About Me

Seven years of my life—wasted. Seven years I’ve spent a slave rather than a free spirit dancing or falling in love or admiring my surrounding beauty. Yet looking back today, those years are so foreign, so distant, so vague, for I have conquered them. I have used those years to hoist myself up out of the hole that I’d been enslaved in. I’ve filled the hole with dirt and I’ve planted a beautiful garden upon it. I’ve won the battle.

The recovery process is really about discovering, revealing, dissecting and learning everything there is that’s possible to discover, reveal, dissect and learn. Once you understand why you use the disorder, only then you can begin to work on eliminating and replacing it with other things to fill the purpose that it served you. People don’t just have an eating disorder for no reason, although that’s what it seems, at first. But there is always a justification. A function. A mission. That’s why it’s so difficult to recover. Unfortunately it’s incredibly hard for people to find something that replaces the disorder—something to fill the uncomfortable hole that’s left in your heart. Because nothing seems to fit as conveniently as ED, at first. It feels awkward and useless, like trying to shove a cube through a triangular slot. And that’s what makes it so easy to give up, at first.

—denise

Open your mouth and try not to choke as the truth slithers up your throat from the pit of your childlike heart. Let it creep out, black and cold; feel its sour wetness burning the cracks of your chapped lips that you’ve been pressing on some cheap warehouse employee’s neck whose only long-term relationship has been with a bottle of room temperature Jack. You don’t know what love is. When the first thing that comes to mind when a child hears “dad” is the faded outline of the pack of Camel’s you kept in the back right pocket of every pair of Levis you owned, it doesn’t matter how many dance recitals you stood in the back of. Love isn’t being there when society expects you to be. It’s not showing up after five months because that’s what you do when your kid has a birthday or when you need to pick up the mail that’s still being sent to a place that you once called your own. You know, it’s funny; since you’ve gone this place never felt so much like a home. As I roast my brain struggling to figure out what hurts more—the awkward way in which my neck bends as you force artificial intimacy through something I interpret as a hug or the harsh memory of you pulling a worn out hundred dollar bill from your brown leather wallet as the words “happy birthday” apologetically slid from your aged lips—I find myself fighting fiercely to deny that the salt water pools on my thighs are because of you. Wishing for you to man up and trade your juvenile heart in for the one that I’ve needed you to have for the past twenty-two years would be rationalizing the damage you’ve done. But three glasses of wine deep, the clock hits 12:43 and instead of longing for love or success I can’t help but pray that you’d just give up on me. 

(Source: letstalkabouted)