I explained in my previous post, “Here We Go”, how I ended up relapsing from anorexia recovery after 12 years, but I made it sound far more simple than it actually was for the sake of brevity. Almost as if, the anniversary of WeeGee’s death, who if you haven’t read that post, was my best friend, made me suddenly wake up and now I have anorexia again.

The truth is, the anniversary of WeeGee’s death wasn’t even the start of my relapse, it’s just the day I realised I was already in a relapse. Anorexia recovery is like building a high walled castle, that you stand in the lookout tower and defend against incoming hostiles. Those incoming hostiles in recovery, instead of armies from other kingdoms, are stress, life events (even good ones), your own brain’s critical thoughts, an illness that causes weight loss, weight gain, trauma, grief and many more. Basically, you learn to defend your castle from these hostiles because you know these hostiles won’t ever stop trying to attack and if you let your guard down just once, cracks in the walls begin to appear and your castle becomes vulnerable to collapse. Your castle needs to be guarded every single day of recovery to stay in recovery, and it’s tiring and sometimes you feel like you need a day off, but you’re the only one who can guard the castle. People sometimes wrongly assume that someone who is in recovery is “fixed” when actually, what they mean by recovery is that they are working so hard without a break guarding a castle.

Even with all of your defences in place, sometimes hostiles can slip through the cracks in the walls without you even realising, and it can take your whole castle collapsing before you even notice. The silent destruction of my castle is exactly what happened to me, even after 12 years of guarding my castle every day, my castle was still vulnerable to collapse. I guess part of me wrongly assumed that after 12 years of only minor dents in the walls that I was able to quickly patch up, nothing could breach my defences. I thought my castle walls had become impenetrable so much so that I thought I was able to stop being such a hypervigilant lookout, take a break, and go and play Cyberpunk 2077 in the game room to help me escape and hide from my grief. After all, dealing with grief is tiring too, and sometimes you just need to drive around Night City for a while and play any other storyline except your own. I was so focused on the game and the grief I was running into Night City to hide from, that I didn’t notice the walls around me start to crumble.

The Hostiles conduct a well orchestrated siege

When I look back, I know now, what and who the hostiles were but at the time I was so convinced that my castle would keep me safe and I was so out of it from running from grief that I basically let them barrage my castle. I slept through it. One of the hostiles was the body composition changes that happen when you’re 40. It started happening in the middle of 2023, I suddenly noticed (because I have always avoided looking at my body) way more fat on my body that spilled over my trousers that I didn’t have before. I was completely unprepared for this to happen and it was an unexpected enemy because I didn’t know I would care about it. When I was younger, I always hoped that by 40, I wouldn’t care anymore so if that change happens, it’ll be fine and I wouldn’t care. Even though I know anorexia nervosa is a mental health problem, it’s not as simple as caring or not caring about what you personally look like, also, these changes came with a host of really not fun hormonal symptoms, some of which I needed medical treatment for, to check it wasn’t cancer which was so triggering to me given I had just been through that with WeeGee. At first, with the changes I could see, I panicked that this meant I had suddenly gained a large amount of weight, but when I got weight checked by the doctor, it was the same as it always was. I had maintained the same weight for about 8 years, every time I would go to the doctor it would be the same. I would have lapses, and by the time of my annual weight check, I had got myself back on track. I was relieved that I hadn’t gained any weight so I tried to ignore this new body I have that now has way less muscle, and way more fat which made it look unrecognisable to me. Until…

The next hostile approaches my castle with a big armoured tank, weight gain. In November 2023, despite eating exactly the same foods all the time (I also am currently being assessed for ARFID so when I say exactly the same foods all the time, I mean it literally), the meal plan that I had used to maintain my weight for 8 years was suddenly making me gain weight, and quite rapidly. I want to avoid using weight, calories and numbers here on my blog, so let’s just say, I was at my set point, in the healthy weight category of BMI and not at a minimum (yes BMI is crap I could write a whole post on that, but just so you know where I was without being specific) and suddenly my meal plan was causing me to gain even more weight. The meal plan that I had used for 8 years, and I felt comfort and safety from following, was now trying to attack me, and made me feel completely out of control. What if my weight gain continued this way? It was also my birthday in November, and I turned 40. I didn’t even celebrate it, I just wasn’t “there”, still hiding. I knew I had to hide from it because it triggered me in the sense that I had become the same age that WeeGee was when she died. Her 40th birthday sucked because cancer sucks, and it was the last one she ever had.

