Today is May 4th (sorry again for being behind) – Star Wars Day. And I too am fighting my own dark side – the Darth Vader in my head known as Bipolar Disorder. Only I seem to have misplaced my lightsaber.

Emotional dysregulation and mood swings can happen in anorexia recovery — it’s common when your body and brain are adjusting to nourishment again. But in my case, those emotions aren’t just louder — they’re Bipolar Disorder on full blast. That’s what I’ve mostly been dealing with since my Day 4 update. I’m exhausted.

Anorexia Recovery’s Cruelest Trick

As I’ve said before, anorexia recovery’s cruelest trick, when you start eating more consistently, is that it shows you all the reasons you relapsed in the first place. There is no immediate benefit for me to “just eat more.” There is ONLY immediate mental turmoil instead. First, like my last day 4 post explained, there was grief. And now, the return of the more severe symptoms of my Bipolar Disorder.

I know this is how recovery is for me personally, because I recovered 13 years ago too. I know that this is a stage I have to eat through. I know what’s waiting on the other side:
getting hyperfixated with a million different things again,
playing Cyberpunk 2077 for hours,
ordering pizza with my son and just being there and not freaking out about it,
feeling fully myself — with real emotion, real joy,
not being so food-focused all the time (because ironically, recovery makes you way more food-focused),
looking outward at the universe instead of inward at myself,
and having a bath without bruises from my bones hitting the ceramic at the bottom.

Those are just SOME of the benefits.

But those are all MONTHS away.

Two Dark Sides

Anorexia is, ironically, an effective coping tool for my Bipolar Disorder. I’ve been in this relapse for over a year, and during that time I haven’t had a severe episode. That’s not something I could say while weight-restored — I’d usually have at least one really bad episode a year. The only episode I’ve had this past year — and it was milder — was in November and triggered when I started trying to eat more. It left when I fell off the wagon and started restricting again. Clippy (what I call my ED) gives me the one thing everyone with Bipolar craves: stability. And while I’ve done everything else I’m supposed to — meds, therapy, structure, all of it — nothing has ever worked as consistently as restriction.

I take my meds religiously. I still experience symptoms — meltdowns, mood shifts — and I’m not free from episodes, just cushioned slightly. The meds blunt the worst of it: hypomania instead of full mania, depressive episodes without the suicidal thoughts. It’s like taking paracetamol for a broken leg — technically, you’re medicated and it does something, but you’re still limping. My meds have reduced my episode frequency and the intensity enough to where they can be managed at home, but that’s about it.

There has been nothing more effective to manage my Bipolar Disorder than my eating disorder. Still, I’m writing this while actively trying to recover. Why? Because anorexia isn’t the answer either. It’s a brutal way to live and has already stolen a year of my life.

I know that what Clippy offers is a false stability, it is eternal flatness, no joy, no excitement, just hunger, emptiness and clock watching. But right now? I’m still grieving for it. Because I know what returning to my weight-restored life looks like: instability, unpredictability, and more brain chaos.

There’s no light side — only two dark ones, each with their own villain: Corrupted Clippy, or Darth Bipolar.

Grieving the Stability, While Grieving the Parts of Me I Lost

Every time I’ve tried to eat more to recover and get out of this relapse in this past year and a half, I’ve been propelled into a mixed state episode. This time was no different. That’s where I am. It unfortunately makes all the sense in the world.

Grief propelled me into a mixed state, and I ran from it and relapsed and “felt better.” It’s almost as if it never actually left, just sat there in the background this entire time, waiting for me to eat more to reenter it. Every time I eat more, I have in fact reentered this mixed state.

It also makes sense why this happens when I start eating more. My body is adjusting. Hormones are shifting. My intake is inconsistent thanks to Chaos Goblin’s 3000 Calorie Biscoff Event days (Chaos Goblin being what I call extreme hunger — the intense, biological drive to eat everything now) and me eating slower weight gain calories on others. My sleep is broken. My body is repairing itself. My routine is upside down. It’s a perfect storm for Bipolar Disorder, which relies on strict internal and external stability.

It’s also an absolute nightmare for my meds, which are affected by weight — which is changing DAILY — food volume, and gut function. I’ve seen it before: if I get physically ill, even if I keep meds down, they don’t work the same and I am at risk of becoming mentally unwell.

The reintroduction of Darth Bipolar is forcing me to accept the body I am recovering into, and that body has unfiltered Bipolar symptoms. This won’t be a recovery journey where I find rainbows, butterflies, and mental peace. It’s a recovery journey where I reenter a body that mid-bipolar meltdown looks eerily similar to Carrie Mathison on Homeland.

Yet, even while mid-Carrie-Mathison-in-the-woods-shouting-about-angels meltdown, I grieve. I grieve the parts of me I lost to grief itself. I grieve the parts of me I lost to my eating disorder. And I grieve the version of me I have to remind myself of daily — just to convince myself to eat. And I know the only way to get those back is to keep eating. To experience and go through this period of utter turmoil and deafening noise in my head.

