Life After Anorexia

This is a follow-up to my last post, Giving Up Anorexia. I’ve spent four and a half years living in a world of food, eating normally, able to go out with friends and have meals, exercise without getting obsessive, and exist like a “normal” person. Having spent most of my life being anorexic, it’s still something of an adventure. I’ll still find myself at lunch with friends suddenly marveling that I can order exactly what I want and not worry about calories or fat content. I eat, pretty much, whatever I want. It’s liberating.

The hardest part about recovery is realising all the things you hid from behind starvation. I used anorexia as a means to deal with a world that I saw as frightening and overwhelming. I’d been bullied and abused as well, and anorexia was an easy means to make myself suffer more, to constrain myself and buy into a whole mental image of self-hate and low self-esteem. Starvation has an amazing effect on the brain: it makes you feel powerful and in control. It meant that as a teenager, it didn’t matter that I was being bullied mercilessly because I was starving. I felt superhuman being able to exercise for hours and hours yet only living on less than 500 calories a day. It’s an addiction. I could have dealt with the pain I felt with heroin or cocaine, I suppose, but it didn’t fit my lifestyle. Anorexia did – it made me feel strong and powerful in a way I never had before.

Living without it was tough, and dealing with what lay beneath, what I was running from, even tougher. It’s taken four years to see the depths of that low self-esteem and self-hatred. Not being anorexic meant dealing with the world in a different way, relating in a different way. It meant that I had to let go of my fear of living, my dependence on something else to make me feel better about who I was, and accept myself as me. I’ve only realised recently how pleasant and easy it is to live within the cage of anorexia, especially when you’ve been described as a terminal case. You never have to try to do anything with your life, you never have to face your fears. You’ve got that protection around you to stop the world getting to you and hurting you.

Suddenly, I had to find a new way of relating to the world, other people, my life and me. That has been a much slower process. My primary motivation to keep eating has been that I weighed so little it was agony. I had had major seizures and been hospitalised, and I was not prepared to go back to that, no matter how frightening the “real” world was. Here I was in this new world, starting a new life. I had to deal with the idea that I’m not a fundamentally bad person, that I could be accepted by others regardless of my weight, that “thinness” didn’t change a person in any way whatsoever, except physically, that it wasn’t the nirvana I’d thought it might be. All the problems that had made me want to starve were still there, whether I was skeletal or not.

Resolving those issues came after eating again, and it’s taken much longer to deal with them. I realised only recently that it’s all about how you see the world, and yourself, and having the courage to let go of the protection of negativity. I’d always seen self-hate as a form of shield, preventing me from really being happy because I felt I didn’t deserve to, wasn’t worthy. After years of spending most of my time with other anorexics, the one major theme that came out as we discussed our issues was a lack of self-worth. It takes time, and patience, to deal with those issues, to realise that you don’t need anything else to make you worthy or deserving of love or security.

At this point in my life, I rarely think about it. I’ve already written one book about living with anorexia, and I don’t feel the need to write another one. I can only speak, I will add and emphasise here, from my own personal perspective. This is my life and how I found means to cope with it. I’ve used techniques that work for me because of my personality type – they might not work for somebody else. My message though is fundamentally positive. It’s not a monster, a demon, a devil inside you. It’s something that can be overcome, and years later, looking back, I am grateful I had that experience – as well as the experience of depression – simply because it made me look more deeply at myself, who I was and am, and how I live in the world.

I don’t think of myself as ‘recovered’ or in any way associated with anorexia beyond the fact that I experienced it and it took up most of my childhood, the entirety of my adolescence and my early twenties. Now, I’ve discovered a fantastic new world where there’s no worry about what I can or can’t eat. Lunches and dinners are my favourite forms of socialising with friends. From being completely introverted I’ve become an extrovert, and found that the person I thought was bad, and hid from the world behind starvation, is actually loved and supported by a great many people. Life after anorexia doesn’t have to be frightening or intimidating. It can be fun, adventurous, and filled with joy.