take a picture.. it’ll last longer
possible trigger warning
Looking through old pictures doesn’t help. Looking through old pictures doesn’t help. Looking through old pictures doesn’t help.
One of the more dreadful parts of recovery is seeing old pictures of yourself and realizing how much you’ve changed. Personally, when I look at my sick pictures, I see a girl who’s glowing. Her body is stunning. Her smile is big. That girl looks like she’s got her whole life together. I even let myself buy into the flawless thoughts I have about the sick version of myself. I use the pictures to fuel my disorder.
I let it remind me of the dinner I just ate and it tells me that the girl in the picture would NEVER eat what I just “devoured.” My disorder is tricky. She’s smarter than I am. She uses powerful words. She says “devoured” instead of “ate” to emphasize that nourishing myself is bad. She says “emaciated” instead of “skinny” to remind myself how thin I was and how hard I worked. She doesn’t use the term “fat” because that’s too cliché. She says “massive” or “hefty” because when those terms were used to describe my weight in the past they hurt the most.
These nights are the worst. The ones that come after a day of fun and feeling great amounts of love. They’re the nights when my disorder feels the most afraid. Just like me, she’s terrified of being abandoned so she holds on to every damn thing to stay relevant. It started by looking for a picture of an old Christmas gift and ended with obsessing over pictures of my sick body.
The logical thing to do is delete the pictures but there is no real logic to my disorder. She’s still there even when I’m feeling great. I could be on top of the world and ready to delete every single sick picture but she would remind me that at some point I won’t feel so good and that I’ll want to be reminded of the body I once had and could still have, she would add. She would remind me that I’ll become desperate for motivation at some point and I’ll need those photos. She might even twist it to say they’ll remind me of “everything I don’t want to be again” knowing damn well I’m never going to look at those pictures and love my weight restored body more.
On a more (somewhat?) positive note, as much value as sick pictures hold to my sad and disordered self, I know the truth behind them. I wasn’t glowing, I was caking on makeup to make myself look alive. At one point my mom insisted I put on lipstick to look “less dead.” Maybe my body was stunning but my gosh did I think it was repulsive then too. I craved every lost pound. I googled how much a body weighs without any fat on it, what a body would weigh with just organs, tissues, skin, nails, hair, and bones because I was not going to stop until I was that weight. I was scared to use lotion, thinking it could add water weight or that there might be calories in it that my skin would absorb. My smile was big because my face was small and no matter how much I wished they did at the time, you can’t lose weight in your teeth. And don’t get me started on how far my life was from being put together. I was miserable. I could literally feel my body giving up a little bit more everyday. I could see my hair falling out in huge clumps. I could feel myself gasping for air after walking up three stairs and that is no exaggeration. I was cold under two heated blankets, a weighted blanket, and two large plush blankets. I was literally being swept around by the wind because there was nothing to hold me down.
So I don’t really have some super uplifting motivational conclusion right now. I’m sad. I’m sad my brain is so screwed up that I know and understand how miserably sick I was yet I still long to be that way again. I’m sad that I write these freaking blogs and they can be so powerful and positive but then the very next post can feel like I’m on the verge of a huge relapse.
And, that’s why I blog. To tell my truth. To process my thoughts. To know myself better and to connect to the people who live my same struggle everyday.
