Reclaiming Your Realness: Recovery in the Real World
Note: I refer to ‘treatment’ quite a bit in this post. My experience in recovery may not look like yours. Take the word ‘treatment’ to mean any sort of focused time that you spent recovery from your eating disorder/body image struggles.
When I was in treatment for my eating disorder, everything felt a little sheltered. I ate what I was given, I read what I was given, and I thought about what I was prompted to think about. This sort of environment is necessary for recovery— you need stabilization before you can move onto the real world.
Except that’s where everything happens— the real world. After graduating from treatment, every step I took was daunting. The transition from treatment to the real world is (excuse my clichéd simile) like the transition from biking with training wheels to biking without. Don’t let me minimize the difficulty of treatment— the months I was at the Renfrew Center were the hardest months of my life. But there, you have a safety net. If you fall, your team and peers will catch you. In the real world, all of this is your job. It’s your job to eat, it’s your job to devise your treatment team, and it’s your job to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It’s not easy.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible, and it doesn’t mean that it’s not the most worth-it thing in the world. I meant what I said before: the real world is where everything happens. You can’t get a dog in treatment. You can’t go on dates in treatment. You can’t go to school and learn new things or drive with the sunroof open or stay in and order pizza while watching The Office in treatment.
Treatment is wonderful and it saved my life, but I belong in the real world. I am a real girl, and I have a real body and real feelings.
I am finally a real girl, but I have always been one. My body is real and it is mine. My mind thinks real thoughts and they are mine. My heart feels real feelings and they are mine. I am real, and I am mine and mine alone.
Now that I have entered and graduated from treatment, I can breathe again.
It has been almost 2 years since I graduated and I still struggle. Actually, there are times when I struggle a lot. It’s not easy to work on recovery when you also have school and family and friends all going on while you’re trying to nourish yourself, too. But it’s possible and so worth it. When you are struggling with an eating disorder or body image difficulties, your realness fades.