"If we want to bring our imaginary future selves to life, we have to keep rising to meet them"
I was sent this the other day…
“We need to live for our future selves, up to a point. We need to believe in our dreams and projects and find some motivation beyond doing work for its own sake. We think we could all be happier. It is very hard to resist the rhetoric that tells us this will happen when we’re wealthier, and slimmer. It is almost impossible to acknowledge that regardless of the number on your scales or in your bank account, you will always get caught in the rain, you will always have frustrating interactions with colleagues and the people you love will die. Losing weight has not protected me from pain, it has probably exposed me to more pain.
Right now, I’m not just grieving for the imaginary woman – I’m mourning the me of six months ago whose dumb lizard brain believed that all could be solved if I stopped eating bread. But I’m also excited for me now. I’m starting to realise we can’t wait around for permission to become who we’d like to be. It’s tempting to see my body as a problem that still needs to be solved, a task to be completed. In so many pounds, I’ll be done, and then I can learn the bass guitar, pitch for the work I want, and finish reading Anna Karenina. But facts aren’t feelings. My weight will always be a number. It will not make me any more competent, successful, or musical. However, I do know that I didn’t lose the weight in a week, and I won’t finish Anna Karenina in one sitting. If we want to bring our imaginary future selves to life, we have to keep rising to meet them. There is no accomplishment that will cure us of being human. We can do anything, as long as we abandon the expectation that our achievements will protect us from feeling anything”.
The above is so incredibly true. Anorexic or not, everyone believes those fallacies; we all think that attainting something we don’t yet possess will equate to happiness. But really, you have to find that in yourself, to ensure that things around you don’t have the power to dictate your happiness, or that’s how I see it. However, I also acknowledge that doing so is another matter.
What really stood out in the piece written above was the realisation that, “There is no accomplishment that will cure us of being human. We can do anything, as long as we abandon the expectation that our achievements will protect us from feeling anything”. This is so, so true. I’ve clutched onto anorexia for five long years now, and for what?
I’ve allowed myself to believe that starving myself of food will simultaneously starve me of difficult feelings too. Throughout these five years at each vulnerable moment I’ve wrongly allowed anorexia to whisper in my ear that it will “protect me” from unpleasant feelings, from getting hurt, from the pain that life throws at me.
The reality is, anorexia doesn’t, and hasn’t ever “protected me”, it’s not helped me to gain more control over my life, in fact, it’s done quite the contrary. It hasn’t just restricted me from food, it’s restricted me from life; in January it confined me to four desolate, dreary walls of hospital for goodness sake!
I need to let go of anorexia, I need to stop being tempted back; it has never and will never help me to cope with life. Life happens, stresses occur, uncontrollable things are inevitable, that’s just LIFE. I need to relinquish the false reigns anorexia resides in me, as it says above, “if we want to bring our imaginary future selves to life, we have to keep rising to meet them”, I need to move on.
