recovered-ish with chloe cox

muffins, missing the ED, and finding hope — reading my ED diaries part two | recovered-ish with chloe cox

• Chloe Cox • Season 1 • Episode 19

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Back by popular demand — we're back in the journals.

In this episode I'm reading more entries from my eating disorder treatment diaries. These are unfiltered, verbatim entries from residential, PHP, and IOP — the rawest, most honest documentation of what recovery actually looked like from the inside.

This one goes to some dark places. There are entries about missing the disorder, about feeling like recovery wasn't worth it, about a muffin that sent me into a complete spiral. But there are also entries about light bulbs going off, about laughing again, about finding hope in the smallest moments. And it ends with the Eater's Agreement — a manifesto I wrote at the end of treatment that still holds up more than ten years later.

If the first journal episode resonated with you, this one goes even deeper.

In This Episode:

  • Why I started doing these journal episodes — and why the response to part one floored me
  • What residential treatment actually looked like for me — and why I want to acknowledge the privilege of having access to that level of care
  • The emotional shutdown I experienced at the start of treatment — and when it finally broke open
  • The life map entry — sharing my story in group for the first time and finally crying
  • The identity crisis underneath the eating disorder — not knowing who I was or what I actually liked
  • The Valentine's Day entry — one of my darkest moments in treatment
  • The muffin entry — a spiral that started with a snack and ended with "I am not shit, I am the shit"
  • Sneaking exercise in treatment — and being honest about the moments recovery wasn't perfect
  • The PHP entry — when things finally started to shift and I started feeling happy again

Quotes from This Episode:

"It is comforting to have a physical manifestation of the source of my unhappiness. If that's taken from me, my failure and unhappiness becomes my fault."

"I don't want this to be my story forever. I need to find my light and choose it."

"A muffin should not have the power to make me feel worthless. I am powerful. I am more than this idiotic monster in my head. I am not shit. I am the shit."

"There was so much pressure to make the right choice that it makes a lot of sense why I wanted to simplify my life and just think about food and just think about my body."

Resources + Connect with Me:

Keywords/Tags: eating disorder recovery journals, ED treatment diary, eating disorder treatment, residential treatment eating disorder, ED recovery real talk, recovered-ish podcast, chloe cox, eating disorder therapist, ED recovery podcast, eating disorder journals, what recovery really looks like, quasi-recovery, eating disorder treatment experience, ED diary, recovery motivation

Resources + Connect with Me:

