Posts tagged recovery
the clear vowels rise like balloons
{ sail on, silvergirl }
Today: working on my online class, laundry and cleaning (maybe), quiet journal time. A trip to the grocery store and health foods store then cooking pineapple-cashew-quinoa stir fry for Liz and I and making homemade black bean burgers to eat for lunches this week. Derby practice tonight.
Tomorrow I will do all the things for Feminists for Action I need to do to make our month of events run smoothly, buy the book for my other online class so I can get started, do homework for my campus classes, actually do laundry and clean, then off to fun sexy times with friends.
I feel decent and I’m getting shit done. I’m actually pleased that I feel just okay and not GREAT!, because when I feel super awesome my mood is apt to crash with no warning, so. Today I am doing life and feeling okay about it. Winning, I s’pose.
Gaining: The Truth About Life After Eating Disorders by Aimee Liu
Three decades after Solitaire (1979), her memoir of struggling to overcome anorexia nervosa, Liu might be expected to discuss how it feels to be cured. Time, however, has given her a valuable perspective shared here in a careful deconstruction of eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia. From her own experience and interviews with many other women who have been diagnosed with an eating disorder, Liu now knows that anorexia and bulimia are lifelong companions. She and her informants have learned that, ebbing and flowing, sometimes moving to the fore but ever present in the background, an eating disorder responds to both good times and bad in a person’s life
I really loved this book. So many books about EDs just talk about the details of being sick (for shock value, it seems) and never go into what life is like in recovery.
I’m also interested in the different views on whether total recovery ever really happens. This book is of the opinion that it doesn’t, at least not very often. And that’s been true to my experiences. I’ll always have this problem. Sometimes it will be completely under control and just a blip on my radar, other times it will be all-encompassing.
A lot of other ED books subscribe to the philosophy that total recovery is not only possible but the only acceptable option (Jenni Shaefer’s Life Without Ed, a book I found immensely irritating, comes to mind).
I dunno. Maybe I’m just bitter and tired. But I don’t really think it ever goes away. Being totally recovered and never struggling with symptoms is just too high an expectation, and makes me feel even worse that I can’t achieve it.
I’ll settle for doing the best I can.
THIN: A documentary by Lauren Greenfield (the rest is on youtube.)
A documentary following four women with eating disorders as they go through treatment at the Renfrew Center in Florida.
When this documentary first came out on HBO I saved it to my parents’ TiVo and watched it probably 30 times. I was at the eating disorder center at Rogers Memorial Hospital in Wisconsin, and my experiences were very very similar to what they go through in the film.
I watched it a lot right after I got out of treatment because, bizarrely, sometimes I actually missed being in the hospital. Being there sucked a lot but it also felt very safe and secure. You didn’t have to be afraid of yourself anymore, your own self-destructive capabilities. Not that you couldn’t hurt yourself in treatment but it was harder. Someone was always there to check the bottom of your yogurt cup to make sure you finished it, check your napkin for pats of butter smeared surreptitiously during dinner. It’s hard to stand on your own feet, to be accountable for your own health and recovery.
