Disclaimer: This post contains vivid, chaos goblin-like descriptions of reactive eating. If you’re sensitive to ED topics such as bingeing, please feel free to skip this one.

However, if you’re up for the actual unhinged and very non-aesthetic reality of the starved chaos goblin I turn into in early anorexia recovery – because I ate a biscuit – while Biscoff the bear looks on, concerned and slightly judgemental at the fact I stole his box of biscoff weetabix, then this post is for you.

It’s been a minute since I did an anorexia relapse recovery update, and there are a great many reasons for that. Mostly, all of the reasons have to do with the superposition that recovery is.

Recovery is a very UNHINGED version of the Hokey Cokey, quite similar to when I used to watch The Magic Roundabout repeats at 3am in the old days. Something always felt very off about hearing that theme tune echoing into the silence at 3am. I take one tentative step into recovery by putting my toe in the water, then get scared and pull it back.

Then, somehow – through a combination of extreme hunger and a moment of bravery – I run headfirst into an entire box of Biscoff biscuits. Afterward, I climb out of it with my tail between my legs, drowning in guilt, shame, and feeling completely out of control, while being shouted at by the deranged, corrupted version of Microsoft Clippy (my ED) in my head. And all the while, my head is hurting physically, especially at night.

UGH Cluster headaches.

I’m in a cluster headache episode right now. I wrote about what they are [here]. It’s felt like one mountain too many: I’m fighting on all fronts at once, with limited energy left after the relapse, and the cluster headaches draining whatever scraps remain. I’m exhausted, tired, weak, mentally drained, and mentally unwell from the lack of sleep, on top of having bipolar disorder which requires strict routines to keep somewhat mentally stable.

I’ve only recently realised I’ve lost the energy to do things I used to be able to do, like being social on the internet, commenting on other blogs, and even writing posts. I still try when I have a moment. The cluster headache post took me days to write. It’s taking everything just to exist right now and to stay on top of responsibilities; there’s nothing left for anything else. Yet still, I am trying to fight Clippy and stay in recovery.

Clippy Patch Notes 27/4

I have been trying to get to maintenance calories by adding small increases to my own tailored meal plan. I’m still walking that path, with varying degrees of success. Some days I surpass it, other days I retreat and don’t reach it. Some days are much harder than others – made harder by the fact that eating more food gives your brain more energy to actually feel your feelings and be more emotional.

That’s great when it’s joy, love, laughter – I am laughing with my son more, and loving my Jellycat bears even more. I get braver on those days. But it’s not so great when you’re depressed, riddled with guilt and shame, and missing and longing for your best friend more than you ever have, because you’re finally eating enough to grieve. It’s been really rough. A lot of staring out of rainy windows, crying.

I have not cried as much in this whole year of relapse as I have in the past few weeks. Crying is now a daily occurrence, and I know I have to sit in it and not run into the paperclip arms of corrupted Clippy – but some days, I really struggle not to. I feel very alone, and Clippy feels like the only thing there for me. What I really want is WeeGee. But I don’t have her. The only other thing that has been there for me throughout my whole life is Clippy.

I can see the logic. I can see that Clippy is not WeeGee. Clippy is hard, cold, mean as fuck. WeeGee was comfort, softness, love. But when I’m vulnerably crying at a rainy window, hugging my bear, I have the temptation to do ANYTHING to make it stop. However, for me – someone who has always swallowed these feelings – allowing myself to cry at all is huge. I probably shouldn’t downgrade what an achievement it is: sitting at a rainy window, crying my eyes out – more than when I finished Mass Effect 3 for the first time – with sad songs playing in my noise cancelling headphones. Emotions aren’t all that increase when you eat more, though.

The Night of the Tea and MANY Biscuits.

I wrote in my [last ED-related post] that I added tea and biscuits to my meal plan, for nostalgia reasons – because they remind me of the comfort my nan gave me. One of my only comforting food memories from when I was a child. I did indeed add them. And I did eat them. However…

Whenever I try to increase my meal plan, whenever I eat even a little more, it sets off what I call the, Recovery Chaos Goblin. It causes a full system panic, and I turn into a starved chaotic food goblin intent on devouring everything in my kitchen. It doesn’t stop even when I’m full – it only stops when it is satisfied. In my body, it feels the exact same as low blood sugar, it’s a panic attack, but one that will only ever be settled by eating a large amount of food. It’s called “reactive eating” in recovery spaces, and it’s a completely normal aspect of anorexia recovery.

It’s also, at the same time, in my opinion, part of the eating disorder itself. Clippy is incredibly black or white: when I eat something it doesn’t want me to eat, it screams, “You’ve blown it now, might as well eat everything.”
And I do, in fact, eat everything.

After the tea and biscuits, I bolted to the kitchen and then all of a sudden there was a giant mug of hot milk. Sixteen more biscuits to dip into the milk (malted milk, custard cream, chocolate malted milk from Marks and Spencer and of course Biscoff biscuits – it feels important to mention). Four cookies. A white chocolate bunny. A white mocha (definitely too artificial tasting for me, still NOTHING has beaten my Americano, but I drank it anyway).
A LOT of cheese on toast – Which, by the way, I could barely taste the toast under the mountain of cheese, and I got angry that it took so long to melt. Because I was panicking, I hacked off more cheese from my formerly giant, now not-so-giant block and ate that while waiting.
HEAPED peanut butter on toast. More spoons of peanut butter straight out of the jar.
A GIANT bowl of Biscoff Weetabix with Biscoff biscuits crumbled into it (highly recommend under more normal circumstances).
and finally, spoons of crunchy Biscoff spread. Biscoff the bear was happy about that at least.

