You Get To Decide What You Want, Not Your Disorder
I don’t know if it was the Spanish sun, a time-zone change, or being thrown completely out of my comfort zone that made me finally listen to what every self-help book has been asking, but here’s my take on ditching labels and listening to what you want.
I have an eating disorder and anxiety - the victim rhetoric doesn’t have to follow the label. The story doesn’t exist on that condition alone. I was letting that rule my life. Because I have this (label) I have to do x or y.
I feel like for the first time I’m starting to take control back though. Now it is; okay, I have these things - what do I want to do with my life? How do I want to live it? What are my actual goals?
It’s not seeing them as roadblocks but obstacles, things that I can, and will, overcome. Things that I am already overcoming every day. I think labels can so quickly become identities, you internalize everything that you think you “should” be doing just because of a name. Anorexic. Anxious. Insecure. Depressed. Whether you give yourself the label or not, it’s easy to feel like you have to live by it. I knew when I was first diagnosed with my eating disorder I felt guilty when I did things that didn’t seem “anorexic” enough (which is a messed up concept all within itself), I was scared people would think that I didn’t actually have an eating disorder and that I was just faking it. If I couldn’t even be the best at being sick, I felt even weaker.
It took a couple of weeks in this new city, plenty of face-time calls, and tears galore for the narrative to switch for me here. When I first got here, to say I was overwhelmed is an understatement. My entire routine had changed, I started living somewhere with a new culture, I didn’t speak the same language as the majority of the population, I didn’t have the usual coping mechanisms that I did at home. I knew I would freak out, I just didn’t expect to be SO emotional (and let’s be real, my baseline emotions are already a little shaky, throw in an international move and we were rocking). I felt like I was being taken over by the eating disorder because, for the past five years, it’s been the easiest coping mechanism to go too. Neural pathways in my brain that told me to restrict and exercise we’re the first ones to activate, the more you use a pathway, the easier it is to go back to it, and when you’re stressed your brain goes for the path of least resistance (that’s right, I took psychology 100 in first year).
Only two weeks into my stay here I thought I wasn’t able to stay in Spain or face these emotions because I had the eating disorder - and that was the thing that always decided my fate for me, the ending to my story written like a predictable movie.
But then, it changed (I wish it was a one time sudden ‘AHA’ moment, but it’s taken years to get here).
The story wasn’t, I have an eating disorder so this is bound to happen and I’m bound to go home. It was, okay I have this issue, and it’s something I can deal with because I have the tools to do that. It’s something for me to overcome, but it doesn’t dictate what I get to do with my life.
It sounds like the ultimate cliche but I seriously hadn’t thought about the most obvious but daunting question; what do you want to do?
I’m so happy and lucky that I’m at a place where I can separate what I want from what the eating disorder wants. There were (and still are) times where that gets cloudy, but as a general rule of thumb, anything that is batshit crazy/self-destructive? Probably the bitch of a disorder.
A long-winded way of saying - this week has been good. Really good. Now, I’m taking control of how I want this experience to play out, instead of thinking that I have some kind of fate imposed on me. There are absolutely times where your mental health challenges/other labels have to be dealt with first. I’m not out here going okay I have those issues, but who cares let's eat tapas and drink vino (ironic)! I’m here with the ability and support system to continue my recovery, I don’t just have a tool belt I have a f*cking warehouse of coping strategies to help me get past it. If I didn’t have those and kept going down the ED path - one-hundred percent I would be home. In the past, the disorder got too strong and I didn’t use those tools, that’s when you know you need to go home, but I’m here now with the ability and resolve to use them.
I don’t feel like I need an eating disorder to define my identity anymore. It’s finally up to me.
I’m extremely grateful for that realization. I was stressed one afternoon because I couldn’t find a place to eat my snack (a petty problem anyone with an eating disorder can relate to), I was wandering coffee shop to coffee shop seeing what options there were, and I ended up sitting in the most beautiful square with the Cathedral to the right and the Palace on the left. The sun was just setting and horse-drawn carriages were making their way through the (you ready for this Kodak moment) cobblestone streets.
The problem I was stressing about, where to eat or what to eat blah blah blah - was SO minuscule. It wasn’t a problem. It’s living the way that my ED wants me to live, not living the way I want to live.
I sat down and did what I wanted to do. I wrote postcards, I read my book. I attempted to tan my ghastly pale complexion (the tanning mouse wasn’t exactly giving off au natural vibes).
You don’t have to live by your label, or what you think you “should be”. Today (and the last five-years duh) showed me that you’re just going to be miserable if you live by someone or something else’s values. When you think you already have your future decided because that’s “just how it is and you can’t change it”, as I do sometimes with the disorder, I just get so caught up in non-issue issues, I stress about things that I really don’t care about. I don’t care where I eat a snack. I’m in Sevilla. In a different country. Alive and healthy. Why the f*ck do I care about what I ate today?
Changing the story isn’t always possible. Right now, for me, it is. And I’m going to do it.
I feel like I can be someone who I want to be, not someone that a disorder, or other people, expect me to be. It’s not because I suddenly have a will to “work harder” either, I want to make that distinction clear. You need to be able to actually be healthy enough to be in the place where you can go after what you want, it’s not about just about “wanting it more”. I’ve wanted recovery for five years, if you recovered based on how quickly you wanted too, we’d all be fine. It’s not weak, or a lack of drive that makes people go to treatment or take time off. It's an amazing insight into knowing that they need help to get back to where they want to be, and that’s okay.