Recovery. That’s a pretty beautiful word, isn’t it? It’s the prize dangling right in front of your face as you dislocate your arms trying to reach out and grab it. Once you’re finally able to wrap your hands around it, recovery becomes victory. But what happens after that? What about the post-recovery?

When everything is all over, the therapy sessions have concluded, and your family decides that you’re no longer in need of professional care, nobody is there to hand you a pamphlet with instructions on how to carry yourself through day-to-day life now that you are “cured.” You’re left to your own devices and nobody ever warned you about the aftermath. You see, the thing about recovering from an eating disorder is that no one ever tells you about what’s going to happen afterwards. Truthfully, I think this is mostly due to the fact that there really isn’t an “afterwards” at all...

I was 12 years old when I first felt like my body was betraying me. I remember how it felt the first time I tried on a pair of shorts at the mall only to find that they didn’t fit around my hips. My heart dropped into my stomach as I stood half-naked in front of the dressing room mirror and saw the extra skin folding over the waistband. With tears brimming my eyes, I quickly ripped off the pants and stormed out of the store. I didn’t realize it then, but that was the day I declared a war with my body. I had unknowingly embarked on a journey down the darkest path I would ever know.

And thus began the countless days that turned to months that would eventually become years of strict dieting, excessive exercise regimens, and so many more grim encounters with the dressing room mirror than I would realize. What started out as just another attempt to look “pretty” rapidly became a toxic obsession that rid my body of all its worth. By the time I turned 13 I had already developed my first, full-blown eating disorder and watched the numbers on the scale tick down like a time bomb. And then one day, without any warning whatsoever, I saw my hips expand. My chest grew and my cheeks puffed out like someone had inflated them with helium. I had heard of puberty changing girls’ bodies but I never thought that it would happen to me, not after all of the “hard work” I had put into my newly slender figure. I would soon learn, however, that I was no exception.

I was just about to write that I was first diagnosed with bulimia nervosa in ninth grade, but the term “diagnosed” is actually very deceiving. Sure, I was diagnosed during my freshman year, but really, I had been struggling with bulimia for about eight months prior to my parents finding out. And do you know what I realized? I realized that I didn’t want to recover. I didn’t want to get better because in my tiny, twisted mind, “recovery” meant weight gain. To me, the pain of stomach ulcers and a burning throat was worth it. My parents had different plans, of course, and I was shipped off to a full round of therapeutic and dietary treatment. And I got better, I really did. After a while, my disorder began to diminish and for once I thought I was going to finally be okay.

The disorder may have subsided, but the voices screamed louder than ever.

I learned for the first time after this attempt at recovery that although I was no longer vomiting after every meal, I was far from a place of self-love. I still hated my body. I still wanted to escape this shell I was being held hostage in. I spent so much time recovering my body from my eating disorder that I neglected to heal my mind as well. As a result, over the next four years, my bulimia would come back to haunt me three times, each worse than the last. My most recent encounter was during the fall of my senior year. I lost 15 pounds over the course of two and a half months, and I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t ecstatic. I was the lead in my school play at the time, and I remember how it felt to look at the pictures and see my cheekbones. I didn’t care how I felt physically even though I was bedridden from illness twice during those three months. All that mattered was how light I felt—empty; a fraction of what I used to be.

Then came another round of “recovery,” at which I am currently still working. This time, however, I began to notice the side effects. The weight gain was so gradual that I didn’t notice until 15 pounds later when I was able to pinch the new layer of fat that now covered my legs. I could no longer play the xylophone with my ribcage. One thing the doctors forget to warn you about is that your body will still view food as poison despite the fact that you “know better than that now.” Every bite will still feel a bit like sinning. The thoughts still envelope my body. My mind feels like it’s betraying my frame every single time I crave certain foods.

They never tell you that recovery is more than just gaining the weight back. When you’ve suffered for so long, you become too used to counting the calories in every bite to realize what you’re doing anymore. Recovery has little to do with how much you weigh (for the most part, of course). For me at least, recovery has been a state of mind. It’s a process of retraining my brain and the way it processes food, exercise, and even life as a whole. Recovery is breaking habit after habit after habit, and this takes time.

Everything. Takes. Time.

I think that at the root of my eating disorder, and the reason why I have never been satisfied with my weight, is because I didn’t care about having less of a body; I simply wanted to cease having a body at all. And now that I have worked so hard to view my body as more of a body and less of a carcass, I know now that my next step down “recovery road” is to make peace with this body and the traumas I’ve left buried that still feed off my soul.

And I’m scared of coming undone.

*Despite everything, I want you to know it is worth it. Recovery, that is. It is so, so worth it. If you are struggling with an eating disorder and you are reading this article, I encourage you to seek out some kind of help. Recovery is hard, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and I'm not even there yet. But I can honestly say that I know once I get there how beautiful it will be. While you may never fully “love” yourself the way you want to, any inch of improvement is a success. Okay? Okay.