TW; mention of eating disorders, relapses, counting calories
In residential treatment for an eating disorder, you meet a lot of people who have been there before. Those who know the counselors and know the routine. It lets in on a little secret: you’re here for the long haul. We’re constantly inundated with small little wisdoms that let us know that if we end back up here, there is nothing wrong with that. “Healing isn’t linear” is one you hear a lot. Each time you relapse, you will still be better than the first time you were here. At the end of my first stint in eating disorder treatment, I was prepared for continual relapses in my 20s. After all, a decade of therapy and I still ended up in this weird house 6 hours from home. I was gonna be here for a while.
While I appreciated this little secret, of how common relapses are, when I relapsed and had to go back home from university from a semester, it feels a little odd now. 3 years ago now was my last stint in any partial-hospitalization treatment, a year ago I went off of my anti-depressants, as per my therapist’s urging, and for the last couple of months, I have not needed consistent therapy for the first time in at least a decade. And can I let you in on a secret? I’m the happiest and most stable I have ever been. Can I let you in on an even bigger secret? It’s utterly fucking terrifying.
It feels like the biggest balancing act, yet I have no idea how I’m balancing. I have no idea why the thing I thought would break me: moving home, having no plan, all of my friends in grad school doing cool shit, no plan, living with my parents. My therapist and I did worry that this would cause a lot of turmoil. I have no idea why it hasn’t. It’s terrifying.
If I don’t know what’s working so well, I don’t know what to keep, and if I don’t know what to keep, how do I stay good, and if I don’t know how to stay good, I won’t be good.
This last year, after I went off of my anti-depressants, I lost my hair, constantly, for 7 months. I lost my appetite as well. I was checking into therapy terrified, anxious, and somewhat depressed. My 10 year plan had fell through, I have no idea what to replace it with, fascism and AI all made a decision on the matter all the more prescient and all the more dire. I was facing the music, leaving my safe space behind, a community of people I loved more than anything, my freedom, and the end (at least momentarily) of doing what I loved (being in school). Graduation and moving back home realistically seemed like it was going to slap me back to 16 again: Counting my calories, having screaming matches with my dad, and worst of all, being alone and not being able to do anything about it.
To make matters worse, I got my heart semi-broken a bit before leaving university, and then, like an idiot, decided to break no contact with not one but TWO exes with tweets about the new pope (one last university bad decision hoorah). So now, I had reopened wounds and dealt with the embarrassment and shame that comes with breaking no contact, over a pope tweet no less. Had I even got better in the last four years?
I moved home, no job, no plan, but I was happy to spend some time with my brothers. We would watch TV together on the couch, Nicholas would drive me to work and show me music he was listening to, we fought like siblings and yelled at our parents when they butted into our fights. My parents were less worried about my future, and the future in general, than I was. I think each time I wanted to panic, their faith was only a couple steps away.
So, I’m happy? And stable? Consistently? Literally, and I cannot stress this enough, what do you mean?
In October, my therapist floated a test balloon, that maybe I didn’t need weekly therapy anymore, I was doing good. That lasted one week without therapy, and I was back.
So needless to say, I’m really surprised, and kind of working without a safety net, forging my own path, being unencumbered by my own, decidedly needy, mind. It’s a completely new territory.
All of this, while I’m stuck in a country barreling towards fascism, though maybe we’ve already arrived. My therapist would send me surveys every week, to track my progress. When I had ticked an unusually high number for the last question “Thoughts you would be better off dead or hurting yourself in some way” She knew that I meant it more in a “We’re all fucked, the world isn’t getting better, it’s literally only going to get worse, I think I might as well end it now before it gets real bad” sorta way and not in an actual suicidal ideation way.
Yet, I’m here in this country. And I am a frog being boiled alive. There are troops in DC, and I believe that the future in this suburb will be eerily close to that of Civil War (2024), it also feels a little less scary since I’m not so far away. Reading about American politics whilst in Montréal, it was all theoretical, which made it scarier. I had no finger on the pulse or ear to the ground, and I felt helpless. I do believe that we are frogs in boiling water, and fascism is here, but it’s a more embodied experience living it, than it is fearing it from afar.
If she sent me a survey this past summer, I think I would check zero for that question. Again, what do you mean? I’m so scared and also so happy. Can those two coexist? Must they coexist in this life? Have I unlocked this secret? What if it goes away? I’m scared of being sick again.
Each rejection email feels more intense than the last. Each desperate B2B sales application that is rejected causes a sense of impending doom. My beautiful friends and their passions and their graduate degrees and each night I am praying for a sign.
My mom tells me that she prayed to God to show her what she is supposed to do with her life. He gave her the sign, and she is a second grade teacher. So, I try this. I pray to God, show me the way, what am I meant to do, what will make it all worth it.
Though, as mentioned in the last post, I am trying to imagine God as less sinister and evil, I still have the Catholic theological understanding that this life is supposed to be suffering. I wonder if that is why God won’t answer me. Am I supposed to be doing self-mortification? Receive stigmata, flagellation and hair shirts?
I wrote a poem in 2023, I had been heartbroken and attempted to return to God for one last chance with the other Italian Catholic, though I can’t find it now, it made good use of the fact that like any good Catholic girl, I felt an innate camaraderie with Joan of Arc. Suffering and dying young felt very real to my experience of life.
I often fail to understand those who say God will grant us our prayers, aren’t we supposed to suffer? I wonder if that’s some of my fear. I am not supposed to be “happy” whether it is because I am destined to be unhappy due to my original sin that is worse than all my fellow humans or that this life is supposed to be suffering, I am supposed to suffer. So, I’m scared of being sick again. This happiness must be a fluke.
This is what goes through my head when I try to pray to God for guidance btw. I get through about two lines before I start wondering about the ethics of praying and the theology of suffering and Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Kateri Tekakwitha and Joan of Arc and 13 year old me, who suffered and who God didn’t save.
I know your 20s are supposed to be scary and confusing but I think they’d be a little bit better if I didn’t have some weird martyr complex. Thanks Catholicism.
I’m scared of being sick again. I am so happy and at peace, yet with so many fears. This doesn’t feel like how it’s supposed to be. But my friends and therapists have been trying to move me away from shoulds and supposed tos. Maybe I will be sick again. Maybe I won’t. Maybe it’s all God’s will. Maybe he doesn’t exist. Maybe He wants me to forge my way in this life, create my own happiness, show me what is possible so I might choose it for myself.
Sure, your 20s are scary, but I think the scariest part is how beautiful they really are. Catholicism says that you are the closest to God when you suffer, so really, I get to witness the beauty of it all because I am terrified. Life is scary, but I will heed advice from Colin, I will not worry, not about AI, or if God is listening to me, or if He wants me to suffer, because it does not take away these troubles, it takes away the peace of sitting on the porch, breathing the cool morning air, being loved by my friends. I will laugh with my friends, I will let them love me, I will love them back, and I know, if I ever get sick again, this love will always be there.
I don’t know if I will get sick again, and I don’t know what is making me so happy. Worrying about what exactly is causing the stability will not create the stability back if it’s ever lost. But I will look at this life, the one I have when I am smiling, and know, that if it ever gets bad again, I know what the life I am destined to get back to looks like.