It's all my fault...

[unknownuser]

.......................

[Amaryllis]

You've had to go through some really difficult times. Eating disorders are life-changing and other than the wisdom you gain from it, it really doesn't serve a good purpose. My post might not fix all your problems but hopefully it'll lighten the load for you - just a little bit.

My weight creeped up way over my pre-anorexia weight as well. It's still up there and I won't lie, I hate it. We feel a tremendous amount of regret, regret, regret. Sometimes I really wish I could turn back, start over and never go on that stupid diet that ruined my life. I want to suck out all the fat or cut it out. To stop eating, to be thin again. For food to -just be food-. For the pain, the regret, the self-loathing to go away. To get my life back.

You understand. That's the thing, Julie. You understand. You know how it feels to loathe yourself. To be -hungry-. Famished. Lifeless. To be bigger than you want to be, to be alone, to not even have yourself on your side.

Empathy is an amazing thing. The ability to understand and help others. That's why I would ever go back to my pre-ana days, if it meant I would lose my memories of how it felt to have eating disorders control me. You can make a change, you can be there for those like us, to point them in the right direction so they don't have to go through what you went through. You're stronger, braver, better.

When you were skinny, did you love yourself? Did you think you were thin enough? Did everyone suddenly love you more? Did life brighten up? If the answer's no to any one of those questions, then the problem isn't that you're "fat" (which you are not) or that you're not "good enough."

Happiness starts from the inside. You know when you plant a seed, you dig a hole, plant it and it first grows underneath. And then it curls out of the dirt and grows into a flower and even then it has roots underground.

Your future, dreams, ambitions, friends and life have hardly anything to do with your size and shape. Eating disorders eat away at your energy and admittedly, I struggle with food everyday and sometimes I'm afraid. Afraid that this will never go away.

You are not your eating disorder. It may feel like that's all you are and have, but once you start -making- yourself live and creating a life, food no longer becomes the only thing you ever think of or care about.

I used to not sleep, partially because I was too thin to and partially because food bombarded every inch of my head. Food. Hunger. Calories. Food. Food. Food. I loved it and I hated it. But, you'll be glad to know, along the line of recovery, food began to fade into... Not nothingness. But just an occasional nagging.

We're not there yet. We're not as recovered as we could and will be. But we're getting there. Keep going. One moment at a time. It's hard to believe that you could have any meaning or be -worth- anything. But you are. Your eating disorder has just glazed over that a bit. But if you keep pushing yourself to like yourself and eat normally each day, things get better.

Fear holds us back but you and I, we understand fear. Because for a long time, fear was all we had. Fear of our weight. Fear of food. Fear of recovering. Fear of losing the eating disorders that we clung onto for so long.

But you still chose to recover. I did. You put on the much needed weight, though you were afraid. And perhaps you still are, because I know I am. I've never lived a week without fear. But as Redmoon said: Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.

You might not be there yet, but you're closer than you were yesterday.