good grief
Grieving is hard. It’s emotionally and sometimes physically draining. Though I’ve only lost one person in my life (thank goodness) I’ve spent a lot of time grieving.
Right now, at 10:00 p.m. on a Staurday night, I’m grieving my small, sick body. I’ve spent the last hour and a half looking at the hundreds of pictures of my life when I was at or below my original goal weight. I say original because with every lost pound, my goal weight gets lower and lower.
I miss the tiny girl who could fit into any size clothing she wanted. I miss that sweet anorexic smile. The smile that twinkles in a way that you can’t understand unless you’re starving yourself for pleasure. I miss the constant motivation I had to watch the pounds go down, right now I can’t even fathom getting on a scale and knowing what I weigh.
My heart hurts right now because I’m not that girl. I’m a self-described fat, worthless, powerless girl. I know my posts have gotten more and more disordered recently but truth be told, I think I was born to live a life with my eating disorder.
My disorder gives me love that no one else does, a love I don’t think I’ll find from anyone else. It’s with me at night and when I wake up and when I shower. I don’t feel alone when I’m deep in my disorder; it’s actually one of only times I don’t feel painfully lonely. It doesn’t reject me. It doesn’t make empty promises. It doesn’t get tired of me. It wants to spend every second with me.
I’ve recently met someone who makes me insanely happy. Normally, when I’m interested in a guy it’s because I love the feeling of someone wanting me, but it’s not that way this time. This new man, and yes he is a man with a big boy job and a college degree, makes me feel so good. We have the same quirkiness, we have the exact same taste in music (minus the whole Taylor Swift obsession, but I can look past that), we just seem to click. I literally pray that God’s will for me involves being in a relationship with him. But I have to play it cool.
My eating disorder doesn’t make me play it cool. It doesn’t make me wait. My eating disorder wants me all-in, all the time and that’s what I’m good at. Tip-toeing around, hoping I don’t mess up this great feeling is not how my eating disorder works. It’s so delicately seductive and beautifully inciting. It makes me prove my love to it and it gives me what I want when I do so. Humanly love is so different.
Balancing the love for my disorder and the potential of love with a real person feels impossible. When I start to really like someone, my eating disorder draws me in. It tells me he’ll want me more if I lose the weight and come closer to perfection. At the same time, it takes me away from people. How can I split my attention between this all-consuming disorder and someone else? I try to have both but it has cost me two really great guys.
To be completely transparent, I’ll probably try to do it again. I’ll try to get skinny and make this new guy want me more and more. All the while I’ll be dancing with the devil that is my eating disorder.
Who knew you can be so in love with something that you hate more than anything? It would be nice to be normal for a change. But my eating disorder isn’t dead, I’m not fixed, and I’m not ready to give it up. Love is toxic and it seems that every road leads back to my disorder.
In case it’s not obvious, recovery isn’t linear. I might be going down a slippery slope and I know when my parents read this they’ll freak out but to some extent, that’s how life with anorexia goes and I am genuinely so sorry.
