“You have to, like, hold both things… and I can’t sometimes. But I’m learning.”
I have spent 14 hours this week talking about my Eating Disorder and the most freeing thing was talking about it. It was identifying it, calling it out on it’s bullshit and separating itself from me. I feel like when you’re living with an ED you’re just constantly expected to never mention it… you have to justify the things that it makes you do in such a way as to make everyone else around you comfortable and okay, and to make it seem like you’re normal. But this week I got to say things like “my ED is just being really loud right now” and “I’m struggling with making a choice– I want it to be the right one, the perfect one.”
I’ve long known that this whole mess has its roots in perfectionism and control. I was right, always, for so damn long. But as you get older, like, out of elementary school, there are so many more opportunities to be wrong and I missed the lesson that perfection is not equal to Always Being Right and that the world isn’t so much about Right and Wrong, but about what’s good right now for me in this moment and for tomorrow and considering yesterday. Sometimes a choice is just… a choice. They don’t have inherent value judgements, there isn’t always a teacher grading me.
People try to become that grader, that evaluator– trying to impose their lesson plan on me, their decisions on me, their Rights and Wrongs on me. What so many people don’t understand is that for me, for my brain, those black and whites aren’t even just separated, they’re walled off with fortresses and snipers of a Chris Kyle caliber separating them. And once something gets put there, no matter how slightly, it sits there, sets up camp, and eventually wages all out war with tactical intel that only serves to make the barriers that much more concrete. So shut up with all your rules (here’s looking at you Goop) that work for you, because they might not work for everyone. And I’m so tired of fighting the powers that be that give me all of this messaging that has led me to slowly, but surely, kill myself.
I did it for so long I barely remember what it is to live. And living vibrantly is almost impossible to remember. But one thing I know: besides holding both the black and white and not only finding, but being confident in, my grey space (and grey matter for that matter (hah)) I will have to forever hold vibrant life and dead life within me, I will forever be walking a thin line between darkness and light, but I have to remember– my favorite time of day is dusk.
A Lot Good 