Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow.” – Mary Anne Radmacher
I have had a hard time defining what “recovery” or “being in recovery” actually means. At what point are you actually recovered? How long does recovery take? What do you have to do to recover? And what happens if you relapse?
I am in the process of recovering from my eating disorder. This isn’t something I usually open up about or broadcast to the world, and I know that it’s not something that I’ve told even my closest friends about. So why write a blog post? This blog is a way for me to get out feelings and thoughts that I don’t know how to express otherwise. My eating disorder is an incredibly personal thing that has been a source of internal shame for a long time, and keeping a shroud of silence around it is going to do nothing to help push away those feelings of shame and disappointment. It’s something that I’ve always wanted to talk about, and always wanted to tell people about, but I haven’t figured out a way to do it before. I’m the type of person who is worried about what other people think about me, and coming out as having an eating disorder puts me out there for a good deal of judgement. Just by looking at me, you could never tell that I’ve been dealing with an eating disorder since freshman year of high school. Too many other girls and women are feeling the same shame, frustration, and confusion that I have felt for the past 6 years, and talking about it is the only way that I know how to help others.
The National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) has declared February 23 – March 1 to be National Eating Disorders Awareness Week, so I figured that this would be as good a time as any to write a post about recovering.
Warning: triggering content about eating disorders