SPEAKER_00

Then I got triggered. Then I got triggered even more. And then the eating disorder was like, mayday, firefighter needs to come in and put the fire out. Like we are in crisis mode. And restriction urges came up, exercise urges came up. I was like, how can I tolerate this? This is not okay. There was so much pressure to make the right choice that it makes a lot of sense why I wanted to simplify my life and just think about food and just think about my body. It was such a strong desire to shut down all the other problems and just think, alright, how do I lose weight? That seemed so much simpler. I'm not sure I could feel much worse than I do right now. I challenged myself with a muffin, but the muffin turned out to be huge. This was probably a distortion. I just want to pause and say that. This was probably not actually an enormous muffin. You're listening to the Recovered-Isch podcast. I'm your host, Chloe Cox. And yeah, I know a thing or two about eating disorder recovery. Between my own very complicated history with disordered eating and the work I do now, I've seen this thing from pretty much every angle. This podcast is where we talk about the messier parts of recovery that don't really make it online. No platitudes, no inspirational quotes, just the real, raw, sometimes frustrating, sometimes surprisingly liberating process of building a life beyond your eating disorder. Let's get into it. Hello and welcome back to the Recovered-Isch podcast. My name is Chloe. I am your host, and we talk about basically all of the things that people don't want to talk about when it comes to eating disorder recovery. I have really been leaning into that actually quite a lot lately because I think something I was missing in my recovery was a space that felt fully honest. I think you see a lot of people really, really struggling on the internet, and then you see a lot of the other side of people living their best lives in recovery. Everything's wonderful, everything's great, and not a whole lot of the in-between and the nuances. And that's really where recovery happens. That's kind of where life happens, right? Is in that sort of gray nuance area where everything is not perfect and amazing. Maybe it's better than it was, but things are still hard sometimes. And that's life. So I guess I'm just giving you a recap of what we talk about here on Recovered-Ish. I don't want to shy away from the hard things. I don't want to sugarcoat. I don't want to lie to you about what it takes to really recover and recover long term. And a lot of it is uncomfortable and hard and sometimes embarrassing and sometimes shameful. And I guess that's where we're going on this podcast. Uh, and you know, all in the name of you feeling less alone in this, and everyone who's struggling with this feeling like you are not the only one with these thoughts. You're not the only one with these feelings. You are not, you're not messed up. Other people get it. And and there's a way out. So today on the podcast, back by popular demand, are my journals from treatment. I did an episode a while back basically just reading all of my diaries from eating disorder treatment. I have one that I kept right before I entered treatment when I was in therapy outpatient. I have one from my residential treatment. I have one from my PHP or partial hospitalization. I have one from my IOP, and I have one from my transition back home and into real life. And it's just wild to look back at these things. You know, this was over 11 years ago now that I was in treatment and reading the ways that I was feeling, in some ways it feels like I'm talking to a different person. And in other ways, I still feel really close to her. She was feeling a lot, she was going through a lot, she was working really hard. And in my journals, I did not filter at all. It's kind of, it's kind of a lot, honestly. Reading some of them is kind of a lot. But the first episode, so many of you said that it was your favorite one yet, and that it just felt really real and authentic. And I mean, it was because this is just this is what I wrote. I'm reading it verbatim with, you know, names censored. But I'm glad that it hit home. And my hope in revisiting these journals today is to provide that same sense of authenticity. Give you a little peek at what my journey was like, how I moved from a place of feeling so entrenched to shaking little by little out of it, and also maybe give you some ideas on how to do some of this work yourself. Journaling was the one of the biggest sources of coping in my recovery. I would journal like crazy. Obviously, I've got like five, six journals from that year completely filled. I would journal on the good days, I would journal on the bad days, I would do assignments for my therapist. I would write really just whatever I was thinking and feeling. And in doing that, it helped me sort through a lot of these thoughts and come to conclusions that ended up making a big difference in my mindset and the way that I felt about myself and about food and body. So I hope to offer that as a tool for you as well today and inspire you to put pen to paper. There is something really magical that happens when you're not doing this digitally, where you're actually picking up a physical pen and writing things down. I think it helps your brain to slow down and process. So I would recommend doing this the old-fashioned way. If you don't have a journal yet, that's also fun, just picking out a journal. I don't know about you, but I really love stationary. Where I want to start today, I know last time we kind of picked up and went through a little bit of each one. But today I want to dive a little more into what it was like in the very beginning of my intensive treatment in residential and the thoughts that I was having there, the things that I was working on there, because I don't know, many of you probably have experienced this type of higher level of care. For those of you that have not, I also want to say it doesn't mean that your struggle was any less. I also want to acknowledge the immense privilege that I had to receive this kind of treatment and have access to it. But residential treatment essentially is where you go and live at a house, and it was a beautiful house, I will say. And you are there with several other people struggling with eating disorders. You're essentially monitored 24-7. Your meals are planned and plated, you're expected to complete them. You do therapy all day long. Uh, there are rules that go along with it, and it's extremely intense, it's really hard. It forces you to not do your eating disorder behaviors. But it was life-changing for me to be able to have that kind of support. It was not always easy and it wasn't always what I wanted to be doing, but it was what I needed at the time, for sure. And a lot of my progress in recovery, I have to thank for this level of care of treatment and receiving it when I did, when my eating disorder needed it the most. And my parents, I'm so lucky that they supported me in getting that kind of help because I know that it is not available to everyone, and I wish that it was. But I also want to say if you have never entered a level of care, or even if you've never gotten help for your eating disorder, period, that