I want to talk about food but deep down inside I know that this conversation is not about food. I realise that no matter how many times I talk about eating the proverbial broccoli, it almost sounds stupid. Like people look at me with this: You know, I’m not stupid Karolina, I know what healthy food is.
Eating disorders aren’t about food. Which is why diets do not work.
The wisdom is always lying right beneath the surface, waiting to be seen.
When we begin to get a glimpse of who we really are, above and beyond the fat on our bellies, we get to witness a spiritual awakening. We start to witness the birth of creativity, passion and power.
But before we get there, a lot of us turn this outside battle against ourselves. Some women respond by staying as numb as possible, with overeating or under-eating, alcohol or drugs.
For me, my eating disorder wasn’t about food. It wasn’t even about my weight or the fat around my belly. I never really suffered from body dysmorphia.
Food was a coping mechanism. Food was an outlet of my emotions. Food, eating, not eating, starving and bingeing and purging, was the only way I felt I could control my life. In fact, food was the only thing I felt I COULD control in my life.
At first my eating disorder was my biggest friend. My secret little friend. Probably my only friend. I didn’t want to give up on it. I didn’t want to admit that it was harming me. Not at first at least. Because at first you have this illusion that you are in control. And the more the illness pulls you, the harder it is to come out of it.
Eventually your illness becomes a habit. It becomes you. This is who you are, this is how you function, this is how you eat or don’t eat. It’s the thread embedded into the layers of your fabric. You’re on autopilot. It’s your friend when your world becomes too much.
When we eat in a bingeing way, it is to silence the panic we feel inside of us. It’s like this massive gaping hole opens up and we need to fill it. Immediately.
It took me years to look at food and think that it could be something nourishing. Healthy? Nah. Food was to fix my broken weeping heart. Like a sponge for insulating shabby windows so that the draft can be stopped.
The problem with reversing an eating disorder is that thinking about food recreates the same feeling of panic, just in reverse. Before it was: panic into food. Now food is a trigger for the panic.
To be around food and feel normal and calm becomes an achievement.
On top of it, after years of fucking up your digestive system, no matter how little you eat you always feel bloated. And that bloating is yet another trigger for panic. Any stretch of the belly shoots an arrow towards one’s brain – dread. Not good. Not comfortable. We need to do something. We need to react to this and amend this situation. It’s reactionary. Impulsive. It’s not logical.
And it takes months to get rid of this feeling of bloating. In fact, it probably is not even bloating. It is a normal feeling of post-meal mild fullness. But what is normal? And for how long do we need to breathe to stop this flood of panic.
Recovering from an eating disorder is like diving into the Soul Canyon. It’s so much worse at first. The dissolution of your old identity combined with bodily discomfort. It’s like flying an airplane that’s trying to steer right but you are determined to go left. It’s a constant battle.
Trying to soothe your nervous system while not numbing at the same time.
It’s so easy to spill that addictive reactionary behaviour onto other ways of coping. It’s like grabbing for crutches while walking with a broken leg. You need something. Anything. If food is not gonna do the job, I’ll grab onto something else. Drink. Obsessive work. Exercise is a good one too, it looks so healthy on the outside. Ha. How many people can we fool that we are now a good girl? But the biggest question, can we fool ourselves? And for how long the new/old behaviour is going to serve us this time?
It's like the next pair of crutches becomes shorter and shorter.
While the gaping hole is still there. The primordial wound. Begging to be filled. Painful to touch.
Healing an eating disorder is a like changing a bandage on a wound. You just have to keep doing it. Working with it. Treating it. Changing the bandage every single day. And one day the pain eases off. It stops to hurt. And on another day you take the bandage off and it stops bleeding. The scar is there but the wound is no longer weeping.
Healing is about finding stillness and sitting with our emotions. Oh, how we hate doing this. How many times did I say that meditation is stupid. Boring. Let’s distract ourselves. Anything just not to feel our feelings.
But worst of all, to be in the body! What if we feel hunger or fullness? Both are a trigger. It’s way safer to just be a head attached to a mute body.
But the truth is, we cannot get better if we do not observe ourselves. Because by this crude raw scrutiny of our thoughts and behaviours we can see how wasteful this life of self-inflicting pain really is.
As I started to truly commit to this inner work, and for the very first time beginning to see the world through some sort of lukewarm resemblance of calm and not the usual filter of fear and anger and neediness, I started to wonder what my true purpose on this planet was. Surely, I wasn’t put up here to just fixate on losing weight?
What a waste of life. Yes, there are moments when you feel guilty and stupid for all the irrational behaviours you did. For all the coping mechanisms you reached for just to survive. To not allow that gaping black hole inside you swallow you whole.
The neediness comes from wanting the others to fill it. The anger comes from the fact that they don’t. And once the anger goes, the sadness sets in because you face the unbearable truth that they really REALLY won’t. That this gaping hole is not theirs to fill. It’s ours. That it’s time to grow up and realise that we are enough. That we have enough resources to fill that gaping hole. It’s on us.
This is when many of us give up. It’s just too much. The recovery was supposed to make us feel better. But it feels so so bad.
And so, you return to those long, lonely nights of going back to the board. Of doing the work. Facing yourself in the deepest depth of the cocoon of the Soul Canyon.
The work of facing your Shadow, of breaking the shackles of the adolescent Ego, of maturing enough to accept the unacceptable. We are our own Hero. The dissolution of our neediness is insufferable. If I don’t have even this to fall back on… The gaping hole is now hurting beyond what can be endured.
Some caterpillars perish in the cocoon, never to emerge as butterflies. Others, miraculously, take flight.
But the point of this process, of this inner work, is to precisely be torn apart, to be dismembered, so that subsequently we can be reconfigured in a never-before-seen pattern. And this new way of living is to understand that ultimately, we are the only one responsible for our own self-worth.
And that we have nothing to prove and everything to live for.
Thoughts? Please feel free to write to me or leave in the comments. x
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