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This topic turns the perspective around on me as DWED’s content writer, which is a little daunting, but here goes...
I still struggle with my eating disorder, I still have days where I don’t want to get up and face the world let alone engage with an audience, but I have come a long way since my lowest point, and I believe recovering is a process which is ongoing, not linear or with a specific measure.
Most of all I know that what motivates me is life, experience, interacting with the world.
Keeping busy means I don’t have time to pander to the eating disorder. It jumps up and down like a devil on my shoulder and it scolds me for not giving it attention but I try my hardest to tell it to pipe down or even to just shut the hell up!
Hospitalisation can be crucial to saving your life if in acute danger, but long term, I don’t think it works. Everyone is different but I have yet to meet anyone that has recovered without concrete achievements and endeavours to grasp on to.
Someone very dear to me said, “why do you think the people that recover seem to be the busiest people you know, Claire?” Food for thought, that. Work is not everything of course, but any kind of distraction is initially a far better source of activity than indulging your eating disorder. In time, and distance from those self-destructive associations, being more relaxed with yourself should become easier to bare.
It’s certainly a learning process. The most obvious thing that inspires me to keep going most of all is to write. It is the one thing I have always valued in myself. Recognition of that has been thickly buried when my disordered self-loathing has been ripe, and so I uncover it and blow away the dust with words across a screen whenever I can.
