You Will See Me

So I am in recovery from anorexia nervosa and binge eating disorder.

This means every now and again I relapse.

It's funny.

I like to think I've made so much progress, but there are still all these mental and emotional booby traps hiding in my psyche. Sometimes even calling attention to them can cause me to behave irrationally or borrow from my disordered past. Other times there's a relapse on the horizon like the gathering clouds of a storm.

First of all,
I noticed the other day that my blog is described in the about section as being about motherhood, but really this is about self care. The two are completely different things and, in this society, they rarely walk hand in hand.

I am considering rewriting the About section so that people stop reading my blog looking for parenting advice. Let's be honest, I don't really write about parenting right now.
One of the luxuries of keeping a blog with almost no followers at all is I don't feel pressured to create any kind of "interesting content". Clickbait be gone!
This blog exists as a way for me to process one of the biggest-if not the biggest-change my life has ever gone through, which dictated the other biggest change.
I got knocked up ergo I had to confront my eating disorders.
I wanted to have a healthy baby and a healthy me to care for him, so I had to recover. The two were utterly mutual in their exclusivity. There was no skipping one to have the other.

Anyhoo, so I've been slowly integrating more recovery media voices into my social media diet as it were. I started with Kylie from ImmaEatThat, which is a phenomenal blog written by a phenomenal certified dietician. If you want to read a very sensitive, understanding woman's personal perspectives on recovery from restriction, orthorexia, and BED, she is an excellent place to start.
From her I have continued to add people like Isabel Foxen Duke, Alice from Alice Loves Peanut Butter, and many others.

To be fair, I also follow people like Jes AKA The Militant Baker, Erin Unleashes, B. Stereo, and Dori Deere, Brittany Gibbons, Joy the Baker, and Deb from Smitten Kitchen. These women are all in their thirties, they're all living very different lives, and some of them aren't in recovery from an ED, but they're women and they love food, which for me is a revolutionary enough description to merit idolization. They're all women. They all eat. Some of them give TED talks. Some of them have children. Some of them are battling with another physical or mental illness than ED recovery, and some of them are so startlingly wholesome they seem to be right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Some of them are dancers, some of them are models, some of them are photographers, and a couple of them are currently pregnant and sharing all of the weird body dysmorphic stuff that comes along with that journey.

If you are not following these women, I feel a little bad for you because they are the smiling faces that greet me from my social media platforms. They are wise, witty, gracious, and grateful. They are nervous, honest, foul-mouthed, confident, and cautious. They fear for the world the same way I do, and the mourn the same things I grieve.

They're good sisters, man.

And they keep me in good company during a time when loneliness is a big big enemy to me getting to a place where I can really trust myself again.

Because that's the root of recovery.

Trust.

Somewhere along our youth, we bought into the idea that we couldn't trust our own bodies and minds to do what was best for us.

I don't know when it happened for you, but it happened for me when I was six.
A person I was supposed to trust implicitly hurt me irrevocably.
Instead of addressing my hurt, the situation was made entirely about the person who hurt me and what would happen to him if it was found out that he had done this.

Time has gone by. He is not a bad person. He never hurt another person in that way, and I honestly believe it was because he was out of his mind at the time that the event occurred. I, as a child, was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It was not my fault.

However, that was never explained to me.

The thing that i remember being impressed upon me the most was that I could never tell anybody about what had happened because it would get him in trouble.

When I think back to many many things that I did, that I chose to do, or allowed to be done to me, they all lead back to this moment where the two adults I trusted most in the entire world explaining that whatever I felt, whatever I needed to make sense out of the hurt I felt, the desire I had to talk about it was not as important as a grown man's reputation.
They did not say this, but it was the message all the same.

You and your body are not as important as a man's reputation.

This seed was sown deeply into me, and it is the one that I have the most trouble addressing.
Even now as I write it, I feel so sorry for the little girl I was. How could anyone have told her that?
It feels insane, but even knowing that, as an adult, does not serve to contradict my feelings and reactions of worthlessness in my own life.

I let a lot of people use me as I grew up.
Including myself.
When I began monitoring my body, one of the bi-products of the decreased nutrition was a plunge in my hormone levels, and without my hormones, I found my emotions more stable. I didn't get as worked up about things as I always had. I could be betrayed, and it didn't faze me.
My eating disorder helped me to manage this horrible certainty that
"Everybody else's feelings matter except mine."
"Everybody else's body is worth protecting except mine."
"I will not stand for anyone treating people I love a certain way, but if I am treated that way, I deserve it."

When my body finally broke the mold of anorexia and the pendulum swung really hard in the other direction, I viewed it as my control being dismantled. I viewed it as my failure as a human.

But it wasn't.
It was actually my body saying loudly, "I DO MATTER. I WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO SUFFOCATE ME QUIETLY. I WILL TAKE UP SPACE AND I WILL MATTER. I AM NOT GOING TO BE INVISIBLE ANYMORE."

All of this to bring me to today...


Today I binged.

I know physically why, but I couldn't put my finger on psychologically what triggered it, but I think I get it now.

I've been feeling invisible lately.

I've had a lot of friends make plans with me only to break them.
I've had a lot of plans with friends that I've had to break because of the baby's teething and instead of checking back with me to reschedule, those friends with whom I broke the plans have not been in touch.
I'm sending out my writing and not hearing any replies.
I'm trying to get people to sign up for a class I am teaching, and I'm not getting enough students.

I feel like nothing I do matters.

I feel like I don't even need to be seen.

I feel overlooked, uncounted, and un-missed.

And moreover, I feel powerless to counter these feelings.
 So my body reacted by filling itself up, by fighting back in the only way that has ever got me to slow down and pay attention.

If I hadn't binged today, I wouldn't have asked these questions. I wouldn't have followed the thread of my disorder all the way back to its painful origins. I wouldn't have reminded myself that when I am at my worst, I feel invisible and of no consequence because that was the overwhelming feeling I took away from the worst experience of my childhood.

If I didn't do those things, I wouldn't have realized that i need something I am not getting right now.
I need recognition.
I need to be seen.

I can attend to those needs now.

For the first time in my life, I think I'm grateful for a binge.

I'm grateful that my recover thus far has taught me to be curious instead of judgmental in the aftermath.

Here I am.
And You will see me.