Through the looking glass life
I wanted to write a little bit more about the experience of going through Anorexia recovery- particularly my first year in recovery. It was a very strange experience for me because I felt as though I was in an alternate universe.
Now that might seem like a strange statement- but allow me to elaborate. In our world, the media, the government, the news, our friends and family, all push us to lose weight. We are encouraged to exercise as much as possible, to avoid the foods society labels as “bad”, to ingest less overall. It is commonplace to hear that someone is on a diet, or that someone has a new workout target, or to hear someone proudly boast that they lost x amount of weight. We encounter the collective societal push towards thinness all day, every day. Diet ads appear on TV and in our magazines, shows like Revenge Body and before and after weight loss insta pics glorify the act of shedding pounds. Because of all this, actively trying to GAIN weight felt incredibly strange. Like breaking the rules of being a human in the western world. As friends gave up chocolate for Lent, I pushed myself to eat some chocolate every day. As colleagues posted about their new PB run times, I patted myself on the back for staying away from the gym. Not being able to squeeze into my jeans, a larger number appearing on the scales when I stepped onto them- for me, these things were met with celebration where for so many others they were met with horror.
It was for this reason that I felt like I was living in some weird parallel universe to the one in which my friends lived. But although I was living my life in the topsy turvy world through the looking glass, I couldn’t be fully free of the real world in which weight loss was king. I still had to attend school and hear classmates discuss their workout regimens and diets- all things that were off limits to me. I couldn’t block out the sounds of people discussing how they had eaten x amount of calories and lost x pounds. When the news came on in the evening and demonised weight gain, I felt sheepish asking my parents to turn it off.
So, how did I cope with this strange alien feeling of living a completely opposite life to the whole world around me? First, I sought out accounts of those going through recovery like me- instagram pages (like @cati.angela), blogs like this- hearing the stories of other people living through the looking glass made me feel less alone in my parallel universe. Then I told the people I trusted- my closest friends and family, my boss at work, my pastoral team in the sixth form I attended- what I was going through. This meant I didn’t feel like my recovery was some big secret from everyone. It meant that with those trusted people I could celebrate my weight gains the way other people celebrated their weight losses- and that normalised it, made me feel less alien. Of course, some people I told weren’t supportive and I’m sure I’ll write about them in a later blog, but most people were supportive. And they helped more than they can possibly know. Not by doing anything big, by the way, just be telling me that they were proud of me if I told them I’d gained weight or eaten a fear food. It made my recovery feel less like rule breaking and more like progress.