A New Chapter

It’s too cliché for me to say ‘new year, new city, new me!’ and pretend that moving across the country and changing aspects of my life has magically transformed me into a new person – because it hasn’t. But the last chapter of my life was dominated by an eating disorder, an unhealthy relationship with exercise, and overall an unhealthy relationship with myself. Starting this next chapter doesn’t mean starting over or completely reinventing myself, but it means that I’m building upon the pieces of myself that I love and using that foundation to accept the pieces that I don’t. It doesn’t mean that I scratch out the part of my life that the eating disorder dominated, because there were still great memories made while I was sick, but it means understanding how much more I could have gotten from those experiences had I been in a different state of mind and health. It doesn’t mean punishing myself for getting sick and guilting myself for losing who I am, but it does mean that I can grieve over the time that I lost. And that grief can be used to push me to a place where I don’t have the temptation to engage with my eating disorder. My failures are a piece of me, but so are my successes.

And the thing is, moving to a new city didn’t automatically flip a switch inside me that made me instantly switch my behaviors. I struggled with eating my first couple weeks here. I struggled with not having access to the gym because our moving truck didn’t arrive till 2 weeks after we did. And I wanted to blame my anxieties on not being able to workout – so in my mind, eating less because I couldn’t work out was the solution. This clearly only jacked up my anxiety and gave more room for the eating disorder to creep back in and dig its claws back in. Rather than accepting the fact that I was extremely uncomfortable not having control on every aspect of a move that was already intimidating, I blamed it on something that I have experience coping with. So when I say that I’m starting a new chapter, I’m in no sense trying to say that I’m any different than I was a month ago in Milwaukee, but rather that I want to use this as an opportunity to start a new chapter with acceptance. I want this new chapter to allow me to take everything that I’ve learned in recovery about myself and use that to push myself into uncomfortable territories.

One of these uncomfortable territories for me is trusting my body and knowing when I push it too far. And in the past year and a half I’ve learned how to navigate my fear of the unknown to a degree, but it’s still been a trigger for me to engage in activities that were a part of my life when I was fully engaged with my eating disorder. I want to run another half marathon, but my first half marathon was when I really started tracking my calories and trying to push myself further each day. It’s when I started using the exercise to numb anxieties from other aspects of my life and learn to push things down rather than work through them. But that has nothing to do with the half marathon – I can’t blame a race for giving me an eating disorder because they are two independent events that happened to magnify the other. And I don’t think I’m necessarily in a spot to train for another half right now, but that doesn’t mean that I can never run another race because at one point in my life I used it as an escape. Similarly, I love working out in general and have always been active. Orangetheory was right up my alley and I fell in love with it when I started it after college (and before I started training for the half). And at that point in my life I was at a healthier weight, but most definitely not a healthier state of mind. I used drinking in college to numb out anything I didn’t want to feel, and then when I found Orangetheory, it gave me another outlet to numb that made me feel less guilty about myself. It let me laser focus in on burning calories rather than laser focus in on the deteriorating state of my mental health.

And after taking a year and a half working really hard on myself and my relationship with my body and feelings, I want to challenge myself to form new relationships with experiences that the eating disorder took away from me. I used Orangetheory as an example here because I was approached by them to partner with them for the month of February and share my workout experiences on social media. Disclaimer: I am NOT including them in my blog right now as a way to advertise for them. I am writing about it here because it was something that I had to think about really hard on if I was ready to dip my toes back in the water. And if I start going down the same rabbit hole as the past, I am confident that I will be able to recognize and address it.

I want to use this first step of re-trying past experiences to really just prove to myself that I can trust my newly acquired intuition and skills that I’ve learned in recovery. That I won’t fall back into old habits just because I’m engaging in some sort of experience that I let the eating disorder control prior. I want this to be a new chapter of pushing myself to be uncomfortable and seeing how I learn and grow from it. I hate the saying of starting on a blank slate because it’s never truly a blank slate. I can’t wipe my slate clean, nor would I want to. There is no benefit to trying to erase experiences of my life that have gotten me exactly where I am right now. I use those past experiences to shape how I handle my present and future experiences. Something that may have been a trigger for me 2 years ago, like going out to eat or skipping a workout, isn’t a piece of cake now, but the difference is that I know what happened last time I listened to the eating disorder. What I don’t know is what will happen if I truly disengage from eating disorder thoughts – though I am 100% sure that I’ll be happier, even if it isn’t 100% easier.