You may recover from an eating disorder and never think about it again.
You may recover from anorexia and relapse with bulimia and have no idea how to deal with it. Suddenly, your coping skills won’t work. Suddenly, you’ll be back in treatment. You’ll have recovered from anorexia. That won’t be your problem, much to the confusion of therapists. You’ll have to reevaluate your life and the things you thought you knew about yourself.
You may recover from an eating disorder in a year. You may recover from an eating disorder in ten years. You may never recover the way that other people say they have. You might have thoughts still, you might not.
You might come out with scars and stretch marks on your body, you might come out with scars and stretch marks on your heart. You might come out with both. You might gain weight, you might lose weight. You might be told that you can maintain and then gain weight and have to deal with the emotional consequences.
You might have traumatic experiences. You might not. You might know exactly where, why, when and how your eating disorder started, and conversely, you might have no idea. You might come from an abusive family, a chaotic family, a healthy family, a loving family, a family that tried their best and didn’t manage to be what you needed. You might come from no family at all.
You might relapse. You might not. You might need to go back to treatment, you might not. You might never need to go to treatment to begin with.
You might have anorexia. You might have bulimia. You might have binge eating disorder. You might have some other unspecified disorder that might not feel as serious but is.
You may have to drink extra supplements, you may have to eat extra snacks. And also not, for a multitude of reasons that aren’t always what you think. You may be female, you may be male, you may be a different gender entirely. You might be ten, you might be twenty, you might be fifty. You might be underweight or overweight or perfectly normal.
You might get dizzy. You might get headaches or cramps or skip your period if you get it normally, which you might not for a number of reasons unrelated to an eating disorder. You might also do none of these things.
You might watch other people eat almond slivers and quinoa and agave nectar for breakfast, fuck anorexia! You might do this yourself. You might eat doughnuts and waffles with syrup and butter but only as an excuse to binge. You might do either of those things but for the right reasons.
You might go in kicking and screaming, you might already hate your eating disorder.
You might have depression, anxiety, OCD, borderline, bipolar, schizophrenia, or any other mental illness to go along with the eating disorder. And then again you might not. You might frequent pro-eating disorder websites, you might scorn them. You might think you’re being healthy or you might know all along that this is wrong.
There is no correct way to have an eating disorder. There is no specified way to recover. There is only you. You have your own pain, and as such, you have your own struggles. But dialectically, you have your own joy, and as such, you have your own recovery.
