Incurable cases?

It Gets Better - Jenni Schaeffer

This is my personal inspiration for today, which I thought I'd share with all of you. After actively fighting this disorder for almost a year and a half (as opposed to passively, which constitutes the latter half of my life) I often feel like I should be well now. I should be eating regularly, enjoying it, maintaining or gaining weight --- especially not losing and not caring, or finding vicious celebrity gossip 'thinspiring'.

I do miss being under a hundred. I miss being dizzy all day. I miss the bruises all along every ill-padded bone. I miss regular self-injury. My eating disorder has been nothing but abusive, spiteful, manipulative, selfish, ruinous, and yet perhaps I will always miss it.

Lately, you've been watching me relapse to some extent. Perhaps it's not been much of an active relapse, but I've still not been doing a whole lot to fight it too hard. The past few weeks have been the sort wherein eating somehow feels like an exhaustive, distasteful chore whose purpose is obscure and value inconclusive.

Today I'm trying to reinforce the understanding that it is okay to relapse. Probably this is not the statement most professionals would want me to be saying, but be realistic here. Relapse will happen. I'm not saying it is okay to embrace it. I'm saying it's okay for it to happen. It is okay to accept bad days along with good.

What's not okay is to welcome it, engage with it, actively pursue it and see how bad it can get. Today I'm trying to look at my life and say, all right. I've been having some bad times lately. My eating has not been what it should be and my attempts to thwart it haven't been up to par. Now that I understand this, I can accept it as something which happens from time to time instead of beating myself up about it for being the worst recoverer ever. I can acknowledge the bad and try to pick myself up again instead of saying, crap, I failed again, I must just not be cut out for this health thing. I can let the relapse be what it is and then let it go.

One thing Jenni wrote in her article in particular stood out to me: her realization that the belief she held about being too ill to recover was false. I remember many, many journal entries along those lines and can now realize that even in the midst of a bad spell I'm still able to see how far I've come toward health and that I'm still moving toward it even despite a two steps forward one back progression.

I still often feel that this disorder may always be with me. But I know now that it does not and will not always control me. I AM NOT TOO SICK TO GET BETTER!!! I was not the sickest, I was not the least sick, but I AM getting better in spite of everything!

Be encouraged!!! You probably feel like a hopeless case. Like no matter how many people say they understand, they really, truly don't. They can't see inside you and realize what a horrible, twisted, incurable creature you are. Like I'm full of sh-t for saying that I know what you're feeling. I won't claim to be all-knowing or all-answer-ful. But I will say that I have felt that before. Sometimes I've felt that my core evil was so warped and disgusting and pervasive as to be a tangible force. I've felt that it defined every part of my being so inextricably that all I would ever be able to be was worthless.

So not true.

Please, please don't listen to the lies this disorder tells you. It tells you you are worthless because it makes you easier to control. Would a person who highly valued and loved herself be as easily inclined to destroy herself as one who thought she were worthless? It's all a power scheme. A vicious and effective one, but only a scheme.

It is possible to break from this disorder and grasp the health that seems so impossible.