For years, I believed age and chronic pain had taken art away from me for good. A year of recovery, deliberate nutrition and strength training later, I picked up my pencils again.
Grief, ED recovery, Mental Health and all the lovely things that give my Sisyphean rock meaning
For years, I believed age and chronic pain had taken art away from me for good. A year of recovery, deliberate nutrition and strength training later, I picked up my pencils again.
Significant anaemia, an invisible surveyor, and an attempted betrayal of the sacred pistachio-crème snack plate: this week has been a lot. Between cleaning, iron tablets, cluster headaches, and a late-night chaos-goblin incident, I’m learning that recovery means rest, fuel, Minecraft ambience, and refusing to make cereal happen.
I thought eating more would just mean gaining weight. Instead, everything came back - my energy, my thoughts, my emotions, and parts of myself I’d kept muted. It turns out you can maintain your weight and still be underfuelled, and fixing that doesn’t just change your body. It changes you.
Being sedated has made mindfulness accidentally achievable. My brain is finally quiet enough to exist without spiralling. It won’t last, and I know that, but for now I’m living inside the stillness — decorating my base, rescuing teddy bears, and letting slowness be enough.
A real “what I eat in a day” from a 42-year-old in recovery who hates Greek yoghurt, needs 150g of protein, and lives on big bowls of food and nightly quark rituals. Not advice, just what actually works for my goblin metabolism and keeps my blood sugar and brain from mutinying.
Covid recovery and ED recovery have collided, exerting their own gravity and bending everything out of shape. Hunger isn’t honesty right now—just noise from a body out of calibration. I’m caught between forces, trying to tell whether I’m being pulled toward a brighter star or into something that feels like collapse.
Being sick in recovery forced me to stop, and without distractions, all I could do was feel. Getting better meant facing my changing body, creatine panic, oedema, and weight gain — all at once. And through it all, I realised something: coping mechanisms work so well, they stopped me from coping.
Join me on the anorexia struggle bus: where recovery is messy, the rules are ridiculous, and Clippy wears a different-coloured cape. I’m unravelling extreme hunger, joy restriction, and righteous fury - one cursed bus stop at a time. It’s chaotic, it’s honest, and yes, there are emergency Lidl trips involved.
I didn’t follow the rules. I didn’t eat 2500 a day or stop moving. But I still gained weight—fast. My period came back. My knees hurt. My thighs exploded. This isn’t pretty recovery. It’s painful, swollen, and constant. And yet, I keep walking. Even when I don’t want to.
Recovery isn’t about food—but here’s a recovery food post anyway. From boss battles in Greggs to Biscoff-fuelled defiance, I’ve been eating through the chaos. These aren’t aesthetic snack wins. They’re real, messy, funny little triumphs I fought for—sometimes while on fire. (Metaphorically. Mostly.)