One Flew East, One Flew West

I’ve said too much (I haven’t said enough)

May 20, 2010 at 10:27 pm (Uncategorized)

I don’t believe in recovery.

ok, I should stop starting or titling posts with stuff like that, or I’ll lose all interest factor and become like the boy who cried wolf! in any case. obviously that’s not literally what I mean, there’s a tad more to it than that!

being healthy* and retaining ties and friendships with people who are still very ill inevitably brings up the dilemma of ‘how do I help?’ ‘can I even help?’. in one sense the answer is obvious – no. no one could help me when I was ill, save flapping around trying to keep me safe and effectively talking in a language I didn’t understand. but now that I’ve spent nearly five months effectively in the process of ‘fixing myself’ and arrived at a place I couldn’t even imagine at the start, is there mileage in explaining my choices or decisions to other people? obviously, this becomes an even more pressing subject when you have a public blog
(* given my professed disbelief in recovery, I refuse to describe myself as ‘in it’ in this post! so excuse my necessary alternative words and understand that healthy isn’t used to mean a bmi number )

the problem I have with the concept of ‘recovery’ is in the opposition of it. recovery versus illness. right versus wrong. black versus white. quite beyond the entirely misleading moral implications that go along with descriptions of recovery as the ‘right’ thing…it’s not that simple. as least, the way my mind works and the way I frame my own experiences, I can’t see it that way. while right now the idea of using ED behaviours confuses and baffles me (why would I want to do THAT? ) that’s completely and utterly influenced by it being MY perspective, from this moment, in this body, with these experiences. people are not the same, and I was not the same even six months ago. honestly, I used to be diametrically opposed to recovery. it made absolutely no sense to me, and you could have told me that that was just a function of the illness until you were blue in the face, I wouldn’t have believed you or even understood what you were talking about. a huge thing that I came to understand over the past few months is that medicine and convention pathologise everything about eating disorders, but that this means nothing to the experience of the individual. fair enough, some scientist somewhere may one day be able to quantify and pin down the neurological processes that make someone opposed to recovery. but it doesn’t mean shite all when that’s the position you’re in, because your thoughts ARE your reality. ‘truth’ is relative to the experience of the individual. and this is why I’m uncomfortable talking about ‘recovery’ as though I’m ‘right’…(even though I’m fairly sure I am, lol, but again that’s a decision made relative to my own experience)

see all of this might somehow be productive and even helpful if I could pin down a decision I made to ‘move’ from illness to health. if I ever weighed up the pros and cons and came down on one side. but that didn’t happen. what I did do was take a risk, a risk which I almost certainly believed would destroy me. but it wasn’t with the intention of ‘changing’ myself into a ‘reformed, recovered’ person. first came the grudging decision to add five hundred calories to my day, in order to quiet the terrified voice in my head telling me my nine lives might run out soon. then to eat pizza and a tuna melt panini because somehow a path opened up in my head which I hadn’t even seen as an option before, and my curiosity is such that I can never turn something like that down I almost can’t believe that the cumulative effect of decisions like that ended up with me where I am today. it’s bizarre, and it certainly wasn’t deliberate.

another aspect: what I actually DID to improve my health. there’s a ‘process’ for this too, a model that I’m supposed to believe in and have bought into. but in a strange way, I didn’t and I don’t. I think this is a matter of the way you frame it. conventional ‘recovery’ says you have to gain weight – this is non-negotiable. in the world of facts and truths, this is undeniable. but that wasn’t how it happened for me. once in treatment I was told ‘think of this as a way of improving your quality of life’. that was said to me in a total ‘harm reduction’ sense, but it actually turned out to help me in a far more positive way. it turned out that, once I was gaining weight, I became averse to doing anything else because of the benefits I saw from it. certainly I made ‘rules’ for myself in order to make those decisions easier to handle. but they were MY rules, not the rules of some shadowy treatment professional over my shoulder. not the pressure from a conventional ‘ideal’ of recovery. in a sense, the past five months have been about finding my own way, and the more time passes, the more I find myself questioning the concept of ‘recovery vs. illness’ itself.

whether I am happy? of course. but elaborating on this is almost pointless. my memory of the time where words meant nothing to me is far too strong. sure, I can paint a great picture of recovery. I’m intelligent and good with words (apologies…this stream of consciousness is far too long to include a paragraph on humility ). I can also write about the horror and the emptiness of my life with anorexia. I’ve certainly done it before. but when I look back at those posts, even now I can see the strange appeal of the descriptions. in practice, hell no fuck off never going back there, I almost shiver at the thought. but it’s probably a flaw of the human condition…the strange allure of the edge of the cliff. hell, even Milton’s Satan seems pretty damn charming when it’s all written out in a powerful and evocative voice (excuse the introduction of my latest revision to my story here!). I could try to express how much happier I am until I’m the one blue in the face, this time. but I can still see my old self, who never really believed any of it until, well, I got here. and I’m so damn stubborn and headstrong that no ‘belief’ or ‘trust’ could help me in the most difficult moments, when I was alone with my own thoughts and the desire to turn backwards was almost pulling me apart. I had to find that for myself, and again, take the risk.

so I guess the conclusion of my strange musings is this. trying to ‘promote’ recovery (and not even in a deliberate way, it almost slips out when you’re so happy about what it’s done for your life!) feels fairly futile for me. but I still feel some kind of hope when telling my story, so to speak, because even when I look at it in the non-conventional sense of accidentally stumbling on health, I can see that the ‘impossible’ is very much possible. even us ‘hopeless’ people who sit around listening to the ‘gospel’ of recovery and wanting to run out of the church can still improve our lives beyond recognition. and yes, part of me is still that hopeless person. always will be. but that doesn’t mean I can’t change and haven’t done so, cause, well, I’m living it.

now I feel like I went round in some sort of philosophical circle, like the poets who wrote long tracts about the deficiencies of the form of poetry. I guess I still can’t help sliding my ‘truth’ in there a little but it seems important to me to explain the divergences I feel with my experiences and the conventional ideal which I felt my ‘recovery’ would have to fit into. cause I’m sure I can’t be the only one I know this will all be irrelevant for lots of people, cause, well, everyone with anorexia isn’t the same! as my rant on pathologising everything about the illness would seem to indicate! but it feels fairly important for me.

also, this wasn’t all conceived for the benefit of getting it out there in public! I’m beginning to feel like the next step for me IS accepting my dislike of ‘recovery’ as a concept, and moving away from it as an identity. it seems like in some ways it sucked me in, and I don’t want to build my life around what I used to be. incidentally, don’t worry that that will be a great reason for me to stay underweight/not watch out for signs of relapse despite intending to move towards life as a ‘regular’ person, I intend to be the kind of regular person who still takes care of their body and their health