let’s try this again

It’s been five weeks now since I overdosed. 36 days, to be exact. This past Monday I started a partial program at the hospital for eating disorders. So for the next four weeks, I’m at the hospital Monday-Friday from 8-3 being ‘therapized’ so that I can maybe function normally with food.

All of this is hard. I’ve been doing my best in partial to let the people there help me. I’m doing my best not to fight what they’re trying to do, even though there’s still a part of me that wishes my overdose had worked, that doesn’t see the point in recovery, that finds comfort in my unhealthy coping mechanisms.

My best has been working out fairly well so far.

I’ve found that for the most part, I’ve become slightly less suicidal over the past week. I’m not really sure why, but I’m not complaining. I’ve also been, especially after the first couple of days, making it a point to talk in groups and more actively participate, which has definitely been a challenge. Meals have been stressful but decent, and I got a loose meal plan that has been helping me follow through with eating a healthy amount and more regularly. And I haven’t purged since Monday, so woohoo! I have to start somewhere, right?

Something I told the doctors the other day was that I’m doing my best to take the first steps I need in order to recover so that hopefully the motivation to recover will come. In terms of recovery I mostly feel ambivalent, but I know that I need to want to recover in order to be successful. For now, I’m taking the steps acting as if I already want it, so that hopefully I’ll learn to really, truly want it.

I’ve been doing my best with making future plans to, so that I have things I can look forward to, in the hopes that it will help lower my suicidality. It’s been fun to figure out different plans and options over what I can do with my life.

With that, I’ve found myself really interested in social work specializing with end of life care. I think the process of dying is tragic and beautiful and kind of amazing. Death doesn’t have to be some scary, terrible thing. It’s an unpleasant but unavoidable reality, and I’d like to make it as painless as possible for people.

I’ve found myself looking up different volunteer opportunities in hospice and palliative care, which hopefully, with COVID restrictions, will be more accessible for me to participate in soon. I started looking up different ways that I could be trained as a death doula as a starting point.

Mostly, though, I’ve been working on building up and collecting all the reasons I want to recover. I have come to realize that this eating disorder and depression have been ruining my life, and I’m so, so tired. I’m tired of stressing about things (like food and the size of my body) that I know intellectually aren’t a big deal. I’m tired of doctors worrying about me, and I’m sick of being treated like a little kid because they can’t trust that I won’t hurt myself. I’m tired of my friends and professors not knowing what to say around me because they don’t know how to talk about my suicide attempts or my crappy mental health.

I don’t know that I’m at the point yet where I can say that I really want to be happy. But what I do know is that I can’t stay where I am. I can’t go on like this forever. I’m doing my best toward recovery because I know in my brain that it will help me–even if I don’t feel that way quite yet. I’m on my way.

One other idea has been circling around my head for the past few days, and it takes me back to the book I mentioned in my first ever blog post, Eating in the Light of the Moon by Anita Johnston: “[a person in ED recovery] must begin to review and retell the story of her life from the understanding that there is nothing wrong with her, that although she has been hurt, she is not damaged goods. Her disordered eating behavior is not evidence that she is a faulty human being in desperate need of repair” (pp. 18-19).

I’ve been doing my best to approach recovery with the baseline belief that I deserve to recover and that I deserve to be here. Sometimes it’s hard to remember, but I am getting closer.

I’m on my way there, and I’m glad you are coming on this journey with me. And man, am I glad to be back.

All my love,

Allie