Dismantling Otherness in ED Recovery
A big part of ed recovery is dismantling the barrier you have built between the ‘you’ and the ‘them’. As much as you crave normality, there is this nagging fear of being ordinary. At some point along the way your eating disorder has become your identity, and to stray from the rules that you have set in place would be to oppose everything you have come to know. There is a certain safety in staying within such clear-cut boundaries, right and wrong becomes clearer, the decisions, the responsibility, is out of your hands.
I get it, you’re surrounded by people who proclaim junk food as a vice, liken calorie-dense foods to ‘sins’ and say that they’re ‘letting themselves go’. So when you ‘don’t like’ the things that others are ‘unable to resist’, you feel superior. You become The Healthy One, and your eating disorder becomes another mask you can hide behind. When all you want is to fit in, restriction and disordered rules feels like an easy way to be involved in a society that doesn’t make sense to you.
It’s easy, but it’s killing you.
To place yourself on a pedestal is to reject the vices of society; but it’s also to reject what it means to be human. It’s to reject emotion and laughter and memories and connection. Maybe you’re admired, but do you really want to be admired for letting yourself remain in this world of gut-wrenching, soul-crushing fear?
Maybe you let the eating disorder in because of the lure of being able to fit in, and maybe you felt you did for a while. Maybe it felt easier for your deep-seated otherness to manifest in rules and restriction. To walk into a store and to see a clear divide between the food for ‘you’ and the food for ‘others’ gives you a reason to feel different, rather than some innate fault separating you from everyone else in the queue.
And, look, I can’t offer you a solution – if I did, I wouldn’t be in this situation myself. All I can say is that an eating disorder doesn’t make you superior, it makes you sick.
An eating disorder won’t relieve your otherness, it will only accentuate it.
An eating disorder won’t make you happy, it won’t help you fit in, it won’t solve all your problems. It is a life-threatening illness that strips you of the life you want to know, it’s not a solution. It’s not admirable. It’s terrifying. It’s isolating.
So next time your family is ordering the food that you would never let yourself near, remember that it’s your food too. You’re allowed to let yourself join in.