says nothing about the severity or intensity of your disorder. I just want to make that clear that at varying degrees, at varying representations, every struggle is real and true and valid. Having said that, this journal represents probably the most intensity right off the bat when it came to me confronting my eating disorder. And so there's a lot in there. And I know in the first episode I shared when I first entered, I had these thoughts of like, I don't really belong here. All these other people that are here are a whole lot worse off than I am, and it's really not that bad, and I shouldn't be here, and I don't deserve to be here and get me out of this place. Quickly, I realized I definitely needed that kind of support, but there was certainly an imposter syndrome going into it at the start and some weird emotional shutdown. I found that, you know, I'm a really emotional person. Gosh, especially being pregnant, I can cry at the drop of the hat, at the drop of a hat. And I do, I cry all the time for things that don't even make sense. But when I was in residential, I found that I couldn't cry and I couldn't feel for the very beginning of it. I would sit down for these meals that I knew were very challenging for me. And I would almost, like a robot that wasn't feeling anything, just complete them and move on. And it made me think, do I even have an eating disorder if I'm able to just do this? I just don't feel anything at all. Realized a little bit later that that was me kind of just dissociating from all of my feelings. And there came a day where all of it sort of broke loose, and I was starting to feel the impact of eating more consistently, fueling my body adequately, and that sort of became terrifying. When you've been in a state of depriving yourself for a very long time, you also numb out all of your feelings happiness, sadness, the full spectrum. And that's what had happened. Once my brain started coming back online, once I was more nourished, man, did I feel a lot. And that's where I want to take you today in this journal. Okay, this was a journal entry from February 5th, 2015. I shared my life map in group today. The life map was this assignment that we received where we essentially had to give a timeline of our life from start to the present and include anything that significantly impacted us, important events, things that defined us, made us who we are. And so I shared my life map in group today, and I finally cried. It felt really good to let it out. It is a bit more freeing now that everyone knows what's going on with me. It feels like a better support system, knowing that everybody gets it. After crying, it feels like my emotions have been opened. I'm feeling more negative than before, but at least it's something different, and I can stop pretending things are going fine. I was getting so good at pretending I'd even convinced myself, Crazy Chloe is totally on her way. And if you remember from the first episode, Crazy Chloe is the part of me that I guess was associated with my eating disorder, the like really manipulative, sneaky, plodding part of me that my therapist really encouraged me to invite and bring into treatment because she wasn't showing up. I was kind of being the perfect patient. But I guess after I shared this, I started feeling her coming back. I'm going to stop acting like I'm happy when I'm not. That's the only way I can deal with my issues. I have to stop suppressing them. I've found that I'm enjoying sharing in group a lot more. It's a nice release to actually let out how I feel and to have it validated and worked through. I really am trying hard for this. I'm doing everything I'm supposed to. Even this morning, I had an intense urge to exercise, but I resisted it. I think things are going to get harder once the weight gain becomes real for me. I feel disconnected from the food and my body, and I'm in a state of pretending that one does not actually influence the other. Before coming here, that is what my life was built upon. I could trust that if I restricted, I would lose, and if I ate, I would gain. Simple. And right now, the only way to keep eating is to pretend it doesn't affect my body. Although logically, I know that it does. Another thing on my mind today is the uncertainty of not knowing who I really am. All day I've been looking at my decisions, even tiny ones, and questioning why I made them or how I knew it was what I wanted. So that's been difficult because I don't really know what I actually like. Nikki says to reframe the anxiety. Nikki was my therapist. Reframe the anxiety I feel about not knowing who I am by calling it excitement. I have to pretend it's exciting that I get to discover the real me, my soul self. I just thought about it, and I do think I enjoy singing for the sake of just singing. I love just singing in the car or in my room. I don't need an audience or a show to make me like singing. So that's decided. I like singing. That's something I know about me. But I also know that it feels so incredible to be the best. I like that too. I don't know if that's enough to continue in this career, if it's just to be the best at it. I won't be happy doing this unless I'm successful and the best. I don't know if it's worth a life of uncertainty just to be the best, because if I'm not the best, there's no way I'll be happy with that. And that's where that entry ends. This was a really important day for me. Uh, not only did I open up to the group about everything in my life, but really what brought me here, which was a massive career crisis at 19 and identity crisis, existential crisis that went with it. But the fact that I actually allowed myself to cry and start to put the pieces together of this is hard and I'm gonna let it be hard. I know that that was a turning point for me. And even more so, it allowed me to actually start the identity conversation, which is what you heard at the end of that entry. Like, I didn't really know who I was, I didn't really know what I actually liked. I felt that I had just kind of been programmed on this track since I was really, really young. And the eating disorder came in and made me face a lot of that, which was scary. And I appreciated my therapist reframe to look at it in an exciting way. But it was also terrifying. I felt like I had lost so much of myself and didn't really know where to start. But I do love hearing that I recognized I do just like singing. And that's still so true for me. As you might know, if you've heard my other episodes, I grew up singing and dancing and acting and thought that was going to be my whole life and my career. And now, you know, I'm 31. I turned 31 two days ago. I still love singing, but I do not like performing. And I will sing in the shower and I'll sing in the car, and I'll sing with my son, and I'll dance around the house, and that's enough for me. I really do love that. And it's cool to hear that I recognized that as early as my residential treatment. Okay, another entry that was on a day that seemed really difficult for me. Today is really difficult for some reason. I'm feeling very down, but it's hard to put words to my emotions right now. I'm struggling a lot with body image, and it's impossible not to think with every bite of food, I'm gaining