Then, with a very painful stomach that feels like it’s about to pop – because I’ve eaten way past full and more calories than I usually eat in more than two days, all in about 30 minutes – the chaos goblin of recovery finally abates.

And as it leaves me, its parting gift is guilt, shame, despair, severe digestive distress, a lot of saying, “What have I done?” out loud to Biscoff the bear while crying my eyes out, wishing that I didn’t have to go through this, simultaneously hating myself because I caused this and the heavy feeling that I’m really, very alone in this.

I try to feel less alone by going on TikTok, finding recovery accounts, looking up “What I Eat: Reactive Eating” – only to find that they ate one extra bowl of cereal.
Meanwhile, my giant bowl of cereal was the dessert course for my chaos goblin.

Even recovery spaces can make me feel alone.

That’s why I’m writing out the unhinged behaviour of my chaos goblin here even though I feel so much shame for it. If you’re in recovery, and you had a night like mine – you are most certainly not alone. In the old days, we used to blog about it honestly and compare levels of unhinged chaos goblin behaviour. Please know: this is normal. And so is the aftermath.

The Aftermath of the Chaos Goblin

Immediately after reactive eating, I sometimes get brave. Sitting in shame, sweating, spiking with severely high blood sugar, drowning in guilt – I want to NEVER experience reactive eating again. The only way to be sure it doesn’t happen like this again is to not restrict. So I come up with better maintenance and even weight gain plans, ideas of going to Greggs for lunch the next day, and the desperate thought: “I can’t do this anymore. I have to eat more food.”

I wobble to bed, struggling to stand up straight from the pain, my abdomen super tight, my belly harder and more distended than when I was pregnant. I lie on my left side and try to sleep, made harder by cluster headache attacks, made even worse by double-digit blood sugar and a digestive system louder and more annoying than your neighbour’s terrible choice in music at 3am.

But, I wake up as someone entirely different. The bravery is gone, and I am desperate to undo what I did. This has happened four times now – once a week – every time I try to increase my intake, and every time I feel like I have to undo it.

My blood sugar still being high the next day doesn’t help. I feel severely nauseous, and eating would only make that worse. I’ve eaten when my blood sugar was high before – and let’s just say, without details, it would be a fruitless exercise – so I have to wait for it to fall back into the normal range. This causes restriction by means of blood sugar but also because I’m so scared and full of regret.

These reactive eating episodes cause a temporary weight fluctuation that I desperately want to fix, and I convince myself that I shouldn’t get back on the recovery wagon until it calms down. The only real effect it’s had on my weight, though, is to keep me stable for the past four weeks.
So at least there’s that: I’m no longer losing weight. Yeah, it doesn’t exactly feel like a win really.

In trying to hit maintenance through slow increases, my body decided the best way to get there was to turn me into a chaos goblin – and completely ignore the fact that I also have reactive hypoglycemia. “Bodies are so clever, they know what’s best!” No, they ABSOLUTELY don’t. Anyone with a health condition knows that. Bodies are dumb, and regularly crave ice when they’re anaemic.

It’s one of the reasons I can’t go “all in”: I would just be dealing with blood sugar chaos every single day, at the mercy of constant highs and crashes.
And that wouldn’t be great for the mental superposition that recovery already is.

Sitting in the Superposition of Recovery

Most of the time, I feel like I am both in recovery and not in recovery at the same time. Sometimes it changes day to day. Sometimes it changes hour to hour. It’s absolutely EXHAUSTING. I have to listen to this internal war of collapsing the wave function of recovery and not collapsing it ALL day EVERYDAY. The cat is alive and dead, and I am freaking out about both scenarios.

One minute I’m crying my eyes out, wanting to go back and restrict, desperate not to gain any weight whatsoever. An hour later?
“I’m going to do recovery. For my son. For pizza. For Cyberpunk 2077. For Jellycat bears. To be myself again.”

Sometimes it’s even both at the same time. “Yes, I want to play Cyberpunk 2077 again. But I also absolutely and desperately don’t want to gain any weight”. I end up trapped in this awful cycle of eating and simultaneously not eating. I guess I’ve always found a kind of comfort in the superposition – even if it’s a fucking awful place to live.

The brave moments – the moments of clarity – I wonder if that’s the real me. Those thoughts feel closer to who I know I actually am, and I try to honour her when I occasionally hear her. Occasionally, because she doesn’t stay with me all the time yet. I don’t think she feels safe enough. She’s still hiding.

Tonight though, she asked for peanut butter toast. I was actually hungry, so I just went to the kitchen, made peanut butter toast, and ate it – for her, for me – and somehow it made the regret and fear feel like they were for someone. So far, the chaos goblin has not seized this moment of togetherness with myself, and I know that’s what the real me wanted. It was “over” what Clippy had planned for me. I was brave, even though the reactive eating happened only a couple of days ago.

I then continued to eat my planned snack after it, even though I – at the same time – desperately wanted to skip it to “make up” for the peanut butter toast.

Maybe that’s how real recovery starts – peanut butter toast shared with myself and my Jellycat bear in a moment of bravery. Just working with the bravery, working with the real me, and not being too hard on myself if I wake up tomorrow as someone else. The real me hid for a reason.

The song for the post, for the lines,
I run to the river and dive straight in
I pray that the water will drown out the din
But as the water fills my mouth
It couldn’t wash the echoes out.

Pretty much what recovery is like, also I love Florence and the Machine