I’m still in a bit of a mess with gastritis. If you read my last post, you’ll know that taking iron tablets to help my anaemia triggered an iron-induced gastritis flare. Unfortunately, that has created a roadblock in my eating disorder recovery, simply because I can’t eat normally right now.

It has also given me far too much time to think. Moving tends to aggravate my nausea, and yesterday while attempting to clean out kitchen drawers I nearly made myself sick. Naturally, instead of stopping, I tried to push through it for the sake of the Biscoff-crumb-filled cutlery drawer. In hindsight, I should probably choose my battles more wisely.

So most of what I’ve been doing instead is self-reflecting while trying to remain as still as possible. I’ve been wondering why this particular gastritis roadblock suddenly feels so unbearable, especially considering I’ve been stuck in a kind of superposition with recovery for months.

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Urgent Rhio – The Many Wave Function Collapser

Throughout my life I seem to operate in two modes: Urgent Rhio, and Scared Rhio.

Urgent Rhio needs to solve all of her problems RIGHT THIS SECOND, because everything is URGENT. I’ll become restless, anxious, convinced that even long-term consequences might arrive TOMORROW if I don’t change something TODAY. The best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, so obviously I need to plant it RIGHT NOW.

When Urgent Rhio shows up, I don’t just open one box. I run up to the box, rip it open, and then immediately collapse five more wave functions I’ve been meaning to sort out.

A good example of an Urgent Rhio spike was, funnily enough, about ten years ago. I was moving house and at the same time decided to quit smoking and completely change my diet. Suddenly lung cancer wasn’t some distant statistical risk anymore – it was a problem RIGHT NOW. I became incredibly anxious and spiralled into OCD thinking that I already had it, constantly body-scanning for clues.

I WAS A BIT BREATHLESS MOVING HOUSE. OMG.

I also have Bipolar Disorder, and unfortunately Urgent Rhio can destabilise that too. Any one of the things I mentioned – quitting smoking, changing diet, moving house – could trigger mood instability on its own. Doing all of them at once often led to episodes, burnout, and spirals.

The problem is that Urgent Rhio is temporary. Once that surge of urgency fades – as it always does – it becomes much harder to maintain the changes. I have to find other reasons, more immediate reasons, to keep doing them.

With smoking, for example, I calculated how much money I would save by continuing not to smoke. That worked. I haven’t smoked for ten years now.

But it’s much harder with things like health risks. Lung cancer risk reduction happens slowly, over years. Once the urgency fades, it suddenly feels distant again, and I don’t care in quite the same way.

Sometimes I also crash from trying to do ALL OF THE THINGS RIGHT NOW, and depression arrives. Depression doesn’t really allow you to see the future at all. So it can feel like I have no day-to-day discipline, only bursts of enormous change followed by exhaustion and being annoyed that I have to now continue this change because it’s, “Good for me or whatever”.

And then, there’s the Scared Rhio I have to deal with more regularly.

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Scared Rhio – The Personification of the Superposition

The persona that shows up most often is Scared Rhio, sitting in a superposition for months, paralysed by the thought of any change whatsoever.

It’s Scared Rhio who has spent the last five months sitting in the ambivalence of eating disorder recovery. In a strange way, it felt fine. I didn’t feel any urgency to get out of it. I felt too scared to even approach the box.

In fact, I almost felt urgent about not leaving the superposition.

Scared Rhio is afraid of putting a foot wrong. Afraid that any change might be terrible, or even catastrophic. I try to tell myself that not making a decision is still a decision – that choosing to stay in the superposition is an active choice – but I still can’t move toward the box. I’m frozen in fear.

I’m very aware that even stepping closer could alter the variables and change the result. So it becomes easier to stay still. I’d tell myself things like, “Well, I’m a healthy BMI now, so what’s the urgency? Ambivalence is fine”. At the same time, I was constantly describing exactly why I hated it.

Being in recovery and not in recovery at the same time is exhausting. It’s constant management. Constant listening to Corrupted Copilot – what I call my eating disorder – when what I really want is to be free of it.

But I’m also scared of being free of it. Scared of what that means. Scared of everything, really. It creates a strange kind of paralysis. I feel paused, while time keeps moving anyway. Time drags me forward whether I’m ready or not. And I’m not ready yet.

So I sit and wait for Urgent Rhio to come back. I wait for her clarity, her focus, her urgency. Sometimes I try to force her back, but nothing works. I just sit there being scared. And eventually, she did come back.

But my body threw up its own roadblock.

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Urgent Rhio and the Gastritis Roadblock

During my last recovery, Urgent Rhio took the wheel.

It happened suddenly. Despite having an eating disorder for many years, it became incredibly urgent that I get better. I saw it very clearly: my son deserved a mother who could eat pizza with him without freaking out about it.

