The Child

Recovery represents a new life, a new beginning. I knew this all along, but now, this concept takes on a new and profoundly beautiful relevance.

For not only does recovery mean a new life for me, free from the shackles of the eating disorder. It also means that, from my body, new life may be brought into the world.

Me this Summer

I've been with my boyfriend for almost a year now. Something I haven't really talked about on my blog; for at first I didn't discern a connection between my relationship and my recovery.

For through this extraordinary and beautiful boy I have found both life, and beauty, in a place where there once was only barrenness. Being in love has taught me alot about recovery. It has showed me what recovery should be like, and could be like. For when I am with him it is like I almost feel normal. Normal and more alive than I have ever felt, in the whole twelves years of my illness.

He has made me realise just how badly I want to be free.

Free, to make our own life together: and, perhaps in time, to create new life through children.

There was once a time I was repelled by the thought of having kids. I love children and always have done; but yet, when it came to the thought of having children myself, my whole being would recoil with fear and abhorrence. Because being a mother meant being a woman. And being a woman meant gaining weight and leaving my thin, stick-limbed child's body far behind.

For me, once; a distant possibility.

For me, now, a close and fundamentally life-changing new reality.

For now I no longer have a child's body: my body is that of a young woman. Just yesterday, I bought my first  D bra. Having been wearing B bras since March this year, it did not escape my notice that my breasts, over the summer, had continued to grow.

Hard to believe that once even my tiny little A bras were much too small for me.



I now have the body of a woman; the body that the person that I am was meant to have, long before now. Now all I need to do is accept it; and perhaps, in time, I will learn to embrace it.

And it is through love - the love of my boyfriend, my Mam, my best friend, and my readers - that I have come to realise that I need not fear being healthy. For being healthy will enable me to fulfill all my dreams and aspirations; for being healthy, I know, will enable me to live my life to the full. A life free from restriction, irrational fears, and obsession about my weight and my size.

It's began, now. And I am near the end of the road. Not there yet; for there is still much to do; still a hill up ahead, for me to climb. But the light is shining, strong and true, through that little chink in the wall; like a beam of golden sunlight pouring forth from the cloud-shrouded heavens.

Now all I need to do is dismantle the bricks that encompass that hole, and step through, into the light.

Finding my own Way

And as the night creeped in like a stalking leopard, so too did the familiar feelings of uncertainty. The claws of doubt raking through my mind, the sharp-toothed fear biting deep into my spine. The jagged self-disgust opening wounds that everyone else thought long since healed; the burning anxiety, roaring like a savage beast, terrible and formidable, in the shadowed recesses of the night.

That anxiety throbs perceptibly, a beating pulse of its own. Every feeling, every thought in my head gradually leads straught back to it, as if they are all connected by a complex channel of veins.

And this is how I feel every day and every night: the constant anxiety, sweeping in like a wave; advancing grimly like the hingry predator, ready to take and kill and destroy. And then all I've ever achieved seems as insignificant and intagible as dust motes blown across the barren desert.

I feel like I have hit a brick wall, a brick wall across the recovery path. It does not appear crossable, while at the same time there are minute cracks. Minute cracks that permit me the barest glimpse of the shimmering idyll lying beyond.

And I can't help but feel that there should be a way across this wall. But I can't help but feel immobolised by my society's definition of what is beautiful in a woman. Slender, tall, and usually done up with layers of makeup which completely change the natural look of a woman's face.  Being less than 5ft 1 and never having as much skill as far as make up applying is concerned, I never felt as if I stood that much of a chance. But I used to be thin. Used to be. But now I am not. And now I feel as if that small, barely significant claim I once had to being even a little bit pretty has been taken away.

But now, as I stand staring wistfully at this wall, I realise that there is something that I could do, right now, which could well enable me to traverse its steep side.

That being, to just start following my own heart, my gut instinct, about what is right for me. After all, no one knows myself as well as one single person: that being, I.

It's time for me to stop trying to fit in to other people's model of recovery.
Those who just see recovery as a simple restoration of weight. This hit me hard when I was talking to Mam the other day. Having refrained from telling her my true feelings for a while, I endeavoured to explain to her the swinging ambivalence upon which I find myself precariously balancing: one minute, feeling ok about my body, and the next minute, full of disgust and self-loathing, adamantly affirming to myself that I am fat and longing with an incensed passion for the "good old days" when I was thin and emaciated.

She had shook her head and told me that she thought I had long since "gotten over that".
I wanted to cry. But I didn't because this merely confirmed what I had already expected. In the eyes of many, I am the "recovered girl". Noone sees or knows the struggle that continues to ensue between I and anorexia.

But there are those in which I have found understanding.

And through that understanding I have began to mold my own vision of what is a recovered Emmy. And that is what I am aiming for now. The perceptions of the others who do not understand, I must learn to pass me by.

For whereas I used to see such judgments as having the strength of those rearing, monstrous waves that have the power and the ferocity to drag me into the sea, I now realise that I was wrong. I now realize that they are more like gentle, curling breakers. Breakers that swirl and rush about my feet, but which do not possess the power to knock me straight over. They do not have the power to drown me.

I just need to stand and hold my ground, in these shifting sands.

My recovery should be about...

What is right and healthy for me.

Me. And this might not necessarily fit in with the perceptions of other people. How could it possibly do so; when those perceptions are in themselves flawed - they are uninformed, inaccurate; shaped by common societal ideals instead of  proven research about real recovery - in both its physical and mental aspects. Rather then perceptions, they are misconceptions - misconceptions about what recovery from anorexia really looks like.

And it shouldn't all just be about how it looks.
Rather, it should be how it feels. How it feels, deep down, inside.