What Recovery Means to Sarah

'Recovery isn’t something that you can package neatly in a box and pop up on a shelf with a sense of a job done. It isn’t linear.'

We're gathering stories from the SWEDA community and beyond, inspired by the prompt “What Recovery Means to Me”. We’re building this series as a resource: something for people affected by eating disorders to read, that can support them and inspire hope, or just hear that they are not alone.

This month, Sarah Rodrigues writes with honesty and rawness about her experiences with an eating disorder and what recovery means to her.  
 
Content warning – describes some ED behaviours 

"Firstly, I’d like to say how honoured I am that my long-ago colleague and still-now friend, Nerissa Shaw (Clinical Lead at SWEDA), thought me worthy of sharing my thoughts on my relationship with the monkey who’s inhabited my back since the age of 11. I’m now almost 52, so I guess we know each other pretty well.  
 
Except that, annoyingly, he knows me better than I know him, and he still regularly catches me off guard.  
 
I would love to write something here that encapsulates an end to the torment, and an answer to the problem, whether that problem has gone on for months, a year, or a lifetime. I’d love to draw a line under my own experience and to hand you all a magic marker to draw one under yours, too.  
 
But I can’t and won’t do that, because if there’s one thing I’ve learned after years of living with an Eating Disorder, it’s that Eating Disorders thrive on deceit and on secrecy. They gorge themselves on lies and on subterfuge, on hidden wrappers and stolen candies. They celebrate multiply-flushed toilets and claims of having eaten earlier. Every time we lie about food, we feed not ourselves, but our disorder.  
 
So for me, recognising this deceit was the first step towards recovery. Social media played a role. After years of posting picture-perfect photos of vibrant, colourful salads (#eattherainbow) the vacuous untruthfulness of it all was even more apparent. Perversely, I toyed with the idea of a toilet-bowl account, where people could see for themselves where my wholesomeness ended up, after a whole lot of retching and gagging. 
 
And this was an eye-opener too: many people associate bulimia with over-eating unhealthy foods, such as cake and ice cream. This isn’t always the case: sometimes, the mere existence of food - any food - in your belly can incite feelings of disgust, weakness and the need to purge. 
 
I’m aware that all of this sounds horribly grim and in no way akin to the ‘what recovery means for me’ brief. But in all honesty, these realisations were baby steps along the way to acknowledging that my behaviour wasn’t normal. That marking my thighs to measure every day wasn’t normal.  
 
It was exhausting, and all-consuming. And even when the numbers fell within the ‘right’ range - I was never happy.  
 
Inevitably, I got sick. Pneumonia. My weight plummeted with absolute zero effort on my part. There’s a video from that time, as I sit down in the park with my children: it looks like someone is folding down a beach umbrella; a 5’ 10” series of hinges. 
 
Naturally - and this says a lot about the society we live in - I’d never received so many compliments on my appearance. “Pneumonia really suits you!”:  that one was a corker.  
 
So then I was terrified of getting well, because getting well would mean not being thin.  
 
I saw various doctors about my disordered eating. The problem with me, it seems, was that I had a healthy BMI. “Well, you’re hardly wasting away, are you?” said one delightful chap. “You’re not fat,” shrugged another. The fact that my relationship with food had deteriorated to staying up late after my family went to bed so that I could chew huge amounts of bread and biscuits and then spit them into shopping bags seemed to matter not one iota to any medical professional. My mouth was ulcered and raw. My jaw ached constantly. The fact that I couldn’t bear the thought of food even entering my stomach and having to be brought up again - well, that was just EDNOS - ‘eating disorder not otherwise specified’. Not quite sure what we do about that one, sorry miss.  
 
Bear in mind that I was in my 40s and raising 3 kids at this time.  
 
And this is what brings me back to honesty. Eating disorders - all addictions - thrive on dishonesty. Untruths are what give them power, even while you think that your dishonesty is giving you power. It is not. It is weakening you; it is pulling you further into a grasp where you neither belong nor deserve to be.  
 
There’s a scene (showing my age here) at the end of the first Nightmare on Elm Street, where Freddy is after Heather, one of the sole survivors of the Elm St massacres.  
 
She turns and looks him in the eye.  
 
“I take back every bit of energy I ever gave you,” she says. “You’re nothing. You’re shit.”  
 
There will always be days where Freddy Krueger, or his Baskin Robbins equivalent, gives you a hard time. Where he looms over you and threatens to take you to a dark hole where a simple spoonful becomes a tub. But simply by recognising who, what and why this is, you have infinite power to make a decision that takes you one step closer to where you want and deserve to be. Acknowledging your relationship with food, recognising its difficulty, speaking openly about it in your own internal narratives and with people you trust … these are steps to recovery, whatever form that recovery takes.  
 
And I think that’s an important thing to note, as well: that recovery isn’t something that you can package neatly in a box and pop up on a shelf with a sense of a job done. It isn’t linear. There are times when I can happily eat three meals in a day, and others where I’ll limit my intake to ‘compensate’ for a so-called blowout. There are times when I’ll do my daily workout and know when to call it quits, and others when that devilish voice in my head tells me that I’m lazy and worthless, and that I should be going longer, harder, faster. There are times when I feign illness to avoid social gatherings where food is likely to be involved, and times when I’m the first one at the buffet.  
 
But I no longer lie about these things, to myself or to those closest to me. I can keep that voice in check by speaking openly about it, and taking away its power by removing the dark shadows of secrecy in which it flourishes. I may not always be entirely comfortable around food, or about my body and how it looks, but I do not starve myself, I do not purge and I do not lie. And that is, for me at least, what my recovery looks like."
 
 
Sarah Rodrigues – Travel & Lifestyle Writer, 51.