moving forward

I still don't feel strong enough
but every day I wake up and I am still here.
so I have to keep going.

and maybe it felt okay to die
when there was no other choice,
but there is a choice now.
and I choose to live.
every single day, all over again.
--Caroline Kaufman, When the World Didn't End, page 113

This past week has brought about a lot of changes. I moved back home from school, ended my spring semester, started my summer class, and got a new job. I’ve been oscillating between doing really well and slipping a lot, and with that, I’ve been avoiding writing for the shame of my slips.

But here I am. I’ve broken my purging days-clean a couple of times over the past week, and I’m pretty damn bummed about it. It’s been really hard getting myself to eat enough and not throw up lately. My parents are on a different eating schedule than I was at school, and the new food and the different ways they look at food have been getting to my head a lot.

This morning, I woke up not wanting to eat at all today. I was coming up with different ways to feel less hungry, found the scale from my parents’ hiding place, weighed myself, and overall wanted to begin the descent back into restricting so I’d feel less of a pull to purge.

But then as I was about to get on the phone with Carly this morning, I realized that I didn’t want to throw my recovery away. I began thinking about my resource box, about my friends encouraging me, about how my body was (and is) learning how to digest again, about this blog, and about posts I’d seen from others on Instagram where they acknowledged their slips and kept on with recovery.

I re-found the poem from the beginning of this post a few days ago, and it has been reminding me that I can live now, and it can be okay. I have some hope that I can really do this, that I don’t need to let the slips turn into a complete turning away from recovery.

So after I got off the phone with Carly, I decided that I was going to make myself breakfast. Nothing insane. But I decided that I was going to make myself breakfast and I was not going to purge. A simple goal, one step in the right direction.

I’m in an online class right now for Social Work called Substance Use and Abuse. The description of recovery has really been sticking with me the past couple of days. Basically, the client (in this case, the person with a substance use disorder), is not responsible for the onset of the disorder. In other words, the fact that they are suffering with a substance use disorder is not their fault. However, in looking at recovery, the person is responsible for their own recovery. It is looked at as a disease at onset, and their own recovery is in their own hands.

As a person who has blamed myself a lot, especially where my unhealthy eating behaviors are concerned, this view of recovery has been helping me so much. It gives me the control of changing my circumstances without blaming me. It has been helping me let go of a lot of guilt and self-deprecation.

I have not been perfect. I’m learning as I go–I’ve never done this, or really anything like this, ever before. But I feel confident that I’m getting to a healthier place. I’m challenging myself to be unapologetically honest. I have been slipping quite a bit since last week. I’m working on changing that. After all, today is a new day.

I told Jessie about one of my slips a couple of days ago, and she quoted myself to me in response: “just because I had a lapse, it didn’t undo all the progress I had made. I still carried with me all that I had learned, and that slip did not mean that I was starting again from square one. The lapse didn’t have to be anything more than what it really was. I could learn from it and move on.”

In deciding to eat today and in deciding to ignore my disordered thoughts of restricting or purging, I took a step in the right direction. I am acknowledging that I fell back for a bit into my problem behaviors, but that it doesn’t mean that I have to stay there. I can move forward instead.

All my love,

Allie