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Tag: bulimia

FREEDOM

I live in a house, surrounded by nature. I sit in bed of a morning, watching native birds sing in the tree outside my bedroom window. I can see the water. I can hear the waves. I can watch the sunrise. These things are always here. They always have been. I’ve lived in this house for 16 years.

ARE YOU ON A DIET?

“Are you on a diet?”
I was 22 years old. I was not on a diet. I was not overweight. Yet…
It was Christmas Day and I was away from my family. Invited to a friend’s house for the day, I met a lovely Japanese couple. His English wasn’t the greatest and when I said I didn’t eat meat, he asked if I was on a diet. It was an innocent question – and his wife quickly jumped in to clarify. He was asking if I had dietary restrictions. I did. I was vegetarian.
Within a year I was also bulimic.

VOICES

There’s a war in my head. Some days it gets so loud in there, it gives me a headache. A real one.
The voice nattering incessantly in my ear is not a healthy voice. It’s a familiar one. It feels like a safe one. But that voice is an expert manipulator, liar and thief.
There’s another little voice in the dark – the voice of reason and wisdom, sense and sensibility – but that voice is weak and timid. It has never learned to stand up to the manipulator.

FULL FUNCTION

And if as a society, we nurtured those in the earlier stages of illness, perhaps those “high functioning” addicts and depressives, those people with hidden and invisible mental illness, would feel okay about acknowledging their issues much earlier on. Because the earlier the problem is tackled, the better the outcome.

REASONS

My psychologist talked about recovery, and I said (amongst other things), what’s in it for me? Which sounds appallingly self-interested – because it is! But it is the crux of my recovery issue. Everything I do in my life, is for other people – even my recovery. And without having intrinsic reasons to travel this rocky road, it is nigh on impossible to keep trudging along.

BORN IN A BODY

What my body didn’t know when it was born, was that it wasn’t the “right” shape. It wasn’t the “right” size. It wasn’t the “right” colour. That while it functioned in a beautiful, healthy and practical manner, aesthetically it didn’t conform to the ideal of beauty, espoused by those who raised me and the society in which they lived.