Lectures were by far my least favorite part of treatment.
This was, in part, because I’d read so many books about addiction that the
concepts weren’t new – and in part because the people giving the lectures were
better suited to the group therapy they also did than actually lecturing.
Oh, ok -- if I’m totally honest, another reason why I didn’t
like them was probably because when they happened, which luckily wasn’t often,
they usually were the second half of the evening, when my thoughts had long
since drifted to dinner.
But anyway, lectures. The most useful one, which I think may
be up there as one of the most useful things I learned there, was about relapse
drift. Basically, relapse isn’t an event. It’s a process that usually starts
out innocently enough, like skipping small things – meetings, calls, regular
grocery shopping, whatever -- that support recovery.
What makes it tricky, of course, is that life happens in
recovery – not every time you skip something does it mean anything. But there
are all sorts of other signs of relapse drift that are individual to each
person – things no one might notice but you, and that may have absolutely
nothing to do with food. One for me is when I stop blowdrying my hair, because
I can’t be bothered to make the effort. Or I’ve stopped gathering what I need
for the morning the night before, so I’m always that slight bit stressed and
late leaving the flat. Or – this one is particularly embarrassing – I leave my
gym towels on the bench in the locker room for the cleaning staff to pick up,
as opposed to putting them in the used towel bin.
How is that last one a sign of anything, you ask? (If indeed
you’ve even made it this far.) It’s a tiny thing that makes me feel bad about
myself and contributes, even in a small way, to the idea that I’m a bad,
unlovable person. Which, of course, is at the heart of an eating disorder. Or
at least, it’s at the heart of mine.
I fear I’m in relapse drift. I thought it yesterday morning
and on into yesterday afternoon, which is when I started (but didn’t finish)
this post because I had to go to my (beginner) tennis course. (If you’re
wondering if I have Wimbledon potential, I do, in that my balls are so wildly
out of bounds at this point that they could, theoretically, end up there from
Chiswick.)
This morning I thought about it more, and it worried me that
I wasn’t more scared of it. Earlier this year the mere thought of relapse was
terrifying, and I’d have done anything to avoid it.
I thought about how my food has gotten a little messier –
and sometimes a lot messier -- than it has been in a year, and how I’ve
justified that to myself as recovery from my restrictive side. So tricky to
know with an eating disorder, isn’t it? But that combined with these other
behaviors, of which there are many, is… worrying.
Because I do not want to go back to where I was over a year
ago. I don’t want to buy clothes I don’t like because they’re the only thing
that fits. I don’t want to worry about what will fit every morning – that
losing battle, where I feel defeated before the day has even started. I don’t
want that fear that people are judging me (unfavorably) because of my size and
that worry and constant feeling that I need to make up for it. I don’t want to
shrink my life again, first with the bingeing and then with the need for
everything to be safe in early recovery. I don’t want to feel like I’m not
living the life I want because of this eating disorder, which has already
destroyed so many things over the years.
I could go on and on. And so I told my counselor today and I’m
writing it here. The drifting stops now.
