Living as a Person in Recovery

Hi, my name is Audrey MacKenzie. I am a junior at Simmons University with a double major in public relations and marketing communications and media arts and a double minor in journalism and graphic design. I play rugby, work in the communications lab, and intern at Bon Me. I spent this past summer in rehab. I'm a person in recovery. This is my journey.

Writing about this scary for me, that's why I'm doing it. My eating disorder developed when I was in eighth grade and went unnoticed until my sophomore year in college. In the first semester of my sophomore year in college, I spent too much time unable to function because my blood sugar had gotten so low after not eating. I spent my time in the health center bouncing between a nurse practitioner and a dietician. I continued to play rugby and each game I feared I would pass out or not get back up after being tackled.

On New Year's Eve in 2018, I had an intake for an eating disorder clinic. They told me to start in Intensive Out-Patient (IOP) once I was back in Boston. I spent the months of January till March walking to BU's campus each Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday night to participate in group therapy and have dinner. I discharged in March and stayed discharged for about a month until I was told by a therapist I should go to residential. I had a month left of school that I wasn't willing to miss so that therapist and I compromised with Day Treatment Program (DTP) also known as Partial Hospitalization Program (PHP), a five day a week program that met for five hours a day.

I spent three weeks in DTP in Boston and four weeks in New York until I was finally sent to residential treatment. Residential treatment was in Philadelphia and I spent six and a half weeks there. I grew a lot there, and learned about myself, learned that a life without my eating disorder was a life worth living. But life there was just recovery.

Now I'm back in IOP after five weeks of DTP and I'm juggling being a student, working, and rugby with recovery. This blog is for me to talk about what it's like trying to recover while also living life. How certain things affect my recovery in positing and negative ways. And it's to teach anyone willing to learn what a person in recovery looks like, acts like, is like.