Waking Up.

I woke up this morning with thoughts swirling around my head. I took a vacation day and was able to sleep in and wake up without an alarm. It sounds nice, and one would imagine that I would wake up and feel relieved to relax and enjoy my time off. But for some reason, I woke up feeling a little lost. Because I wake up every morning after 8 hours of sleep, but I’m still waking up from years that my true self was dormant. I was dormant but the world went on around me. And now I’m playing catch up. I’m playing catch up on building trusting relationships, letting people in, taking care of myself, my emotional maturity, and all-in-all, I feel like I’m playing catch up on life.

Where do you begin when you realize how much you’ve missed?

One of the blessings of recovery is learning to reintegrate yourself back into society without restrictions. But with this blessing, comes the FOMO from everything that I missed while I was lost in the abyss of my eating disorder. I was watching everything go on around me, but I had no desire to participate because the only thing that was on my mind was food, exercise, shrinking myself, and putting on a facade, day and night. And now that my mind is no longer occupied with these obsessions, I don’t know where to begin. I want everything all at once – I want to experience everything I didn’t let myself do because I was scared. I want to eat everything that I forbid myself to eat. I want to pour out my soul to everyone around me after keeping my thoughts and feelings inside for what feels like my whole life. I want to find a career that fulfills my passions of connecting with people and making an impact on as many as I can. I want so much now that I’m waking up and seeing how beautiful life is. So where do I start? I feel like I’ve been trying to do all of this simultaneously and by doing so, I’m still not fully awake. I’m still not in the moment – I’m in my head with those swirling thoughts of how to achieve each and every one of my goals that I had put on the backburner and mending myself at the same time. And I know it takes time, but if you know me, you know I am incredibly impatient, and with anyone else, I’m tired of waiting.

But, I think it’s worth the wait.

As much as I wish I could snap my fingers and make all of these ‘wants’ a reality, I know that’s not how it works. Rebuilding my feeling of worth, rebuilding trust and relationships takes time, finding my purpose in society takes time, and getting to experience all that I didn’t let myself before requires me to truly be in the moment. Because why would it be worth it to experience it all when I’m still not in the moment, when I’m still trying to solve it all in my head. I often have to remind myself that when I’m challenging myself with a new experience or even a fear food. When I finally let myself spend time with friends and family instead of working out, there’s still a small part of my head that holds guilt. That makes me feel like I’m not good enough to have such a loving and caring support system. It’s that small piece of Ed that I haven’t fully parted with that taunts me each time I challenge myself to be fully awake. That makes me want to shrink myself and fall in the solace of the comfort that I was tricked into feeling by Ed. But with time, it has become easier to separate myself from these thoughts.

It’s easier to remind myself that life is worth living. That I am on this Earth to make a difference, to love and be loved, to have fun, to laugh, to cry, to fight, to make up. I’m here for all of these ups and downs and highs and lows. Because you can’t have a high without a low. There is no up if there is no down. And before I was floating directly in the middle. I had the illusion of feeling highs and never allowed myself to feel the lows. Thinking that those who are truly strong don’t show their weaknesses, that they don’t have weaknesses and they don’t let themselves feel negative emotions. After beginning to wake up, I know that I didn’t have any ups, I was only spinning in the middle of nothingness. I wasn’t happy once I had worked so hard for what I thought would make me happy. When in reality, there were traumas and feelings that I needed to acknowledge in order to grow. That I can’t be happy when I’m still pretending to be okay 100% of the time, when I don’t acknowledge the hardships in life because I don’t want to be seen as a pessimist or a negative person. I can’t be happy if I don’t allow myself to feel it all, in the moment, and in reflection. I can’t be happy if I avoid my fears and give into the temptations of my past.

I’m learning, day by day.

I woke up today feeling a little lost. Did I ignore that feeling and numb it out? No. And that’s how I know that I’m learning, I’m growing, and beginning to truly live. Instead, I made myself a full breakfast even though I didn’t feel hungry. I drank my coffee and stretched. I journaled and now I’m writing this. And while I’m still feeling down, I know that it’s okay. Not every day is going to be amazing, and that’s okay. Perfectionism is not something I want to strive for anymore. It’s boring. I want to make mistakes and then learn from them. I want to fall and get back up. I want to be able to have a bad day and understand the source of my feelings so that the next bad day will be easier to bounce back from. And I now realize that these are the experiences I’ve missed out on. Catching up on life doesn’t mean throwing myself back into the world and into as many experiences and social interactions and challenges as possible, it means living day-to-day, understanding who I am, and being present in the moment. The best experiences always seem to be unplanned, and I’m ready to give up that control and take life day-by-day. I’m waking up slowly, and I’m working towards being fully awake, but in order to do that, I need to stop just ‘wanting‘, I need to do.