WBB ESSAYS
Worth
- by Jen
I want to feel like I am worth something. I want to stop feeling like I deserve to feel pain. I want to stop feeling like a modern-day Atlas. The truth is, I don't HAVE to carry the weight of the world on my shoulders, even if this is what I desire. For me, recovery is less about a number, and more about a mindset. I just want to feel like it's normal to be a person- to be happy, sad, angry, and giddy, just like everyone else. Of course, I haven't reached this point yet, but "normalcy" is the mantra that keeps me going each and every day.
It's so easy to blame myself each time that I slip, for each lapse and relapse. However, I've already dealt with enough shame and guilt to last me a lifetime. These feelings of negativity only turn my mistakes into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if I have failed at recovery for one minute, hour, day, or even week, that doesn't mean that I am a failure as a person. Recovery is the strength to realize that a moment in time does not equal a person's character. I am so much more than my eating disorder. I am more than the sum of its parts: more than the voice that tells me to give up, more than the voice that tells me that I don't deserve happiness.
It's hard to move on from this point, to take each small kernel of happiness and process it, to learn from my mistakes and to move on. Each second that I don't let my eating disorder win, each television show that I let myself watch, each book that I read, each step that I take that isn't "exercise", these are all tiny victories. My war is huge. I don't believe that I have to tell anyone reading this piece that recovery is an easy, or a quick process. To say that would be a huge lie. I thought I was "recovered" years ago, years in which I enjoyed some sense of normalcy. Relapsing after these years was an enormous emotional struggle. How could I admit to my team, my friends, my family, myself that I had failed at anything, let alone something as important as my health and welfare?
I wake up each day with the hope that I will somehow find recovery behind a door that I thought was locked to me. When I am down (and these moments are often), I tell myself that recovery, normalcy, joy, happiness are beyond me, that I do not deserve to experience them. But even my deluded logic knows at heart that this is not the truth. Eating disorder or not, no matter what weight, in any state of mind, sickness, or health, I am a person. This fact is so hard to remember in the world of an active eating disorder, where a person is so often reduced to numbers and a set of symptoms. This essay is my attempt to say what I have struggled to fit my mind around for five years: I am worth something despite my feelings to the contrary. What keeps me going each and every day is the hope that my vain wish to embrace these feelings of self-worth will finally come to fruition. I AM worth something, just the same as any and all of you, and this fight, this battle, each and every tiny victory is important. One day, they will all add up. Even if the battle is prolonged and painful, even if it is never "won", at least the odds will no longer be stacked so strongly against me.
