Since I last posted, I’ve still been dealing with increased OCD anxiety. It shook my eating disorder awake and I’ve been really struggling. There are good and bad days in recovery, but unfortunately one bad day can very quickly turn into a week of equally bad, or worse, days.

It led to a pretty big wobble. I restricted and ate less for a whole week.

Today is actually day three of forcefully stopping the wobble. I wish it was because I had suddenly seen the light and realised the error of my ways. No. Instead, I’m spiralling and freaking out about it every single step of the way. Recovery continues to suck, and I’m still doing it anyway.

The Suspicious Croissant

In my last post I wrote about gaining 1.5kg in 9 days despite DEFINITELY not eating enough to logically explain that amount of weight gain. I grew out of my new leggings in four days and they still do not fit. In fact, despite eating less and restricting for a whole week afterwards, I have maintained that gain.

At first, I tried to logic myself out of it. I told myself it was probably temporary fluctuation, water, glycogen, hormones, stress, all the things people say when your brain is spiralling. The problem is that my ED and OCD are not logical programs my brain runs. You cannot force them to see reason.

Trying to argue with them feels a bit like trying to convince a moon landing denier we landed on the moon. A complete waste of time and energy that somehow still leaves you feeling guilty for becoming frustrated by them in the first place.

One of my OCD fears is returning to my pre-relapse weight. Not because I think that weight is morally bad, ugly, or unacceptable, but because my brain has attached it to a period of my life where terrible things happened to me. In my head it has become a destination. A warning sign. A place where bad things happen.

The closer I get to it, the louder my OCD and ED become.

The speed of this gain felt unacceptable to me. It felt like I had been propelled forwards several steps all at once when I wanted to take tiny baby steps towards it. Controlled steps. Predictable steps. Instead it felt like my body suddenly hit fast forward.

Every single day since has been filled with obsessive thoughts about it. I wake up with them before I even get out of bed. My brain immediately starts scanning for explanations, for danger, for proof that something has gone terribly wrong.

I think part of why I became so distressed is because it does not match my intake in a way my brain can comfortably understand. I almost think I would have emotionally coped better if I had been eating entire jars of peanut butter everyday. At least then the numbers would feel like they made sense.

But my intake has never looked like that. I track carefully. I weigh food. I make small adjustments instead of huge ones.

So because the maths doesn’t make sense, my OCD becomes convinced something else must explain it. According to my brain, energy cannot magically appear from nowhere, therefore the only conclusion is that Lidl must have lied to me.

Thus began the great croissant conspiracy. It must have WAY more energy than stated.

I swapped multiple smaller snacks for a Lidl bakery croissant and 10g of pistachio spread while keeping my overall intake roughly similar. It became the only variable my brain could latch onto. It was the only thing that changed while everything else stayed EXACTLY the same.

The great croissant conspiracy made my brain become full of “what if.”

What if I return to my pre-relapse weight in another nine days because this is all it takes?

What if this never stabilises?

What if this rate of gain continues forever?

I am not ready for that yet. I’m scared of it. Honestly, I’m petrified of it.

Eventually I became completely exhausted by how loud my brain had become. It felt less like I was trying to destroy recovery and more like damage control. Like slamming on the brakes in a car that suddenly felt like it was accelerating too fast downhill.

There were fleeting moments where I wanted to burn everything I’ve built over the last year to the ground out of sheer frustration. I was furious that after all this work, all this effort, my brain can still become this loud, obsessive and terrified.

The worst part is that I know these thoughts are irrational. I know that I am even being irrational while doing compulsions. But knowing OCD and eating disorder thoughts are irrational does not magically stop them from feeling catastrophic. It also doesn’t stop them from making me completely believe it is catastrophic while simultaneously repeating the logic out loud to myself.

So I slipped.

I ate less to stop the runaway gain, but in the process… I also became less.

The Week of Less

After emergency braking and eating less, I felt okay at first. Relieved, almost. Like maybe I had regained some control over the runaway train my brain had convinced me I was on. But it wasn’t long before I started to feel terrible.

My mood tanked. I found it hard to blog again. I struggled to enjoy anything. My entire waking life became consumed with food thoughts, OCD obsessions, clock watching, trying to negotiate with myself, getting progressively more frustrated, and honestly, a lot of crying.

Then I realised something that scared me almost more than the weight gain itself. Eating the amount I had been eating before I backslid had given me something back. It had given me back.

I liked my writing more. My blog posts actually sounded like me again. Not whatever flat, disconnected version of myself I’ve been trying to force onto the page previously.

