When I look back on all my favourite people in my life, I love them for the way they make me feel. For their smile, their grace, their energy, their spark. I remember feeling loved and cared for by my primary school teacher. A gymnastics coach in high school had a way of making me believe I could tackle difficult skills. My university lecturer marked in a way that highlighted the strengths in my writing and had me wanting to work even harder. When I think of a particular work colleague, I can’t help but smile – he has a way of lighting up every room he walks into.

In recovery, you don’t need to ‘find’ anything. You are not lacking any tool or essential quality you need in order to recover. Every thought, every action, is taking you one step closer to your eating disorder or one step closer to recovery. Every thought and every action is a creation of the next moment in your life.

When did you first put your mask on? More importantly, are you ready to take it off?

When I think back to that time I can remember the rush of adrenaline through my veins. When I pause though, and pay attention to what else I was feeling fragments come back to me. The lethargy in between the adrenaline. The isolation. Foggy thoughts. Dizziness. The drill sergeant in my brain, always commanding. The immediate terror I would feel on waking - having to plan out my day.

I was tired. No, exhausted. When I say I had nothing left it is no exaggeration. The thought of the next hour of life felt insurmountable yet here I was being asked to do all the things that terrified me. Eat food. Keep it. Sit on my butt and not exercise. I didn’t have the energy to fight the anxiety if I did the recovery thing, yet if I continued in my eating disorder I wouldn’t be getting additional energy anytime soon.

Having lived in both hemispheres I have been exposed to all versions of ‘recovered’ in the eating disorder world. In medical terms there is criteria for a broken bone and criteria for a healed bone. There is criteria for being diagnosed with cancer and criteria for remission. When it comes to eating disorders, there is no standard criteria that is agreed upon in order to define recovery.

As you step into recovery, your body may change...and your beliefs, behaviours, biases and values will go through a software update as well, because these are the things that got you into an eating disorder in the first place.

Having an eating disorder is more than a full-time job, it becomes a lifestyle and a way of being. I don’t need to tell you that going to a party is analogous to being put in a washing machine. A cacophony of thoughts, all competing for your attention order you to eat this and not that. Another sector will run the bargaining campaign, if you don’t eat this you may eat that. A third part of the chorus will conduct a running commentary on how you look and who is watching you, all while keeping a black book of ‘social blunders’ it can use to beat you up later.

Never going back means exactly what it sounds like. The distinction, however, is that never going back is a choice. As someone that is recovered, I do not fear falling into eating disordered behaviours or thought patterns. I do not fear that I will be blindsided or tempted or swayed. The thing about knowing is you cannot unknow it.

This is the part I like to call ‘no-man’s land’. It is where the eating disorder (the tiger) is no longer working for you, but recovery (the absence of the tiger) isn’t yet delivering on its promises. No-man’s land doesn’t have a timeframe or a compass. No-man’s land has a plentiful supply of fog, obscuring your vision of what is ahead and giving you no sense of the ‘right’ direction.

You can choose to do ‘a little bit of your eating disorder’ if you want to but there is no such thing as a little bit of an eating disorder because the truth is, an eating disorder is like a termite. It chews away at your insides until one day your house (life) falls down around you. So no, 80% doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for birthing a baby, for driving to work, for going to the toilet or handing in an essay. The fact your ED is trying to get you to do 80% is a big red warning sign it is gearing up for an attack on your recovery.’

Diet culture is everywhere. I often have clients say to me ‘I feel like I am the only person that eat 3 meals and 3 snacks a day’ or ‘I’m like the only person in my friendship group that eats carbs.’ Sometimes, that might 100% be true. Diet culture has become the ‘norm’ in today’s society. It is hard to find someone that has never been on a diet, never wanted to lose weight, never felt the weight of comparison, judgment or pressure to be something other than they were.

Our experience of life is often contributed to luck. The typical view is that our experience is a result of what happens to us. That life is random, that some people are just “born lucky.” But the truth is we contribute to everything we experience in life. While we can’t necessarily control what happens to us, we can control how we respond.

The high of being recovered is a thousand times higher than any high I ever had in my eating disorder. Sometimes storms don’t come to destroy our life. They come to clear a path. My path asked me to make peace with being alone, feel my feelings and lean into true freedom.