He was seven. I was a single mum. It suddenly made sense that I was all he had, and I couldn’t be like this. It was incompatible with how I wanted to raise him. So I went all in – the most urgent recovery you can imagine.

Medical professionals commented that they’d never seen someone recover the way I did. But at the time I didn’t think it was that unusual. I had met other people who were doing the same thing. “All in” recovery was something people were talking about then, so how unusual could it really be?

The problem is that Urgent Rhio isn’t very good at the work that comes after. “All in” on its own is actually terrible for eating disorder recovery. It works for weight gain, but not for the mental health side of recovery. That part has to be slow, measured, one step at a time so your brain can keep up with your body.

That’s far too slow for Urgent Rhio. Urgent Rhio believes she can brute-force anything. And sometimes that belief has hindered me just as much as it has helped.

Take what happened recently. All of a sudden I had to:

• Reach my pre-relapse weight
• Get out of this depressive episode
• Find myself after losing my best friend
• Fix my iron deficiency
• Get back on track with sleep and food
• Clear out my flat
• Be more consistent with my blog

I know I can’t possibly do all of that. My health won’t allow it for one thing. But it’s also impossible for another reason. You can’t brute-force finding yourself. Finding yourself comes from quiet moments. From meaning slowly returning. From feeling something again.

It also requires not being in a depressive episode. When you have anhedonia, it’s impossible to feel who you are, it’s impossible to feel meaning in things. I can’t brute-force my way out of depression, try as I might.

And fixing my iron deficiency – the thing that was supposed to help – triggered gastritis instead, which made brute-forcing my way back to my pre-relapse weight impossible anyway. I felt like a complete failure.

Urgent Rhio doesn’t like being forced to stop. She sees everything with absolute clarity: I must do all of these things RIGHT NOW, because the solution is obvious and I can’t stay in this superposition anymore.

So the last few days of gastritis have been incredibly frustrating and full of tears. I finally feel like I can move forward in recovery – and now my body won’t let me. What upsets me even more is that it feels like there is no middle ground. Once Urgent Rhio leaves, I worry I’ll go straight back to being petrified of everything again.

I don’t know how or why I get quite so scared. How I become so paralysed by even the idea of moving forward. But the strange thing is that Scared Rhio has actually brought me further in recovery this time than Urgent Rhio ever did.

This recovery has been completely different. It has been slow. Measured. Thoughtful. I’ve worked on issues I’ve had for decades – things my last recovery didn’t even touch. And I’ve done all of that while being scared the entire time.

Yes, I stalled in ambivalence for five months. But she still ate when she was scared. She still gained weight slowly, even while crying about it. She didn’t crawl back to where she used to hide – becoming smaller, disappearing, escaping.

Maybe the gastritis isn’t the roadblock I think it is. Maybe the person who needs the most healing right now is Scared Rhio.

And maybe Urgent Rhio should stick to things she’s actually good at – like clearing out my flat, redecorating the living room on a whim, playing video games on the hardest difficulties, mastering a skill I saw on Pinterest in a weekend and forcing me to go to bed on time – instead of trying to brute-force her way through problems that can’t be solved that way.

Especially when she suddenly decides it’s time to collapse the wave functions of five different boxes all at once when I evidently do not have the body for that.

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Maybe Not a Roadblock

It was only while writing this that I realised maybe gastritis isn’t the roadblock I thought it was. It’s not the same roadblock I described in the introduction anymore.

Because Urgent Rhio has made several giant, and sometimes beneficial, life changes, it’s easy to think that she’s the only part of me that ever gets anything done. She’s the one who quit smoking, started eating more healthily, developed new skills because they might solve everything over a weekend, and suddenly feels clarity when everything makes sense.

But that wouldn’t be the whole truth.

Scared Rhio is the one who most consistently showed up. She’s the one who is soft and loving with her son. The one who loves plushies. The one who falls in love with video game characters and birds. The one who slowly got me to a healthy BMI despite being petrified.

She’s the one who sits by a rainy window and thinks deeply about life, the universe, and everything. The one who really misses her best friend. The one who listens to Clint Mansell and cries because it speaks to her soul.

She’s the one who feels anxious about doing almost anything, but still shows up for her son every day and wonders how she managed it by the end of the night. The one who constantly says she can’t cope, who insists she isn’t strong, who cries a lot – but does it anyway.

Maybe recovery, or even my life, isn’t about waiting for Urgent Rhio to appear and collapse all the wave functions at once.

Maybe Urgent Rhio just needs to teach Scared Rhio how to collapse one of them and then learn how to live with the uncertainty and fear that comes after.

This song, just captures my feelings so well –