Oh, the irony… I’m in the midst of a 30-day challenge to write a post every day representing positivity and/or freedom from disordered eating. I know – I’ve been wavering a little bit. But I’m trying to be mostly positive! I was sitting here wondering what to write tonight – it has to start with the letter M. And then what do you know?! An email popped into my inbox from The Mighty, and it’s their new challenge for June – My Mighty Month #boringselfcare challenge…

I wrote a post a little while back about boring self-care things I need to do. Boring self-care is much more likely to slip by and not be done. Exciting self-care seems to have a bit of an incentive for doing it… There’s not much exciting about making sure I take constipation medication every day. But it’s pretty jolly important.

I don’t know if I would go to the effort of printing out a chart and tracking self-care activities every day. But I do know this is an area that needs a lot of work for me. My two main recovery goals at the moment are to indulge in self-care activities every day, and focus on freedom “whys” – look to the future and keep picturing what it might look like.

I went to a book club this evening. I’ve never been to book club before – I had no idea what to expect. Or who to expect. I kind of enjoyed it though. As it was the first week of a new group, we all just took along a few of our favourite books and told everyone why we loved them. I had to leave early, but everyone will choose a book that we’ll read this month (hopefully they’ll let me know what it is!) and then next month we’ll chat about it.

Pretty simple really.

Anyway – I’m saying all this because I think reading will become both a really important self-care activity (I pretty much stopped reading several years ago) and an important part of my freedom “why”. I adore getting lost in a book. It’s so therapeutic. And having time and energy and desire to read heaps feels a really good goal for future me.

So for this week, my daily self-care goals are, do my physio exercises, take my constipation medication, start reading again. Just three goals. I don’t want to make things too complicated.

I need to keep doing these things until they’re so normal and part of my daily routine that it doesn’t feel like “work” – I don’t have to remember. And then when that happens, I’ll work on adding three more things into my life. Perhaps all these little steps will turn around and lead me to recovery.

I had one other recovery epiphany today – I sent the following into my recovery group:

I realised today, I’m going to be dragged kicking and screaming over this recovery “finish line”… And it will be me – dragging myself.

A fair whack of me is mightily determined to do all the work, make all the changes, and relish in all that freedom. And a small, but resilient, determined and really strong little bit of me, is hell-bent on dragging me back to the start line.

It’s kind of exhausting to tell you the truth…😴

Apparently this is some kind of breakthrough – I’m very close to flipping over to the recovery side of the fence. I don’t feel like that… But I’m not in a position to state whether or not that is true. For now – I will have to accept that someone else thinks it is so. In the meantime, I’ll keep working on dragging my weary carcass for as long and as far as I can. Because I ain’t going back to the start line…