CREATING SPACE - LIFE WITHOUT RECOVERY

I’ve had a lot of blogs in the past, and various Instagram accounts to match: yoga accounts, personal accounts, recovery accounts, and a foodie account before we knew what the hell we were doing with photography. I always had this idea that if I could document something it would be more real somehow, my saviour and kryptonite wrapped up into one messy space on the internet. Brené Brown says in today’s culture we often feel that if everyone doesn’t know what we are doing then it holds no meaning. Maybe I am victim of that.

I’m an eternal people pleaser. As a kid that looked like being the ‘good girl’, with perfect grades and a billion extra curricular activities squeezed between doing all my homework, as an adult it looks like burn out and an identity crisis. Because the thing is, when you feel like you have to please everyone, including the millions of strangers on the internet, you tear yourself into pieces so small you don’t remember what they look like reassembled.

A little while ago I wrote a number of blog posts about recovery. I wrote about how I dealt with eating more and the steady weight gain I noticed on my body. I wrote about the fear I felt and the discomfort. I wrote because I love to write. I wrote because I thought it might give me the accountability I needed, and maybe the support too. I wrote because it made me feel brave. I wrote because I wanted to feel connected; to create community. And you know, I think it did all of those things. But what I also did was further solidify the significance of the eating disorder in my life. Recovery as a verb; vs adventure or enjoying food or freedom, and those things just adding up to recovery. Does that make sense?

Letting go of that part of me feels scary. I have spent the last week drawing and painting, I have done some yoga, I have posted and written on my social media, but I haven’t once spoken about recovery. It’s only one week and yet already I feel this odd sense of loss. Who am I without this? And how do I navigate the adult world? A world I arguably left at 14?

You know how they say that the definition of crazy is to repeat the same thing over and over and over again? Whoever said that would argue I’m insane. But regardless. Maybe. Instead of continuing to look for comfort in the depths of my eating disorder (both interacting with it or fixing it), I need to lean into the discomfort and emptiness that letting go seems to bring.

Because maybe this feeling isn’t loss or emptiness. Maybe it’s space.