Thank you for all of the NEDA week support so far! I’ve been chatting about my ED recovery affirmations this week, which are as follows:

1. Keep it real
2. Take up space
3. Break your rules
4. Be love
5. Keep faith

Yesterday I wrote about what “keeping it real” means to me in the context of recovery. Today, I’m moving onto #2: take up space.

For a long time I took this affirmation literally, because weight gain was a part of my recovery process, and it was hard. As time went by, recovery became less physical, but the idea of taking up space continues to guide and challenge me.

Like many women, I was given the message very early on that I was too much: too big, too loud, too messy, too hungry, too unusual. I think a part of me always sensed that there was something wrong with this framing of my identity, but young people can’t help but be influenced by the narratives that are handed to them, and this one stayed with me. I can’t remember a time in my life, childhood included, when I didn’t think of myself as being ungainly and monstrous, or didn’t worry that my uninhibited self would alienate the people around me.

I haven’t come close to undoing this idea; it’s so old that it populates nearly all of my unconscious fears. But I’m aware of it now, and if recovery has taught me anything, it’s that this way of thinking is ruinous.

Recovery is all about learning how to take up space again, to stop hiding, to inhabit your body and the world around you. If you’ve come to believe that you are lovable only if you make yourself as inconspicuous as possible, this is really hard work.

For me, it began physically, with weight gain and filling out clothes. I learned to stop draping my body in baggy layers and tucking myself away behind folded arms and hunched shoulders. I struggled with these changes, but the real work lay ahead of me, which was learning how to take up space in other, intangible dimensions.

Recovery has given me the courage to use my voice, to take pride in my appetite, and to own the fact that I want things: food, experience, pleasure, and love. It’s pushed me to stop trying to sanitize and tone myself down. It challenges me to let go of the notion that people will like me more if I give them less of myself.

This isn’t a leg of the recovery journey on I’m very far along; actually, I think I might still be navigating my way around the gateway. There’s still a part of me that fears my own wholeness, regards it as being fundamentally unmanageable or undigestible. I recognize the fear for what it is—untrue, limiting, outdated—but it hangs around anyway.

When I was sitting down to write this post, I thought of a quote from Geneen Roth’s Women, Food, and God: “You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won’t discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself.”

I don’t really know how to shake off my own sense of being problematic. I have a feeling the best thing I can do is to be aware of it and invite myself to see its falseness while also accepting the fact that the belief is still there.

In the meantime, I try to embody sensations of fullness and wholeness and fully-realized selfhood, trusting that the more I longer I do it, the easier it will be. Anorexia recovery is a good teacher here, because the process asked me to embody a certain kind of self-acceptance long before it felt completely real to me.

I hope that some of this will resonate with some of you today. Perhaps NEDA Week will encourage you to share yourself more freely than ever with the world around you, to give yourself permission to be full and whole and real, rather than shadowy and obscured. Everyone, including you, will be enriched by having access to your most boundless self. 

More tomorrow. Happy Tuesday.

xo

This week, I’m working with GoFundMe to raise money for the National Eating Disorder Association and the work it does for people with eating disorders and their families. Your contribution will help to keep NEDA’s helpline, referral system, and legislative advocacy going, and I’d be so grateful for any show of support that feels right to you. You can learn more and donate here. 

 

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