Dying is Easy, Living is Harder TW: suicide

Being sick is easy, recovery is harder, so much harder. According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, there are at least 30 million people in the U.S. that suffer from an eating disorder. Eating disorders affect all ages, genders, races, and classes. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness. That's why I had an eating disorder.

I won't get too deep into how and why I held on to my eating disorder but I will take the time this blog to talk about how my eating disorder has affected my depression and my life. I used to have no drive, no motivation. I wouldn't eat because I saw no point in feeding a body that I hated so much. I've worked long and hard to move out of that headspace. It took being in Intensive Outpatient, Partial Hospitalization, Residential, then back down to Partial Hospitalization for me to realize that my body was worth feeding, I was worth feeding.

This past week I fell into that thinking trap again (thinking traps are exactly what they sound like and we talked about them earlier tonight in treatment) of I'm not worth taking care of. Having that thought again scared me, so much so it landed me in the hospital for suicidal idealization. That's not a fun thing to write in a blog for a class. But I guess it explains why I was out of class on Thursday. The thinking trap scared me so much this time around because I had worked so hard to unlearn this behavior and belief. Being back in this thought made me worry I would never get better, that all of my time spent in treatment and progress I had made was lost.

That wasn't the case. I had stopped taking my meds as prescribed (don't do that it's a bad idea) and made my mood incredibly unstable. In the past, this event would have made me spiral into a pattern of restricting, most likely skipping meals and sleeping instead of eating. But I didn't do that. I went about the next day as though I hadn't just experienced this emotionally taxing event. That's progress. That's the progress that we forget to look at. Those little victories. Leaving the hospital was a little victory, ordering breakfast while I was still there was a little victory, eating a snack before taking my nap was a little victory.

I've put so much work and effort into recovery, I'm not letting anything stop me.