*WARNING, could be triggering*


As anyone who has ever suffered from an eating disorder knows, it's never completely "behind you". It lies in wait for when you have a weak moment. It's just a fact.

Now, we can see this in two ways. The negative view finds this to be depressing. The positive (and correct!) view finds this to be empowering. Why? How can the knowledge that an ED cannot disappear forever be, at all, positive?

Simple. You are past the stage that you pretend the ED doesn't exist, isn't as bad as it really is, or that you don't really know how it works. You know how that shit works. If you have suffered from an ED and have been lucky enough to break it's cycle (Me! Me!) and enter a sort of "remission", you know what most of your triggers are. For me, they are letting myself ruminate over "problems" (half of the time these are made up or exaggerated in my mind), isolating myself, not getting dressed/exercised/showered until late in the day, eating mindlessly in front of the TV or computer, worrying inordinately about the future, and so on.

Now, guns are really only dangerous when they are loaded. So all of these triggers are pretty harmless without ammo, in the bulimic's case, food. Of course, for the bulimic in an attack, nearly anything can become a binge food, unfortunately. I'm past that point now, luckily, but I still have some bad behaviors that really foster ED behavior. Today is a great example.

I bought 4 boxes of Girl Scout cookies not too long ago. It was on March 3, to be exact. I was saving them. For what I don't know. But I was saving them in my room, where no one could see them. Hidden. I wouldn't be accountable to anyone or for anything if they were to disappear. And two of them did this morning, and I tried to cough it all up into the toilet.

I've been having some setbacks lately, and it's always with hidden food. The shame I feel about binging is enough to keep me from binging on "communal" foods these days (sometimes it didn't in the past). Not only because of shame, but also because I can objectively rationalize with myself that that food is for everyone so I can't eat it all and throw it up. That gets expensive. Something that didn't seem to stop me when I was bulimic but thankfully stops me now.

Now I feel like crap. I've showered, so that's nice, and I'm not going to lie, throwing up made me feel less bloated and more comfortable. But I hate that I let myself scarf down cookies to the point that they were no longer enjoyable, just like in the past, and for reasons unknown. Well, not completely unknown; mostly I was stressing about the future again.

I'm going to try to relax before work now. No running, no workout. I don't like to barf and then stress my heart, that feels like a recipe for disaster (or just heart attack). I feel like napping, I may let myself do that.

Be kind to yourself today.