Eating Disorders / Mental Health

TICK TOCK…

The pendulum swings.

How awesome would it be if life were linear? We could figure stuff out then travel on the path of success with nary a backward glance. Wouldn’t that be lovely?

Alas – today that is not the case.

I felt a sense of progress the past few days. Gentle progress I will be the first to admit. In fact – just a nice feeling of not going backwards. I was even starting to think that perhaps I’d travelled so far up the “wrong” road for such a long time, my first major achievement was to return to square one. I was tentatively hopeful I was approaching that fateful square.

Today is a delightful demonstration of the irony of hope. One step forward. Two steps back. Cha cha cha.

The day began as usual. Nothing unusually good. Nothing unusually bad. No major problems. No major pitfalls. An ordinary day.

Had a nice day at work.

Then for reasons that cannot be explained by me, I was hijacked by the insanity of my eating disorder. And a box of Freddo frogs. (Yes – a whole box. My son is an engineer at a chocolate factory. I hope he gets a job in a salad factory soon…) Thankfully I was feeling so ill after the first nine I couldn’t get any more in. I decided to skip lunch.

I feel disappointed in myself. Intensely disappointed. In fact, disappointment doesn’t really cover the emotions I’m feeling at the moment. I’m making a valiant effort not to focus too much on my overwhelming desire to plunge myself into a bigger hole.

It would be so easy to wipe out any of that sense of hope and positivity from the past few days. To wallow in a sense of, Why bother? It’s too late… I’m beyond redemption. It’s never going to get any better. Accept the inevitability of being a binge eating bulimic and stop trying to change things. In fact, I’m not really sure how to stop those thoughts. Perhaps it is easier to just let them wash over me and remind myself that like kidney stones, This Too Shall Pass.

The pendulum swings.

It swings left. It swings right. It always swings. I can only but hope that one day the arc becomes less pronounced and the motion of the pendulum softens to a gentle sway rather than a tumultuous tsunami.