Four years ago today, I started writing on this little corner of the interwebz. That first post was a sort of tentative “well, I guess I’ll give recovery a shot.” A lot has happened in four years. And sometimes I wonder if I would go through it all over again.
Four years ago, I had no idea that things would get worse and worse and worse and I would go to treatment three times. I had no idea that I would find myself in the ER more than once waiting for an admission to the psychiatric unit. I had no idea that I would lose friendships. I had no idea that recovery would hurt so damn badly that I’d rather have sutures than sit with the pain.
But I also didn’t know that it was possible to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then go along with the rest of my day. I didn’t know it was possible to just walk into the store and buy cheese. Just buy it – not spend ten minutes trying to figure out which was “best” only to walk away without buying any. I never would have thought that I would be stable enough to try to go back to school. (Shit, I never would have thought I could get off the treadmill long enough to fill out an application.) And I didn’t know that my friendships that survived would be deeper and more authentic or that I would pick up new friends along the way.
There is still that small voice in the back of my head that tells me everything would have been fine – would have been better – if I had never attempted recovery and just stayed in my eating disorder. Sometimes, I think that voice is very, very right. But on the whole?
Things are far better than they were four years ago.
And maybe, if I can remember that, I can hang on through the next four years.