The next hostile infiltrated my castle like a double agent. In December 2023, it was actually the day before Christmas Eve which is without a doubt one of the worst days you could possibly think of to have this done, I had one of my wisdom teeth removed. I had no reason to think this would go badly, apart from missing out on an abundance of turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce sandwiches anyway. I have had other wisdom teeth out in those 12 years and have been absolutely fine. However, this time, I couldn’t eat properly for about 2 weeks, and in those 2 weeks, I lost the weight I had gained from my meal plan no longer working and I, unfortunately, liked it, and really didn’t want to gain it back. I didn’t see this as a problem either, even though I’ve trained myself to know a sudden fear of weight gain is a giant red flag. But because I was just back to the set point that kept me safe from anorexia for the last 8 years, I thought it was fine; I had just lost the “extra” weight. I guess I hadn’t considered the fact either, that my set point could have changed. Hindsight tells me it might have changed as losing this weight made the eating disorder thoughts in my head come back hence why I felt like it infiltrated me. Being under your set point is a recipe for disaster. You can be any weight when this happens, it is different from person to person, it is basically when you’re under whatever weight your own body is happy with (which is one of the many reasons measuring an ED by BMI is absolute crap, you’re underweight as soon as you slip below what your body is happy with, not when BMI tells you so). This made my brain work against me too, and I didn’t even notice that the critical awful eating disorder voice was back in my head. It has this way of making you think it’s been there all along, that it is normal and a part of you.

Finally, a biological weapon attack, the last hostile was iron deficiency. Later on in December, I had the results of my blood test back, the blood test that was conducted before I had my wisdom tooth out and it turned out I had iron deficiency. My anaemia was then probably made a lot worse owing to the wisdom tooth procedure and also missing out on all those turkey sandwiches, no I am still not over it. It completely weakened my castle’s defences both on the inside and out and attacked my body and brain at the same time as my castle. Anaemia is terrible for making you feel depressed, and too tired to fight at the same time. It hurt me in more ways though, it made me think again about how my meal plan was completely wrong both in terms of how much, and thought to myself if it was “right” it wouldn’t have led me to be iron deficient. I suddenly started thinking about how I needed to be more “healthy” and changed what I was eating which became more and more restrictive. Another giant red flag is labelling food as healthy or unhealthy, but I didn’t see this either or the wanting to restrict my food, because I had gone gluten free for an entire year in those 12 years and was absolutely fine with it. “Going gluten free didn’t trigger me at all, so this will be fine too”, I actually wrote this sentence in my journal ffs.

The Realisation of the Devastation

On the day of WeeGee’s anniversary, January 13th 2024, I finally looked up from my controller in the game room of my castle and realised I was no longer sitting in the safety of my castle, I was instead in the aftermath of an attack that completely devastated and collapsed my castle. Not only that, I was also now finally overwhelmed with grief for my best friend after running from grief for 4 years. I entered some kind of messy meltdown that lasted about 3 days and I was really scared for my mental health, it feels like I still haven’t recovered from that meltdown, I just stopped crying so it looks less messy. I felt so completely overwhelmed by the prospect of having to rebuild the castle brick by brick, that I guess I ran away from that too and just accepted my castle was now demolished. I didn’t give up though, I just gave in. Fascinates me to know that even after so long in recovery, anorexia can still be your brain’s autopilot, it was running in the background like one of the many apps on my phone I never close. I was also, finally, after running from it for so long, so devastated and paralysed by grief that I didn’t have it in me to rebuild, I didn’t feel strong enough anymore and even if I did rebuild it, I didn’t have the fight I know it takes to maintain it. I had become a ghost of the recovery soldier I once was, and unfortunately not like the soldier Ghost from Call of Duty, instead a shadow of my former self. My recovery journey so far has only been to patch up dents caused by lapses, I’ve never had to rebuild the entire castle from scratch since the time I initially recovered with a whole team of medical people waiting to help me and even more importantly, WeeGee. But here I was alone, with all of this mess and it just kept getting worse because now, it is October and I’ve been stuck since January.

I guess this blog will be the story of rebuilding my castle when I get around to feeling strong enough to do it because I know I will rebuild it at some point, or now in a minute as we say in Wales. I know relapses are part of recovery and this isn’t the end even if it feels like I’m in a war of my own making surrounded by devastation. Having a blog, and meeting my best friend there really helped me through recovery last time. It wasn’t just WeeGee either, it was the connections I made through blogging, through the comments and posts from people going through the same struggles as me, and just the action of being truly myself and sharing the thoughts in my head. I owe WordPress a lot for that. I’d love to hear from you if you’re going through anything similar, together is stronger, especially in recovery, we can talk about maintaining, or even building our castles together.

Here’s your song reward for reading this far :3 It’s how I feel about where I am at right now in song form, the lyrics are perfection.

*Images in this post and on my blog made by my teen, find them here