This week has been an absolute rollercoaster of extreme emotions. I have emotional dysregulation at the best of times, and yet here I am, trying to recover from my eating disorder while also dealing with the completely normal emotional dysregulation that comes with recovery. It’s been a mess. Because I’ve spent so long suppressing my emotions through restriction, I’ve cried more this week than I have in an entire year.

“Learn To Sit With Your Emotions :)”

I know I’m supposed to feel these emotions. I know I’m supposed to sit with them instead of running to my anorexia-based coping mechanisms. But knowing that doesn’t make it any easier. It’s not a comfort when I feel like I’m drowning, struggling to keep my head above water. Sometimes, the Sisyphean boulder I’m pushing just tumbles over me and I can’t get out from underneath it. Continuing to push it when you’re underneath it? Impossible. Sit with it and accept it? But it’s too much pressure, it’s too painful, I’m paralysed by it, I can’t even breathe.

My emotions are also triggering, which means I’m very fearful of them. Thanks to trauma, my brain has learnt my emotions are dangerous — they’re to be contained, and I am wrong for even having them. For safety, for my continued survival, it’s best to shut it all down. Because that’s how I survived my childhood.

My ED, Corrupted Clippy, has weird rules about food — like how crisps are fine but potatoes are ABSOLUTELY NOT — and those rules, I’m more able to contend with. I can laugh at the logic, even challenge it. But what about when I’m already under a giant boulder of grief, trauma, and my own emotions, and it reaches out its paperclip hand and says,

“I can make this boulder a rock instead.”

I try all the self-care. I do art. I hug my Jellycat bears and tell them my problems. I take my meds. I journal. I play video games. I research physics concepts like Loop Quantum Gravity and apply what I learned to my whole life, and it gives me meaning. I take pretty bath bomb baths and light candles while thinking of WeeGee.

I make my room all cosy with string lights so I have a nicer place to cry in. I try to validate my feelings while the world, at the same time, invalidates me daily just for having them. I even try mindfulness and meditation, even though — for some reason — they always make me worse and trigger a meltdown.

Some things help more than the mindfulness fails. Art, when I can physically do it, helps. Blogging helps even more. But nothing has ever worked as well as my eating disorder when it comes to making my emotions feel tolerable. Nothing I’ve found in the last 13 years of recovery has come close. If it had, well… I wouldn’t be in a relapse, would I?

I’ve worked hard. I’ve done the emotional regulation therapy. I’ve done the worksheets and the workbooks. I’ve done everything I was told to do, even though some of it sounded ridiculous – It baffles me that they’re still quoting Freud when his coping mechanism was cocaine. How is my ED any different?

Why despite all of this work am I still drowning?

The Other Side of the Boulder

There’s another side to the boulder — when I’m standing on top of it, with my joy, my passions, and my intense love.

I don’t just spend time with my son. Every time we’re together feels like Christmas — so much so that Christmas itself feels like just another day to us. I don’t understand how people like my parents exist. Treating my son badly feels impossible when I love him this much. I gave my entire self into being a good mum to him — because that’s the kind of love I have. That’s what love IS to me.

I don’t just play video games. I immerse myself in different worlds and feel like I’m living there. I love the characters in the game, feel such deep empathy for them, and they feel like my friends.

I don’t just make art. I sink into my art pieces, explore new mediums, and search for the ones that feel most authentic to who I am. I work hard to get better because I care that much.

I don’t just collect Jellycats. They all have names, stories, meaning — each one feels like one of my children. Each one is a symbol of something or someone that I have loved deeply in my life.

But when I reach for Clippy’s paperclip arm, trying to save myself from drowning in grief, trauma, and the weight of my emotions — it doesn’t discriminate. It mutes these things too.

I still love my son more than anything in the world. But Clippy has stolen my presence with him. I’m so deep in my head from the effects of undereating that I couldn’t share pizza with him on his birthday. I feel horrible about that.

I can still make art — but it’s not the same. Sometimes while drawing, I feel the energy burning faster than I can replace it. I’m not creating, I’m counting down until I can eat again. I don’t get to fully immerse myself anymore.

And video games right now feel like just games — like Candy Crush or Tetris. I’m not transported to another world, I’m just wasting time clearing lines. My brain flat-out refuses to let me enter Night City. I’m too underfed to cross the border. The cost of admission is too high. Clippy won’t let me pay with calories.

There are many reasons to recover.
I know them. I feel them. I tell myself them over and over again, hoping to brainwash myself out of this.
But how do I not reach for Clippy’s hand again the next time I start to drown?

Because having my intense love return — it’s part of the problem too.

To feel intense love
is to feel intense grief
for everything I’ve lost.

And that’s exactly the boulder I’m under right now.

Of course it had to be Linkin Park for this post :-