Glad That I’m Alive

I must have tried almost 100 times to write this post, but every time, the thoughts come out jumbled and don’t make any sense; or they make me sound selfish, attention seeking, fake. Both of which end with me pressing the delete button. However, I know I can’t possibly be alone in feeling like this. I’m hoping that in sharing this post with you, however uncomfortable it makes me feel, it will let you feel less alone. I’m hoping that by sharing this, the guilt I feel for having these thoughts might finally lesson, knowing that I am not the only one that feels this way.

It seems to me that the only anorexics that don’t want to go to hospital are the ones who have already been there. I know that maybe that is because they have experienced the horrors of inpatient, but I think that a certain validation is achieved, that those of us who have never been there, are still searching for. Those of us to whom tempting death isn’t an option. 

I have craved validation and safety and help. I know I’m not alone in that. I’ve always felt that unless I got ‘bad enough’ to be admitted to hospital, I never really achieved anything – and there was no reason to my so-called recovery. Maybe it’s because I need people to know the pain I’ve felt, because otherwise it feels pointless, like I’ve suffered for nothing. Why do I have to suffer if no one cares and I don’t achieve anything. 

My mind is like a battlefield, the two sides fighting so hard that I can’t even work out what they are saying anymore and it’s all just one big jumbly mess that I can’t make sense of and its constant. It’s like that feeling mid panic attack when your thoughts are racing but it’s always and I’m exhausted. Recovery or relapse, I always end up somewhere in the middle, wishing for one or the other to take me in its arms and hold on tightly. 

Sometimes I hate the fact that I feel jealous of the people who are still so in the grips of the disorder, but that is the disorder trying to reel me back in, to pull me back into a miserable, terrifying existence. That is not what you want, you want the opposite of that but maybe you don’t know how to say it or how to feel it yet but you will, because life always finds a way, you know and I think maybe life is finding a way some of the time, which is a relief because it feels like it’s been too long coming to this. But eventually, soon enough, I will feel better and I won’t be as scared anymore and I can succeed at being me and not at being thin or broken or fragile or sucked into a glamourized illness, I can have a good old go at just being me and living the life I want to live, safely, without being watched all the time.

I can live at university and I can study, and I can be up till 4 am watching tv and eating popcorn, or fruit salad or pizza and it doesn’t matter because I will be free of all of the voices. And maybe it seems too good to be true at the moment, but maybe soon it might become reachable and I’m so thankful for the people who have helped me exist and not destroy myself from the inside out, because I tried really hard. And my disorder is here saying ‘not hard enough though, you didn’t try hard enough to destroy yourself because otherwise you wouldn’t still be here.’ But guess what I am, and I am glad that I am alive. 

Stay Safe,

Abbie xx

please note:  when I refer to anorexia I am talking from my experience and obviously all eating disorders are valid.