What Recovery Means to Nerissa
What Recovery Means to Nerissa
"Recovery to me is hope fulfilled, all the therapy and help I had and work I did over years, even when it felt totally futile, eventually meant my forest could regrow."
We're gathering stories from the SWEDA community and beyond, inspired by the prompt #WhatRecoveryMeansToMe. 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. We also want to raise awareness about how recovery is not a fixed or 'one size fits all' concept: it's something unique to each person and their own hopes for a life in recovery from disordered eating.
Nerissa Shaw, 50, SWEDA Clinical Lead
I would say that I have ‘recovered’ – more on this later - from my eating disorder but I would add a caveat – that this doesn’t mean it has gone away entirely and that I don’t need to be vigilant about what is happening with my eating habits and, more importantly, what is going on inside my head.
I see illness and recovery as part of the landscape of my life. If you could look at my life like a forest from above, you would see areas of destruction and barrenness, you would see areas of scrub and young trees – new growth, and you would see areas of full grown, healthy trees. Some of the destruction is caused by the life events we all experience but lots of it is from my eating disorder and other mental illness issues I have had in my life over a period of many years. I’m pleased to say though that lots of that destroyed forest now has new growth on it. Some of it is very young – tiny saplings and small bushes, and some is a bit older – bigger trees, and I hope that, one day, these areas will grow and fill out just like the full grown healthy sections of the forest. Recovery has taken many years, and some regrowth has happened sooner, some later. Some bits still remain barren and maybe they will forever – I don’t know yet.
What recovery means to me comes in different parts. Firstly, it means a strangely new but welcome and, dare I say, good relationship with my body. I now see my body as belonging to me, as something I can invest in, and a welcome part of my identity that I actively want to listen to, understand and work with. The feeling of my body being an ally rather than something I hate, want to punish, do not want to think about, or look after or nourish is something I am still getting used to.
This is a new thing for me, it isn’t something I lost and have regained, it’s something I never had before and I find it amazing and weird but so, so welcome. It’s something I never thought I would feel.
Secondly, recovery means seeing food in a new way. Before recovery it was something to be feared, something to either love or hate, something that dominated my life. I felt totally controlled by it and powerless around it – like it was some fierce dictator at the heart of everything. I saw that others did not feel the same way about food, and I knew in theory that this was possible, but it felt like something I would never experience – that I just wasn’t made that way.
Now I feel that it wasn’t really ever food that was those things, it was a part of me. I am not really sure how and when that changed but at some point, something did change and then that change progressed and slowly but surely, I have come to see food (most of the time) as something that is important for good health, something to be enjoyed, something worth tasting, a way to help my body and mind be at their best. I feel interested in food and curious about it. It is a substance that is not, in fact, imbued with an inherent evil waiting to destroy me. I get flashes of that old way of being, but I feel like I have enough real experience of this new way of seeing food to remind me that the old way is wrong and not real.
Finally, I think that recovery is not an exact science. I would say I’ve recovered but I wouldn’t say I’ll never have a ‘blip’ or even a relapse. It would not be true to say that I never think about eating disorder behaviours or even do them. But in this phase that I call recovery, I’ve been able to stop, think and check what’s happening, make choices and get back on track rather than spiralling downwards as I once would have done. But allowing myself to use the term recovery makes me feel a sense of being able to move on and get on with my life which feels beneficial. I appreciate that some may not want to use ‘recovery’ in the same way I do, and I fully respect this.
Recovery to me is hope fulfilled, all the therapy and help I had and work I did over years, even when it felt totally futile, eventually meant my forest could regrow. It isn’t the same as it would have been but that’s OK – being changed by things is inevitable. Grieving for what was lost, is ongoing work.
