Letting Go...

I held on with a death grip to the idea that I didn't have an eating disorder, that I didn't really need to do anything about it, that I wasn't really sick...It hasn't been very long that I let go of that denial, but I am reminding myself of why it is such a good thing that I did...and that I need to keep moving forward, not back..

About six months ago, I sat in Liz's office and I said these words- 'No, I don't think I have an eating disorder. People with eating disorder's don't actually need to lose weight (and at the time I really did...had gained about 70 lbs with my pregnancy..) Those people are sick, I'm not sick at all. I just choose to throw up as a form of weight loss.' 

And I was serious! I really believed that. I think back now and think, my God she must have thought there would never be any hope for me. How is it possible that someone who, at the time, ate one huge 'meal' (read:binge) a day, and purged that could honestly sit there with a straight face and say, 'I don't have an eating disorder'. I cannot stress enough how serious I was, how fully I believed that I didn't. Since then I have worked so hard I cannot explain. Here is the very short version of how I got my head out of my ass and began the slooow process of truly healing:

-I didn't want to say, 'I have an eating disorder' because I wanted to be different, I wanted to be better than 'those people' who are obsessed with food. News flash- I AM obsessed with food! But that doesn't have to mean it has to be disordered, it can also be channeled into being incredibly healthy..

-I didn't want to say, 'I have an eating disorder' and I'm going to try to get over it because I am DEATHLY terrified of failure. I didn't believe that I could stop for real, for ever, so what's the point? I can either keep going the way I'm going and say, 'well this is just what I do, this is just how I eat, throwing up is just part of my life, I don't mind and I"m not that sick', or I could say 'Ok I want to get better, I want to eat healthy and not purge- but what happened when I didn't eat healthy one day, or I purged when I said I wouldn't? I'll tell you what happened- it happened on Monday, and I'm still alive, Liz is still there for me and working with me, she didn't throw her hands up and say 'oh well forget it clearly you don't want to stop'- I got over the frustration, and learned more about that particular binge than I ever have in my life. I didn't fail. I got up, quit the whining and crying, and started again the next day, a little stronger than I was the day before, because I was honest about what happened.

-I didn't want to admit it because I thought I was too old to have an eating disorder. Funny, but true...I felt pathetic for having a husband and a child and STILL being 'like this'. Somewhere along the line I got over that...because it makes absolutely no sense. Liz said to me once, when I was still working as a case manager, 'Think of one of your kids, one that just has a special place in your heart and just gets to you. If that child came to you in ten years and said, you know, that was some pretty messed up stuff that happened to me when I was a kid, I didn't realize it then but now that I'm married and have my own kids I'd like to heal from it, the right way- would you turn them away and say, 'too bad, you missed your chance!' Absolutely not, of course. So why is it not okay for you to heal now?

-I didn't want to admit it because I knew somewhere deep down that it wasn't about food. I HATE talking about food. I hate it. I wanted to scream, 'who CARES what I ate today?!' I know now that I wanted to scream that because what I really wanted to scream was 'who CARES what I ate today- I'M in PAIN! I ate to forget about that! that's all, I don't want to talk about stupid food, I just want to use it to numb myself, not eat when I want to deprive myself and eat too much when I want to punish myself and I don't want to talk about the details.' No one wants their life to revolve around eating or not eating. It doesn't have to, I know that now. 

This got too long...I don't really have a concrete point...just thinking back to why it's important for me to go today and continue the 'work' on actually experiencing how I feel. Today's chapter continues with: 'How Blu Did NOT Cause her Father's Relapse into Heroine Addiction- take two'.