Grief, ED recovery, Mental Health and all the lovely things that give my Sisyphean rock meaning
On Tuesday, all I had to do was go to the dentist. Instead, I got caught in a torrential downpour, emergency-shopped for a jacket, bought suspiciously specific DIY tools, declared war on a sofa, accidentally created a rage room, cleaned up a communal bin room disaster, and somehow still thought that was normal.
When Marks & Spencer announced it was closing, I was surprised by how upset I felt. This isn’t really a story about a supermarket. It’s a story about friendship, Christmas sandwich competitions, Yorkshire puddings, grief, and how sometimes we leave pieces of the people we love in unexpected places.
This week I was anxious, trapped in a giant netted cage, fuelled by iced decaf Americanos, and writing essays about asexuality. Somehow, despite all that, blogging has started helping my mental health again. Life is weird, but I’ll take the motivation where I can get it.
For over twenty years, I searched for an explanation that wasn’t asexuality. Maybe I hadn’t met the right person. Maybe I was a lesbian. Maybe it was my eating disorder. Maybe it would change. This is the story of how every alternative explanation failed, and why acceptance proved harder than discovery.
I went from brown hair to brown hair via a spectacular detour involving Vantablack ends, Anish Kapoor jokes, a scalp that felt sunburnt, and enough hair dye to chemically alter my postcode. It also turned into an unexpected lesson about how invisible struggle can be.
The internet prefers suffering that is tidy, inspiring and tied up with a bow. Unfortunately, my brain didn’t get the memo. This is not a post about overcoming anything. It’s about what happens when you stop waiting until you’re better before allowing yourself to be seen.
Still deep in the hole, I’ve been trying to find little lights in the dark anyway. Pigeons by the river, audiobooks that reignited my love of science fiction, Project Hail Mary nights with my son, and tiny moments of peace that didn’t cure me, but reminded me there’s still warmth outside the fear.
What began as a recovery wobble became a deeper fall into fear, shame, exhaustion, survival behaviours and a literal fire that no longer even felt like an eating disorder. A post about panic, uncertainty, and trying to climb back out while terrified of the surface.
Recovery did not just bring weight gain back. It brought me back too. My intensity, my emotions, my curiosity, my writing, my ability to feel present in the world again. The terrifying part is that becoming yourself again after grief means learning how to sit with an entirely new version of yourself and more importantly, not running away.
Sometimes when I wake up, my anxiety wakes up first. Before I’ve even opened my eyes my brain is already spiralling about weight, Welsh elections, quantum mechanics and whether Biscoff spread contains enough energy to power a small nation. By the end of the day, seagulls, Starbucks and my son helped ground me again.
Absurd Universe 