Leaving Narnia: The Chronicles of Recovery
Life with an eating disorder is like existing in a frozen wasteland. Leaving anorexia involves a long period of thawing. The warmth can be painful.
Surviving in energy deficit was a kind of like Narnia. Not Aslan’s Narnia, where there were seasons and warmth and colour, but Narnia under the rule of the snow queen, in a state of eternal winter, uninterrupted white and frost and cold. In this frozen Narnia, minutes passed like hours, and hours like days. Most of the time, I was somewhere without really being present.
Everything was ordered, pristine, even beautiful — but a cold and hard impenetrable kind of beauty, like an icicle. There was no change or flux in season. A constant snowfall of glittering flakes were a vision of immaculate beauty, but try to capture them, and they melt and disappear, leaving your palm frigid and streaked. Trying to navigate myself out of anorexia is leaving the safety of that perpetual order and numbness for the uncharted territory of another part of the woods. Where there are seasons from hot and humid summers, to blustery, colourful, autumns, and to wet and rainy springs. It’s not always cold, and its unpredictable from day to day and hour to hour.
It’s chaos and it’s scary and entirely foreign, and yet has its own kind of wild beauty. In this new mysterious wood, I am ripe with feelings, coursing through me like ocean tides. I am ripped open, raw, and exposed many times over.
I feel them all.
In the beginning it was mostly sadness, despair, misery, fear, loathing, hopelessness. I ached to back in the cold eternal winter. Many days I still do, wishing to be rocked into numbness in the familiar icy cradle of anorexia, rather than be subject to the storm of painful emotions that send me crashing against the rocks over and over.
However, the longer and further I am stumbling through this wood, falling down, tripping over roots, and picking myself up sore and scraped and bruised, I have also come to know other feelings, nowhere near as painful and still equally awesomely powerful. Joy. Gratitude. Contentment. Peace. Giddiness. Compassion. Thrill.
These feelings come in moments I often least expect it, like a brilliant rainbow after a torrential downpour. I have learned to savour them, ride them with reverence and gratitude. Like happening upon a deer, drinking from a brook, I’m afraid to blink or breathe to sharply in fear of frightening it away. Just as quickly these joyful feelings float in, they disappear, leaving me with nothing but the memory of what it feels like to be warm, filled with sunlight from the inside. It is this feeling, so fleeting, so precious, that keeps me forging onward.
I write more of the chronicles of my recovery (and life beyond) on my blog: www.dayslikeblankpages.com