I never thought I would feel like myself ever again after WeeGee died. Before I even relapsed, I had already lost myself to grief. I was dissociated, numb, emotionally flat, just going through the motions and surviving because survival was all I could manage.

I didn’t suddenly jump from grief straight into relapse. I spent years desperately trying to find my old self again and could not find her anywhere. I had less passion. Less intensity. Less curiosity. More anger.

The evidence of the things I used to love fiercely, my little shrines to favourite games, movies, books and moments, stopped feeling comforting. Instead, my house began to feel like I was living inside somebody else’s life. It felt like my old self had died too and all that remained was the evidence she had once existed.

I grieved for WeeGee, but I also grieved for myself. I genuinely thought we were both gone forever.

Somewhere during recovery though, alongside all the food, grief work, self reflection and fumbling attempts at rebuilding a life, something slowly started returning.

Not the exact same version of me. A different me. But still a very recognisable one. I became more intense again. More interested in things. More curious. I started exploring new hobbies, new ideas, new values. I began caring about things again, even myself occasionally.

I also became far more emotional. Less numb. Less dissociated. More present. Sometimes I suddenly realise I actually feel inside my body again, inside the moment itself, and I honestly cannot remember the last time I consistently felt that way. Maybe not since I was pregnant 22 years ago.

But that terrified me too. I don’t really know how to sit with my own intensity. Emotions have always felt dangerous to me. And underneath all of that was another fear I didn’t really want to look at directly.

What does it mean about my grief if I found myself again? What does it mean about WeeGee and our relationship if I am not completely emotionally destroyed anymore? Would she even recognise this version of me now that I have changed so much?

One day I ended up sitting by the window crying because my mood had crashed so badly from not eating enough while also being obviously hungry and doing absolutely nothing about it. I realised I had lost myself again, this time through my own actions. And somehow, even that still wasn’t enough to make me eat the suspicious croissant.

Part of me started wondering if the weight gain panic was not actually the entire story. Maybe the real thing terrifying me was becoming fully alive again. Maybe I backslid because sitting with all these emotions felt far more frightening than obsessing over numbers not making sense.

Because the truth is, my ED gives me something else to fight. Something measurable. Something controllable. Something external.

Blaming Lidl for bakery lies is much easier than sitting with the fact that I survived grief by becoming somebody different, and now I have to learn how to live as that person.

The Days of More

“There is only one way to learn how to sit with being a new person, and that is to sit with being that new person instead of constantly running for the nearest escape hatch.”

This was the thought that finally led me to eat more food again on the evening of the eighth day of eating less.

Part of it was also pure frustration. I had spent the entire day unable to properly think, write, focus, or enjoy anything because my brain had become nothing but food noise, OCD thoughts, clock watching, and that horrible type of hunger where you feel physically weak and don’t even want to move from the sofa.

So I ate. Biscoff biscuits. Peanut butter on a rice cake. A protein bar. I don’t know, I just chose them randomly. Honestly, I am still terrified. Today is day three of eating properly again and I still simultaneously believe two completely opposing things at once.

Part of me believes the thought that made me eat that evening. The thought that maybe the only way to become this new version of myself is to actually allow myself to exist as her instead of repeatedly running backwards every time I start feeling emotionally alive again.

The other part of me still completely believes my OCD and ED when they scream that I am barrelling towards disaster at high speed. Both of those realities currently exist in my brain at the same time. I’m also not fully “back” yet either. It takes a few days of consistently eating enough before I properly feel like myself again.

But I can already feel glimpses of me returning. I’m looking forward to my writing sounding more like me again because I sound more like me again. And at the exact same time, I’m scared of becoming more myself again too.

I think this might actually be what resilience really is. Not never falling down. Not becoming some impossibly enlightened person who is unaffected by fear, grief, intrusive thoughts, or setbacks.

And definitely not whatever version of “resilience” mental health services often seem to mean now, where resilience becomes synonymous with “never visibly struggles with anything ever again and therefore stops being a giant burden on our health system.”

Maybe resilience is just the ability to keep getting back up. Even while terrified. Even while your brain screams at you from the moment you wake up that you are doing the wrong thing.

Even while part of you still wants to run backwards towards whatever feels safer and smaller and more familiar.

Because this is what people actually mean when they say recovery is non-linear.

Not that you never step backwards again. Just that eventually your steps forward start becoming more frequent than your steps back.

This is what you asked for, heavy is the, heavy is the crown :-