Phase One: Stay Alive

[Trigger Warning: Self-harm, Eating Disorders]

The more I think about it, the more I see that everything was about control. The calorie counting. The self-harm. The obsessive exercising.

I would get angry at the people who loved me for making me feel guilty about what I was doing to myself. I thought, it's my body, I should be allowed to hurt it if I want to. It's my life, I should be allowed to ruin it if I want to. And I guess that was about control too. I had resigned myself to the idea that things in my life were going to go wrong somehow, so I might as well choose how. I might as well try to control the chaos.

The thing is, I genuinely thought that I was in control. I thought ‘sure, what I’m doing to myself isn’t healthy but I could stop if I wanted to’. But the thing is, you usually only realise that you’ve gone too far when it’s too late. You can only see that you are out of control when the damage is already done and in that you have forfeited so much more control than you believed you had gained.

You come to this strange stage between controlling the disorder and the disorder controlling you and in that sense, are you ever really in control?

I used to get so angry at people who said that happiness and recovery are a choice because I thought that if they truly believed that then they must also think that sadness and mental illnesses were a choice. Because if you aren’t choosing happiness, you must be choosing sadness. Or if you aren’t yet recovered you must be choosing to be mentally ill. Right?
This frustrated and deeply hurt me for a long time. But now, I think they were right. But the idea is much more complex than it may initially appear.

In order to recover you have to want to get better. But it’s not that simple because nobody doesn’t want to get better. Everybody wants to be happy and nobody wants to be ill. So, you go to therapy and you exercise and you eat healthily – 3 meals a day and 5 pieces of fruit or veg – because you would do anything to not feel the way you do. But it doesn’t work. You go to therapy but you can’t talk because of your social anxiety. You eat 3 meals a day, but rarely keep it down. You exercise, but for the wrong reasons. And you wonder why you don’t feel any better.

But recovery isn’t a simple checklist of do’s and don’ts. You must want to eat healthily because you’re deserving of nourishment. You must exercise with an appreciation of everything your body can do, not to persecute it for what it can’t do or to try and make it something that it isn’t. You must go to therapy and talk and be vulnerable and challenge yourself even when every cell in your body is telling you that you don’t deserve the love you are finally giving yourself, even if you believe them.

You must choose to eat when you feel so fat that you want to die. You must choose to go back into school after you’ve had a panic attack. You must choose to live when all you want to do is die.

You must give your all to your recovery and happiness, whether that means pushing yourself or allowing yourself to take a break because blindly following a set of rules isn’t enough. I wish it was.

“I’m at the point where going forward is easier than going back.” — Alice Hoffman, Green Witch 

And I wish I could tell you something better than ‘it gets better’ and ‘time heals all wounds’ because those clichés annoyed me too but they’re true. As far as I can tell there is this period of pain where you just have to allow yourself to be sad so that you can eventually choose happiness. That’s phase one: stay alive.

It’s like you’re tied to an anchor at the bottom of the ocean and until you’re untied you cannot try to escape, you have to focus on breathing before you can focus on swimming to the surface. Once you’ve done that you enter a different phase where you realise that you have to choose whether to recover or continue on autopilot through the darkness. You have to choose whether to swim or float along the ocean floor. You have to choose to do more than stay alive. That’s phase two: live.

That’s where I am now. I fought every day, I got up, I survived, I went to bed. There were countless times when I thought I wouldn’t make it, mostly because I thought that phase one was the only fight and so there was no point staying alive for another day only to keep surviving, without living. But now instead of ‘get up, eat, sleep, repeat’ I’m also choosing to go out and have some experiences, to try and challenge my illogical and negative thought process. I’m choosing to gain some positive control over my life.

So, if you’re still in phase one, keep staying alive because although everything looks, smells and tastes grey if you take it one day at a time you’ll soon see a glimmer of colour, and when you do, choose it. Choose the colour.

“As time goes on, you’ll understand. What lasts, lasts; what doesn’t, doesn’t. Time solves most things. And what time can’t solve, you have to solve yourself.”

— Haruki Murakami, Dance, Dance, Dance

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If you liked this post, you may also like my post about depression and suicide.