!!!!
NO DOUBT you are on the path …
I know you want to HURRY IT UP … but unlike Marya Hornbacher, sometimes that “just doing it” takes time.
There are no “declarations of independence” from ED’s. I don’t believe it. Some people do it, and they are on a HARSH path of no forgiveness if they “slip” or digress from their “JUST DOING IT”. They live in fear of a goof … and HELLO, goofs are part of recovery. AKA slips …
For me, (one person’s opinion) it was the combo of a sick body, and an open mind TOWARD a person i trusted.
For some reason i decided to say, OK, I’ll give this eating a try. How could life be worse?
How would DEATH be better?
Life wins. … in all it’s roads and side-trips in the journey. LOVE YOU LIL SIS!!! Melis
You are amazing, Mel! Truly amazing. This is just what I needed to read. Actually I read it last night – just before i went to bed. Opened my email and there your comment was. It made me cry (but in a good way, a cathartic way.) You are right that life is worth it, life wins.
It is a journey. There isn’t a ‘yes I’m cured’ moment. i totally agree. I think I have to check my impatience – needing it to be over ‘now’ when it’s never actually going to be over, I’m going to keep on plodding on and then one day realise things ARE a lot better – because a lot of hard work and tears have gone by.
Death would never be better – death would be nothing. I don’t want nothing I want to LIVE.
Thank you for reminding me how special life is. Thank you for being YOU. For your kindness and caring. Love you, sis. xoxoxox
Oh honey … whenever i made a DECLARATION of “I quit BULIMIA” … i feel i had made a deal with the devil because i had handed my control over to “something” that was holding my puppet strings. That if i failed, I WAS the one who was wrong … that if i were Stronger or Smarter i would have obeyed my declaration. A slip would seem devilishly unacceptable to me. Slips are natural.
Fighting against recovery is a HUGE part. My doctors used to ask me to keep tabs on how much money i spent on bulimia. I wouldn’t do it: DENIAL. They asked me if i thought the bile from my stomach had ruined my teeth and cut my throat … i denied it … “oh it could be because my mom said she had a calcium deficiency when i was born” … but i was knee deep in denial, and NO ONE was going to MAKE me Better before my time.
KNOW THIS. You are doing the work … and YOU will get better … you are better now.
Recovery is not something that is easily “posted on a graph”. AND, the graph (if you chose to use it) would look like a heart beat
right, up and down and all around.
I know … it’s NOT easy. But life will be a WHOLE new chapter for you very soon. I can’t wait to meet my lil sis. LOVE YOU, MEL
there is definitely a comfort zone is being sick…it is what you know, it has been how you coped for so long.
Yes.. it’s easier to stay sick than face what is terrifying! xx
I know you said that you don’t have a guarantee that things will work out or that you will be okay, but I think it’s all a matter of perspective. Things may not go the way we want them to, but they will go regardless. What I mean is, we always have the choice to change our perspective. Whatever comes our way, even if it’s something we perceive as bad, all we have to do is change the way we think about it. Everything that happens, regardless if good or bad, can all be great if we choose to see the glass half full.
So true – and thank you. Such an important reminder – we do change our reality just by changing our viewpoint. I usually am a half full person but lately I’ve lost sight of that.. time to start seeing the positive again. Thank you again hope you are okay xxxx
I’ve asked this question to myself many times. Particularly when you start therapy and understand how you got there and still nothing changes on the level of symptoms, it can be very frustrating and decouraging. But understanding alone doesn’t help, because the disorder goes so deep and reaches into layers of your mind that are beyond awareness. If you’ve lived like that for so many years, you’ve learned those unhealthy patterns of thinking and behaving very well. It’s a kind of conditioning that goes very deep and is very well-anchored. I always use the picture of a highway to describe it: The ED-related (neural path-) ways of thinking and behaving are so well-established in the brain that it’s always the first road you want to take. Getting away from it means to build sideways of healthy thoughts and behaviors, which are bumpy and narrow at the beginning, and it feels eerie to take them because they’re so unknown to you. But the only way to establish them as an alternative to the ED highway is to go them as much as possible. The ED highway won’t go away, but the goal is to build those other ways as an alternative to the ED road, and eventually the ED highway will need repair (because every street needs repair from time to time), but nobody is interested in repairing it because it’s not used anymore, and then it will decay gradually.
As you can see, anxiety is as the very root of it. Fear of the unknown was probably my biggest obstacle in getting better, and I was stuck for years because I didn’t dare to face it. The crucial insight to make me go for a change was to accept that there will be fear, and it won’t be easy, but those fears and discomforts will be temporary and smaller compared to being stuck in that misery forever.
Hi Kath, WOW this is amazingly helpful, I love your road/highway analogy, and it makes a lot of sense to me. Anxiety is a huge problem for me too, and makes taking those scary little side paths hard. But they can be made into bigger paths with time – and anxiety lessens when we challenge it. Fear cannot hurt us unless we allow it to – it’s we who hurt ourselves in response to our feelings. You have a lot of insight an dthank you so much for sharing it! xxxx
That’s exactly it, Fi! I’m very happy you found it helpful.
And you’re absolutely right, going the small paths of healthy life more often will make them broader and more inviting, and in the end walking on them is the more comfortable choice. So it’s actually getting easier with the time. The beginning is the hardest, but you’ve already mastered that, so I know you’ll make the rest of the journey as well. 
Hugs to you!