Eating-Induced Carrie Mathison Disorder

Anorexia recovery is about finding who you are beneath the disorder. But there are times right now where I am not myself.

When I’m unstable, Bipolar can distort my values, my thoughts, even my perception of reality. At random points throughout the day, due to my brain having enough energy to elicit Bipolar symptoms but not enough for consistency, I crash deeper into the mixed episode recovery has landed me in with no warning or trigger. I become irritable, irrational, impulsive, emotionally explosive. I cry uncontrollably out of nowhere.

Yes, there are real emotions under it — grief, fear — but they’re exaggerated to the point of distortion. Everything feels catastrophic. Later, I look back and realise how far off the mark those feelings were. I still care, but not with the same urgency or intensity. The intensity wasn’t me.

I don’t think about the future in those moments. I don’t possess that ability — I just DESPERATELY want NOW to stop hurting.

This isn’t me — it’s the impulsivity and reckless combo that comes with a mixed episode.

And Clippy, sensing my vulnerability, offers a way to take the pain away TOMORROW. That’s how I fell off the wagon of my recovery at the end of last year: I was in a mixed episode, couldn’t bear it, and gave up. Restricting quieted everything down again.

When the chaos of the meltdown has subsided — probably because I’ve used all available recovery energy wailing like Carrie does while shouting “NO DAVID” repeatedly — I’m left with the deep, heavy sadness underneath. In that moment, I fully believe that this is how my life always was without my eating disorder, and how it always will be. That’s a pure mixed episode distortion. It isn’t true. I wasn’t always in episodes. But in the moment, I believe it 100%. So why wouldn’t I be manipulated by Clippy, when it’s offering me a version of life that isn’t this?

Honestly, I think anyone would consider it if eating food turned them into a sobbing, stubborn, impulsive Carrie Mathison from Homeland. Except instead of yelling about terrorists, I’m melting down over weight gain, unresolved grief, old wounds I can’t do anything about, and how stupid I was to think recovery for me was even possible.

Acceptance Is Key, I Think, But I Haven’t Been Able To

I’ve never been able to accept Bipolar Disorder. Living with it, at times, has been absolutely awful. But do you know what’s worse than living with Bipolar Disorder? Other people seeing me struggle and stigmatising me for it. That’s another way anorexia helps me survive socially. People judge me less harshly when that’s the label I wear. Of course anorexia is still heavily stigmatised, but it has not been as bad as having Bipolar Disorder and being a single mother.

I have dealt with terrible stigma. Questions about my parenting ability. People saying how I had no right to have children at all (I got diagnosed when my son was about 9 — bit late then anyway, isn’t it?!). The sly digs about how people with bipolar disorder are always terrible, abusive parents.

I am a good mum. My son says so. And he is 20 and has autism, so he’d absolutely be bluntly shouting about it if I was not. I devoted my life to being a good parent despite my many diagnoses. But it doesn’t matter how much proof you give — you are an abusive parent because you have put your child through this. But I didn’t choose to have this.

Then you confide in friends about the stigma, and have to deal with, “They didn’t mean it, they just don’t know. Why are you so upset about it” And while I do look the other way 90% of the time and give grace, no one considers what it’s like to hear that on a daily basis. It’s exactly why I had to leave my main Instagram account. I’m sick of looking the other way when they’re actively tearing mentally ill people like me down constantly.

Basically, I am pre-grieving reentering my real self, because that self has been heavily stigmatised for just existing with Bipolar Disorder. It’s incredibly hard to accept that I have Bipolar Disorder — or accept myself at all — when I’ve been judged, stigmatised, and ridiculed on what sometimes feels like a daily basis. It’s like that saying: “If enough people tell you you’re drunk, go home.” After a while, I started to believe I was worthless — simply because I kept hearing that I was.

But to recover, I know I have to accept the truth: the self I’m returning to has Bipolar. And if I don’t accept that, Clippy will always have a way back in. Because when I’m deep in a mixed episode meltdown, it’s easy to think that staying sick is doing people a favour — at least then, I’m not “burdening” anyone.

Back to the Swamp.

I’d love to tie this post up with how I’m going to go into the swamp and have Yoda teach me to wield the lightsaber of acceptance and being one with the emotional forces in my body. But it’s still missing — probably fell down a ventilation shaft on Cloud City. Maybe recovery and acceptance isn’t about finding my old lightsaber, but constructing a brand new one.

A lightsaber of truth. One where I live authentically and truthfully, no matter the consequences. I’m always thinking about the comfortability of others, and in return, they rarely think about mine. They’re exactly the kind of people who need a good lightsaber of defiance to the arm — instead of me almost disappearing in plain sight to make them feel comfortable.

It’s not going to be easy, and I don’t exactly know how to make a lightsaber — but there’s probably a wikiHow or something.
First things first: eat through and survive this mixed episode chaos.

BRODY! BRODY!

“Here is a gift, it comes with a price — who is the lamb, and who is the knife?”
– Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up), Florence + The Machine