Content note: This post contains honest reflections on anorexia relapse, depression, grief, and suicidal ideation. Please read gently if these topics may be difficult for you. I am safe while sharing this. My aim is to be real about recovery, to keep myself accountable in recovery while dealing with a lapse and not to cause harm.

Last week I woke up and felt completely back in the grip of anorexia. Despite my recovery, despite doing better than I had imagined, it was as if I got out of bed and stepped into my relapse slippers instead of my recovery ones.

Anorexia recovery is wild like that. Everything can be going well, and suddenly the rug slips out from underneath me, and it feels like I’m right back at my worst. Here’s how I am navigating the storm I’m still trying to get myself out of.

Wake Me Up When September Ends

Why did I wake up like this? I’d had the roughest night with cluster headaches and only four hours of uninterrupted sleep, waking at 2pm. Maybe it was that, maybe not – but I’m sure it played a part. Then I made another mistake: I weighed myself.

Logical me knows interrupted sleep and high cortisol from relentless pain affect weight. But logic didn’t matter. I was devastated that since my cluster episode started, my weight had been climbing every single day. I even dropped calories for a few days, thinking less movement was the cause. It made no difference.

It consumed my entire morning. I cried, furious at recovery, furious at myself. I wanted all the weight gain to stop – and if it wasn’t going to stop, I wanted to make it stop. I tugged at the growing patches of flesh on my body, repeating over and over that I wanted it gone.

I wasn’t acting rationally. I knew that. But I couldn’t stop.

Crying Mechanisms

When Clippy – my ED voice – makes a play like this, I know I need coping mechanisms. They’ve always been: wait it out, ignore it, keep eating even when I hate it, remind myself why I’m recovering, do something kind for myself, and don’t beat myself up.

This time, all of them made me cry harder. Ignoring it felt impossible with how loud Clippy was. Eating felt like one battle too many on top of the cluster pain. I couldn’t think of a single reason to recover. And I beat myself up for being here again in the first place.

I thought I was building an impenetrable castle – and maybe I am – but the concrete hasn’t set. Right now, it only takes a little pressure, like weight gain or cluster headaches, to punch a hole through the wall. Falling off the wagon felt like sitting in my castle, a wall collapsed, watching the rest crumble with every skipped meal.

Slipping Into Old Slippers

Yes, I ate less. A lot less. I thought it would be easier. Everything in me begged for relief – but not eating didn’t give me any.

My body was furious. I didn’t even get the old buzz from skipping food. Instead, I felt horrendous. Falling off the wagon felt intolerable, but so did climbing back on. I cried more because the old slippers didn’t fit anymore either. I cried because I could see I was making myself feel worse and still felt powerless to stop it.

It wasn’t just recovery that felt hopeless. My life felt hopeless. What’s the point of recovering if I’m only recovering into a body that lives with unimaginable pain? Cluster headaches don’t care about mindfulness or clean eating. There’s oxygen and caffeine, but I can’t avoid season changes.

How am I supposed to imagine a future when pain will always be part of it?

At 4am, severely underfuelled and crying between cluster attacks, it suddenly began to rain – heavy, relentless rain. I walked onto the balcony.

I held out my hand, trying to remember how much I loved the rain. Silly little reasons like that keep me alive as much as the big ones do. My son is my massive reason. But the little ones matter too: coffee, rain, the Interstellar soundtrack, my wood pigeon friend.

I stood there for an hour, watching and listening to the sheet rain. I had to remember what it felt like, because I couldn’t feel it. But something in me wouldn’t let me move. I thought about my best friend. How much I missed her. It felt like she sent the rain – like a hey, remember this? In my darkest hours it feels like she’s still with me, and I felt her in the storm.

By 5:30am, the cluster attack period had waned. I went to bed still crying, wondering how I’d ever sleep. I don’t know what’s worse – the pain of clusters, or the pain of grief and the thoughts that come with it. Thankfully, Quetiapine worked its sedative magic, and I finally cried myself to sleep still listening to the rain.

Nobody’s Gonna Know, They’re Gonna Know

When I woke the next day, I thought about how you can go through the worst night of your life and no one knows. You survive a war created by your own mind, and from the outside it looks like nothing happened.

And maybe you wonder why I didn’t call for help. I thought about it. But the last time I called, feeling the exact same way, realising I had relapsed after 12 years of recovery I was told “see you in March” – three months away. By then, my relapse had already held a tight grip on me. That phone call broke me. It made me feel like I wasn’t worthy of care, like I was bothering them by having a crisis.

It’s not just that they told me March. It’s that every time I call, I think this will be the time they actually help me. And when they don’t, I grieve for that hope all over again. That grief hurts worse than the silence, so now I survive alone. Somehow.

The battle of the night of the rain was over, but the war is still ongoing. I’m still depressed – of course I am, I’m still in the middle of a cluster episode, writing this between attacks, taking breaks to shove an ice pack on my head, down as much caffeine as humanely possible and breathing in oxygen. But the day after was different.

I remembered that wars aren’t always won by tanks or heroic firefights. Sometimes they’re won by a single silent infiltrator with courage – someone history forgets. That’s what recovery feels like: not loud victories, but quiet, unseen choices to keep going.

So that’s what I did.

I returned to eating maintenance. I don’t even know exactly how – just that wars are hard enough without me spraying friendly fire and sabotaging my own defences. I can’t wave a white flag, because underneath, I know those dark thoughts aren’t really me. Normally, even the smell of coffee or the sound of rain is enough to remind me why I keep going. And my son – I never want to leave him.

Depression doesn’t just cause explosive battles that take lives. It robs you of what you know to be true. That’s the scariest part. It steals every reason you have to keep going, every reason that keeps you eating when you don’t want to.

So now I have to patch this broken wall, even while I still feel the same.
To hope that one day, I’ll feel again,
The way I know I do about coffee and the rain.

Had to be this song. Linkin Park have kept me company during cluster headaches and depression. And because I have to keep moving forward, no matter what I’ve done.