RECOVERY - I AM A SNOWBALL

We are just over a week into this ‘all in’ journey and already I feel like a snowball.

I often use the analogy of a snowball to describe my feelings in my own head; gathering speed, gathering anxiety, getting more and more out of control. Sometimes you hear people say things get easier with time and with exposure; the more you do something the more comfortable it gets - but for me recovery feels the opposite, at least at this part does. With each day that passes the security of restriction gets a little further away. The snowball is not only mental, as anxiety increases, but it feels physical too, as if i’m also gathering weight in the same way that a snowball might as it rolls down a hill. Scientifically I know that’s not really possible, considering the amount I am eating and that this ‘all in’ journey has only lasted a week thus far, but anorexia doesn’t happen in the rational brain.

The further I get from the pain that restriction caused (mentally, physically, emotionally), the easier it feels to allow myself to fall back. I remember reading once that your body cannot recall pain, you can remember it psychologically but you cannot feel it (a good thing of course), and so you find yourself thinking that it can’t have been ‘that bad’.

It’s at times like this that the commitment I made becomes even more important. I committed to this - promised myself I would stick with it for at least 6 months. I need to write my mantras in big letters on my fridge: the only way out is through… neither can live whilst the other survives (a fitting harry potter quote)… what happens if you chose to go back? You plod round the same shitty field for another thirteen years…

And I remember that quote that floats around social media sometimes, ‘anxiety is worrying about the future’. It is self predicated; ideas and predictions. I keep reminding myself to come back to today: recovery does not happen in the future, it happens right now in the present with the choices I make and the thoughts I choose to interact with.

I have seen the truth of this within my yoga practice: I didn’t get better at handstands by thinking or worrying about them. I got better at handstands through the work and the patterning I did each day. Action. Present tense. Real time.

To quote James Clear, ’You should be far more concerned with your current trajectory than with your current results’.

I am not a snowball. This isn’t something I am rolling towards at break neck speed. This journey doesn’t have an end. Only a present; one that I choose and create.

And so a final mantra. Repeat after me. I am not a victim of this, this is not happening to me. This this what I choose.