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.