Last Night I Confessed to Writing this Eating Disorder Recovery Blog (and Today I Feel More Free)

After having a particularly funky little day yesterday (as well as one earlier in the week and one a few days earlier than that), I decided that i needed to get out of the house last night so suggested that we go out for dinner last night - I’d been craving cheeseburger, so hey, whatever. While we were at dinner, I started talking about the funk I was in - something of a change for me, but something that I’m working on nonetheless. During the conversation, after saying that I was uncomfortable and feeling like I was doing a lot of work on me lately, I mentioned writing this blog.

I’ve had this domain name for almost a year. I’d had some other plans for what I was going to do with it that never happened. I hadn’t really talked about that - and there’s a simple reason for it: in the past, when I’ve started looking at my own eating disorder recovery, I tended to get a bit caught up in it; when I looked at eating disorder recovery, very quickly the recovery part of things blurred out of the picture and eventually vanished completely. To some extent, until I was confident that my recovery was strong and that I was really using this blog to address the underlying issues more than just to talk about illness, I didn’t want to talk about it; I didn’t want to send up flares and call attention to the fact that I’ve been looking at things.

There was that initial concerned look. There was some discussion about what I am looking at, talking about and working with. There was some discussion of where my thinking comes from and why I’m writing. In the end, it felt good to talk about it (before that, while I was trying not to think about it or talk about it, there was a barrier - and hiding it started to feel a lot like hiding the behaviors or the symptoms or something; not talking about talking about recovery started to feel like hiding the symptoms of the eating disorder). In the end, today I’m feeling a little bit better than I’ve been.

There’s a strange sense of relief that comes when you open up and talk about an eating disorder - because even with the shame and the discomfort that you’ll find, it’s easier when you don’t have to hide; it was nothing like the relief that followed talking about writing this blog. Some days, it seems, I’m subtly (and not so subtly) reminded of why I’m writing here: it’s because the time is right to peel off some additional layers to allow room for growth.