Does anyone need part-time employment?
Anorexia recovery IS A FULL TIME JOB, with double-shifts. Therefore, if anyone would like to tag along with me on this journey and help me with the baggage, etc., I would appreciate the assistance. The disease debilitated me quite enough over the past 40+ years, and I find myself weary and rather resentful of the tasks ahead…And to consider the fact that I started this job over two years ago!
I try not to reprimand myself too harshly for the length of my recovery-journey, because – I will just state it boldly – older people have a much tougher time with recovery. In fact, a lot of us may wonder what, exactly, we are recovering? What does “recover” even mean? Cover something back up? Sure, I would like to kick some dirt over the remains of my disease – does the word imply that kind of maneuver?
All right, time for more etymology just to straighten my record: “recover” means to “get something back [health strongly implied].” It derives from old French (a lot of English-language words do) recovrer, which means both to return to something and to gain back something lost. Now that I have clarified this part of the “recovery” confusion, I ask again, what am I returning to, and what am I gaining back? Those of us with long-term restrictive eating disorders know only one way of life: restriction. We believe in only one way of life: restriction. We perceive that the world operates on: restriction, so we champion: restriction, as our greatest triumph.
(When have we felt triumphant over eating pizza? Just a side question.)
Younger people have not spent decades cherishing, reshaping, honing, and finding salvation in: restriction. I cannot stress enough the importance of the difference between decades of restriction and a few years of restriction. To be sure, younger people have full-time jobs, too, in recovering from anorexia, but they can fuel their efforts on hopes and dreams of coming into their full selves.
Older people, on the other hand, often already have “selves,” selves with varying degrees of accomplishments, relationships, memories, more memories, intellectual maturity (a lot of which is sieved through society, just FYI), and on and on. All through these years, we have toted restriction around with us to fortify and nurture our “selves.” Thus, when I declare, “I am going to recover!,” I catch myself wondering, “What do I have to return to?”
In essence, I have nothing to return to. I have, instead, an ENTIRE SELF to recalculate all while staking a claim on the entirely novel. This work presents little appeal. First of all, I do not like math (even though I love calculus, go figure, no pun intended), and, secondly, I fear the novel might prove cheap and, simply, bad.
If the anorexia-recovery pros ever saw this blog, they would huff and puff at my statements. I wager that they would all see my words as a lot of blather and further delay of recovery. I understand their points of view. In fact, getting to my point has not yet occurred, so, pardon me for such a lengthy examination of affairs.
My point: if I have nothing to return to, nothing to gain back, why recover?
Why? Because all of us older people who heavily invested in restriction have lost our life savings. Restriction went bust on us, unfortunately. Some people may have made a fortune on it, but those of us with anorexia went bankrupt. Here we find ourselves, mid-life or near it, finally realizing that restriction took our retirement.
That revelation rather stinks. To thrive, and to look forward to some type of future enjoyment, we have so much work to accomplish! My to-do list looks like the following: 1) do not look back with regret, because I will get stuck in the past; 2) wipe my brain clean of all malware consisting of food rules, routines, movement compulsions, and bodyweight presumptions; 3) repeat #2 constantly; 4) eat loads of food as my body dictates and repeat #2; 5) reinvest my energy in the novel – and pray the novel is a best-seller; 6) since I am already so tired, having run riot with restriction only to lose my retirement, rest; 7) repeat #2; 8) realize I need to repeat #1; damn this list is burgeoning; 9) change a bunch of habits I do not want to change; 10) repeat #1 and #2 and oh, lord, now #9; 11) realize I lost sight of #4 and repeat #4; 12) resist future-casting even though I still pray this novel sells well; 13) repeat #12.
In conclusion: I should consider myself a survivor of a disaster – a stock-market collapse that took everything, including self-esteem and emotional growth. I do not want to die. The clean-up from the devastation and the establishment of new savings entails quite a bit of work. Anyone confronting such a list of tasks and risks needs extra care and love along the way. I extend my care and love to myself; I extend my care and love to all others enduring the same experience.
