back to the beginning

Okay, uncomfortable honesty time: these past two weeks, I’ve been a mess. I’ve relapsed in just about every sense of the word–restricting, bingeing and purging, and self harming. The idea of school and the craziness that this semester will bring has been a LOT. It’s been a really hard few weeks.

I had gone over 11 weeks without purging and over 13 weeks without hurting myself, and it had broken within these past couple days.

I’m disappointed. I’ve really just kind of let myself spiral, and it sucks. I’m not going to sugarcoat it.

And part of me really is wanting to give up. Completely. Restricting was easier for me than it’s ever been before. And to be completely honest, I think a part of me is still inside of that. I feel like I have back tracked and like I have failed the whole concept of recovery. I don’t feel like I’m worthy of even claiming that I’m in recovery anymore.

It’s really interesting, thought, that even while I’m inside of this, I have a lot more ambivalence towards letting myself spiral–I can feel myself fighting to get back into all-in recovery, even though a part of me is still pushing toward self destruction.

What I can say is this: today I haven’t done any problem behaviors. It took me almost two hours to drag myself out of bed. I was miserable. But I ate breakfast. I ate lunch. I ate dinner. I didn’t purge. I made some phone calls and replied to some emails. I started a bullet journal and cleaned up my room. I came to work. It isn’t perfect, but it is something in the right direction.

I’d like to say that I’m turning a new leaf–that I am one hundred percent recommitted to recovery–but I’d be lying. I still kind of want to spiral. But the part of me that wants recovery is getting a little bit louder. And at least for today, I’m doing my best to listen to that part.

I wish that I could make this prettier. I wish that I could say a light switch has flipped and I will never want to die again. But this morning I woke up and wished I wasn’t here anymore. I went through the different ways in which I could end my life today. I picked out a vague time that I could do it. I don’t really know how I got that feeling and its urgency to fade, but eventually it did, and here I am.

I feel like a lot of people expect these types of things–suicidality especially–to be a one-time thing. That suddenly, you won’t want to die anymore and everything will go back to being okay. It makes it sound far easier than it actually is. Recovery is actually, though, making that choice over and over again, sometimes multiple times a day, an hour, or a minute, that you don’t want to torture yourself anymore. Recovery is taking the chance that you are worth it, that you deserve to be okay.

I’ve been having an incredibly hard time making that choice lately. Sometimes the other voices get too loud, and I fool myself into thinking that recovery is stupid and that I don’t deserve to be okay.

But I do deserve to be okay. I deserve to exist. Like Jessie texted me the other day, I “am not this anomaly to the human race”–I deserve to be here just as much as everybody else. I’m doing my best to remember that.

I feel like in posting this, I need to recommit. That’s a lot of pressure, but it’s also kind of the point. I don’t want this blog to end–I don’t want to fall back down the hole. I like how recovery feels, even if it’s hard to remember that sometimes. I like being able to only think about food when I’m hungry. I like feeling less pressure to be perfect, less obsessive over my something I can’t completely control.

I like the person I become when I am fully in recovery–a person who loves to laugh and joke and hang out with my friends. I like that I can have those friends, while when I relapse I pull away. In writing this, I’m reminding myself why I really DO want recovery and why it’s so much more important than the comfort of my problem behaviors.

I may not be perfect after this, but I am doing my best. I am doing my best to be all in even when I don’t feel like it. I’m doing my best to believe in myself even if I don’t want to. I’m doing my best to believe that my life is worth saving.

All my love,

Allie