WBB ESSAYS
We Were Never Taught
How to Find a Healthy Balance
- Amy
We were never taught how to find a healthy give-and-take balance.
Recovery isn't a destination. I don't know when I reached it. I do, however, know that I don't have an eating disorder anymore. I am an attractive 20 year old Caucasian middle class female in a western country and therefore certain things are expected of me (to look a certain way etc). The pressure does not come from my friends or my family. The pressure comes from within. But it is not a 'natural' sort of pressure. I don't believe that girls are born believing they are fat, unlovable, undesirable, unintelligent, etcetera.
I have, over the course of my life, been bombarded with so many conflicting messages about how I am supposed to look and behave and think and feel. I have taken on these messages, adopted them, then turned them inward and directed them at myself in this same sick game that too many people in our society play. It goes much wider than eating disorders, alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, anything diagnosable.
It is the woman who spends her entire fortnight's pay on shoes in an attempt to make her feel better. It is the woman who sleeps with men she doesn't care for, just to feel desirable for that fleeting moment.
We are not taught how to find a healthy give-and-take balance. Maybe we should have been taught this in Personal Health and Development class amongst all those rubbishy facts the teachers tell us about eating healthy food, getting moderate amounts of exercise, not succumbing to peer pressure, not drinking, not smoking, not taking drugs, practicing safe sex, etcetera etcetera.
Society runs on this merry-go-round of success then failure, success then failure. While eating disorders are generally treated as serious (yet often misunderstood) conditions, we as a society ignore the 14 year old girls who slap their bellies and cry because they're "fat", shrugging it off as just a phase. Why are girls expected to have these phases of self-loathing, almost as if it is some sort of rite-of-passage?
Once we've acknowledged that these thoughts aren't 'natural', we can then choose how and whether we want to act on them. I am choosing, at the moment, to acknowledge and record some of my thoughts about what I weigh and what I've been eating. I am also actively making the decision not to 'act' on them. If eating cupcakes makes me feel guilty, I'll remind myself that they're a 'sometimes' food and that today was my flatmate's birthday, so it was the perfect occasion for cupcakes, really.
What other 'action' is there to take? Curl up in bed and cry? Shove my fingers down my throat? Work them off at the gym? No thanks. My Physical Health and Development teacher may not have taught me how to find a healthy give-and-take balance back when I was 14, but that doesn't mean I can't constantly be teaching myself, every day.
There is no ultimate destination. This is just life.
- Amy
