Recovery is a verb

Hello, world. I'm Rose. This is my blog.

Those are weird words — perhaps deluded or ostentatious words — to write for an audience that isn't likely to ever exist.

However, even if no one reads this blog, or even if no one cares, what matters I suppose is that I do, that I am committed to the words here, that I've beget them back into the universe in a space I can call my own, that here I can be myself without judgement.

I need to commit to writing, and maybe if the words can occupy a place other than my brain, I'll feel a bit lighter from writing, rather than more deeply entangled in the more unfortunate aspects of my brain chemistry as I usually do.

I've resisted saying many times over, or whispered it only to a few loved ones, but there's no room for shrinking or quieting my voice here. Reader, it's written. I can be as loud as I want to here.

I have an eating disorder.

More specifically, I have bulimia and in the off-times when I have not purged, I suffer from binge eating disorder.

I have a serious illness and have had serious issues with my body image and food for as long as I can remember.

But I've had enough, quite frankly. Living with an eating disorder — like Bulimia — has been oft-discussed in our culture, but I don't think enough and I don't think recovery is discussed as much as it should. And while I don't suppose I add more valuable insight into the condition itself, I can offer some regarding how painful it is.

Bulimia is a lonely illness. Bulimia obliterates the very notion of hope itself, because it becomes its own gravity, a force endemic to daily life, pulling you down and down and down and down some more. It becomes repetitive, addicting, isolating.

The act of purging is one of profound self-abuse. Nourishment, a life-giving act, becomes a force of diminishing life instead. And the abuse becomes comfort and horror all at once.

Bulimia demands you unravel your own flesh, slip out of your body, estrange yourself from even your most minuscule cell. And that is the comfort. The escape, the relief of purging. The body becomes prison and purging becomes freedom. Of course the disease is none of these things. Bulimia is not a solution, but it feels like one an awful lot of the time — until you get really physically sick.

The body begins to fail, casually at first. You see, I'm currently situated the at-first stages, and I am willing myself to let them be the end of my dealings with this illness's physical effects. Really, I'm scared. My heart has been beating irregularly or too fast. I walk up the stairs and hear my heartbeat in the ear (cardiac stress is a symptom of bulimia, apparently). I cough every time I drink any fluid, as my esophagus is no doubt damaged from the stomach acids it's constantly exposed to. My hair is starting to fall out. I am constantly dizzy and see stars when I stand up. These are not casual ailments. My need to purge is not normal. It cannot be regular. It has to end. I cannot let the narrative shift from that.

So today I am committing to recovery. However, the impetus to do so — about one hour ago, and then subsequently making this blog — happened quite ironically.

Today I weighed myself after a rough week of binging, and some frequent purging as well.

I'll get into my history of weight and body issues soon enough, but after some time away from this number, I clocked in at *** pounds once more. Well, ***.*, but that's actually besides the point. Today, I entered back into the ***-pound realm, a realm I never thought I'd enter again, and one I thought if I did enter, would be my end.

After losing a bunch of weight from a previously unhealthy size, I believed weighing anything in this realm would be the worst thing that happened to me. But it happened today, and it isn't.

My heart didn't stop beating when I stepped on the scale today, I didn't lose my home, my family, my friends. I didn't lose my ability to see or hear or smell or taste or experience the world around me. All that changed was a number on a scale and it's certainly not the worst thing to happen to me. Actually, I'd rather be at this weight than live with Bulimia for one more second, so if I have to be at a higher "number" until I can get my eating habits back to a healthy place where I can begin losing weight to focus on getting myself healthy, then so be it.

Today, I surrender to healing. It's a verb, an action, a continuous process that needs to begin. I don't wave a wand and get a new day and somehow it absolves my illness. I'll probably live with these issues forever, and it will take a lifetime of healing to reckon with it. But the process needs to begin. So today. It doesn't have to be the first of the month, the start of the week, the top of an hour. Actually, it can begin now. And so it does. And it does because I said so.

I surrender.

I surrender.