Navigating the Gray

With today being the first day of Eating Disorder Awareness Week, I’ve thought a lot about where I was a year ago today versus where I am now, and what it’s taken to get here. It’s taken patience, strength, tears, support, reflection, understanding, and most of all, the desire to live life free of an eating disorder. And in return I’ve grown to love myself and all the imperfections that come with that. But like I’ve said before and like I will continue to say, recovery is not a linear road, and I knew that when I started, and I know it now through experience.

I used to see things in black & white, right or wrong, good or bad. What I didn’t understand was the gray area. I never had much experience navigating gray areas because a lot of the decisions in my life were made because of what I thought was expected of me, or ‘right’ in other people’s eyes. I was scared of that gray area because I hadn’t really been forced to experience it. But what I’ve learned is that the gray area, the area between right or wrong and good or bad, is where we learn the most. It’s where we learn to sit with the discomfort of the unknown and the weight of our decisions. Not the weight of what’s right or wrong, but the weight of understanding the outcome on either side and how those fit into the life you desire. Labeling something as one or the other puts experiences and emotions in a box – it traps you inside what society thinks is inherently correct at that point in time. But we are constantly growing as a society and as individuals, and with that, our versions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ should be shifting outside of the space we put them in. It’s uncomfortable to take ideas and thoughts out of the original box you categorized them in, and it’s intimidating to not know what the outcome of that will be – but this is the gray.

The gray has taught me how to be uncomfortable and be okay with the discomfort. It’s taught me that perfectionism is an unattainable and undesirable goal. Trying to reach a state of perfectionism had taught me that any sort of negative emotion, or negative experience, was bad. That it hindered my growth and path to becoming this perfect image I had in my head. But in hindsight, all I was doing was limiting myself to growing outside of what I knew. The gray has taught me to take each day in strides, but to have attainable but hard goals for myself. It’s taught me that just because I fall backwards, doesn’t mean I’m not going to continue going forwards. But something that I’ve continued to struggle with is the idea that I am ‘still’ in recovery and if there’s going to be a point in time where I can just feel ‘normal’. Recovery is frustrating and it can be extremely discouraging on the days where I choose to engage in behaviors that I used to. It’s frustrating to know what the healthy decision is and to ignore the rationale and make excuses for why I do it. But at the end of the day I can make a decision to either repeat what I know won’t help me, or I can be intentional to do better the next day.

I have the intention of becoming fully recovered, and at the end of the day that’s what I remind myself. I’ve learned that I can be frustrated and still continue to recover – it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Just as something doesn’t have to be strictly right or wrong, good or bad. We don’t have to love, or even like, everything, just as we don’t have to hate everything that doesn’t feel ‘right’. There’s so much subjectivism that comes with the strength of these words and I’m working on my ability to disconnect from what I had previously learned them to be. Disconnecting from the way that I used to think has continued to allow myself to broaden what I believe and who I am. Navigating through the gray, with all of its challenges, has proven to be where I’ve begun to grow the most.