This amazing and genuine blog post is written by our client AD. She is a brave, fierce and resilient recovery warrior. We are so inspired by her every single day. Here she is:
Let’s be honest, you don’t have control. It feels like it. It feels like using behaviors puts you in control of your life, in control of your body, in control of what others think of you, but it doesn’t.
Five years from now I’ll be just out of college, starting a life on my own. If I let my eating disorder keep control I probably won’t be able to go to college and if I do it won’t be the experience I wanted. It won’t be across the country, partying hard and embracing my youth while I still can. It will be me stuck in the same place, going to school close to home so my parents can keep an eye on me. My eating disorder won’t let me go to parties or focus in class because it has my full attention.
Ten years from now I want to be starting my life. I hope to be entering a career that makes me happy and positively influences the world. Maybe I will meet a man, maybe not, but I know if I can’t learn to love myself no one else will be able to love me.
And I know that I won’t be able to change the world if my whole world is consumed by my eating disorder.
Twenty years from now I could be thriving with my family and whatever industry I decide to go into. I could be running and traveling the world, doing what makes me happy. Or, if I let my eating disorder keep control, I could be dead. I know it seems dark but it is the scary truth.
Every time your eating disorder makes a decision for you, it reinforces that the monster holds the controller, not you.
It tricks you into thinking you have the control because you are making your body look a certain way or you are making people see you a certain way, but really the food and the rules are controlling you.
Diet culture is controlling you.
Your eating disorder is controlling you.
No matter how in control you think you are in the heat of the moment if you are engaging in behaviors you do not have charge of your life.
Once you acknowledge that it is not you who wants to compulsively exercise or restrict or whatever, you have taken your first step towards taking control back.
You may believe that it is you who wants to do the bad things your eating disorder makes you do, but it’s not. It may be hard right now but that recognition will get you so much closer to recovery. Accept yourself for who you are and stop trying to change to fit other people’s standards. That is how you really take control.
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