Gratitude...

I’m sat in my warm bed, in a lovely, safe flat just a stone’s throw from Orri – a place where I feel truly cared about and supported. I have so, so much to be thankful for yet spend so much of my time feeling that life is so unfair and so hard. 

Recently I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on where I was this time a year ago compared to where I am now. Exactly this month a year ago I was admitted inpatient to Vincent Square, a place where I endured the worst four months of my life. I was confined to the four walls of a cell-like room, on a locked ward, where every ounce of freedom was taken from me. However, at that point in my life Vincent Square felt safer than being left alone in my own head. Even writing that scares me though; it scares me to remember that I got to a point where my life no longer felt safe in my own hands.  

Fast forward to January 2020 and I’m living on my own, in my own little flat and have been managing weekends coping by myself, buying and eating what I need to. In fact, fast forward to tonight where I’ve just managed a proper supper, no tears or tantrums and am sitting with the difficult feelings knowing that they WILL pass. That has to be progress, right?

There’s been nothing easy about getting to where I’m at today, and I know that I still have a very, very long way to go. But I’m holding so much hope that 2020 can be different. What I’ve really begun to realise recently is that recovery is about all of the little things adding up, it’s not a sudden realisation, a neat upward trajectory. It’s messy; it’s pushing through the tears and eating what you don’t want to, it’s feeling so vulnerable you want the world to swallow you up, it’s trusting in other’s despite the risk that you might get hurt. 

Recently for me these little things include jamming out to music on the tube, uncontrollable laughter, and actually being engaged in conversations. It’s in those moments that I feel glimmers of my old self returning, it’s from those moments that I can see the light.  

I wouldn’t be where I am writing this tonight without the incredible team at Orri though, I know I always say it, but they really are one of a kind. They’re the ones who are gradually teaching me to live again. How could I think that food is more scary than dying, that life is more scary than anorexia? How could I welcome the prospect of not being here more than the prospect of waking up in the morning? There is so much more to life than anorexia, but the hard part is it’s only in taking the risk to recover that we can begin to see this. 

I may feel different in the morning, or perhaps at the end of the day tomorrow, but for now, in this moment, I’m thankful for where I am and the life that I do have.