weight and losing control. I can feel my healthy self wanting to reframe this in a positive way, but so much of me wants to wallow in my sadness. This is messed up, but a lot of me finds myself missing the hunger and misery I felt so often. It filled me up and gave me a focus point. For some reason, the devastation is appealing and the suffering is attractive. I'm having such a strong urge and pull to find darkness again. It's so much easier to blame my unhappiness on my eating disorder. Gives me an excuse that sounds like a friend. It is comforting to have a physical manifestation of the source of my unhappiness. If that's taken from me, my failure and unhappiness becomes my fault and not the eating disorders. I can't handle taking responsibility for the fact that my life is not turning out the way I thought it would. If my expectations are not met, it's my eating disorder's fault. I'm just the victim in all of this. But what happens when it's gone and I'm still a mess? And at the same time, I look around and realize I'm so much better than this disorder. I don't want this to be my story forever. It's such a war inside my head. I need to find my light and choose it. It's going to be hard, but if I can find light that is more appealing than my darkness, I will overcome this and be a full person again. Wow. I mean, there's a lot there. I have spoken, I think, about this before, that sense of really missing the disorder. And I say it here that, you know, it's messed up, but there was a certain pull to it, a certain desire to be just wrapped up and held by my eating disorder and my depression that went along with it. It felt oddly comforting. And I think I said it best when I noted how comforting it is to have a physical manifestation of my unhappiness. That I wasn't just I didn't have to say I was unhappy, I embodied it. I didn't have to say I was struggling. I was the picture of struggle. And my eating disorder spoke that, so I didn't have to. And I think there's a lot of fear, and I don't know if anyone can relate to this, but there was a lot of fear for me in letting the eating disorder go. And then what? What if I still fail? What if I still struggle? What if I still can't figure out who I am and move forward? Then I don't have anything, then I don't have the eating disorder, and I don't have a life worth living. And that was so scary to think of. But I appreciate where I landed that I noticed this war inside me, the light versus the dark. There it was still a chance to find the part of me that can see through the eating disorder. I didn't want this to be my story forever. And I think it helped me to put into perspective that I really needed to commit to doing the hard stuff and just take a chance and risk it to see if I could be a fuller version of myself and I could see myself through this. Wise kid, that young Chloe. Okay, here we go again. This is a bit of a heavy one. Also forgot to mention at the top of the show, I'm like getting over a cold. So if I sound a little congested, that is why. This entry was from Valentine's Day, 2015. This has been the strangest day emotionally. I've felt more depressed today than I have in a really long time. It felt like I wanted to just give up. The thought of having to worry about feeding myself six times a day, battling six times a day, is just too exhausting to handle. I either shut off my emotions, do my eating disorder, or get totally depressed all the time. Today I FaceTimed with two of my friends, I won't name them, and it made me feel like shit. They're living their lives, having fun, being productive people, and I'm just a huge messed up person in residential treatment for my eating disorder. I feel like I should have been there with them. I'm really jealous of them, to be honest. So-and-so is going on dates, and other friend is going to parties. I'm here eating and feeling things. Where did I go wrong with all of this? On top of all of this, I also feel shitty because I don't actually have many friends, and that's my fault. I've been a bitch. I don't know if that's true looking back on this, but I really felt that it was true. I've isolated myself, that's true. I've made myself lonely. No one actually even cares about me. I have no one. And that wouldn't be so bad if I liked myself. It wouldn't matter if I literally have two friends. So-and-so is moving on with his life. He's fine without me. I'm probably such a burden on him. He probably doesn't even miss me. We made so many plans and I messed them all up. So of course he should move on and make plans without me. I hate feeling like we're drifting apart. Well, anyways, I've felt like shit all day since I spoke to them, and now I have even less of a clue about what I'm doing when I leave here. Do I go back to college? Do I become a vagabond? The next time I mess up, do I starve myself again? Why does that suddenly seem like a solution to all my problems? It seems so appealing, almost glamorous, and that's so messed up, and I know it, but it's still appealing. When I cry, it's painful, but it's purposeful. Does that even make a little sense? When I suffer, it feels productive. I'm aware that sounds crazy. I'm losing my will to recover. I'm losing track of the light. I have a strong desire to spiral out of control again. I want to lock myself away and sob. I miss it. I don't want to be scared of my life. I'd rather not eat than feel this unbearable pressure. It's got to get better. There is so much more than this. I will figure it out. I will find myself. Life has got to change, or it's got to end. Whew. That was really heavy. There's a stage of eating disorder recovery that almost nobody talks about, and almost nobody has a program for. It's not the acute phase, you're not in crisis, you're not white knuckling through every meal. By most outside measures, you look like someone who has her life together. You're a mother, probably, you're holding things down, and you have done real hard work to get where you are. But the eating disorder is still there. Quieter now, functional even, but still running a background program in your mind. Still shaping how you move through your days, how you feel in your body, and what you reach for when life gets hard. You're recovered enough, but you're not free. And you know the difference. That's quasi-recovery, and it's where so many women get stranded, especially in midlife and motherhood when there's simply no space, no time, and no permission slip to still be dealing with this. The Quasi-Recovery Exit program is built specifically for you. It's an eight-week small group coaching program, and when I say small, I mean it. This is not a course, it's not a membership with hundreds of people inside. I'm talking a handful of women. Intentionally, stubbornly, few, because that intimacy is the point, and I protect it. Entry is by application only. Not everyone who applies will be accepted, and that's by design. This isn't a program designed for early recovery or even mid-stage recovery. It's not crisis support, it's precision work for the last layer. The part that's dug in because it's learned to survive alongside your real life. The weekly group sessions, the specialized work-between calls, the individualized Thursday coaching rounds with me, all of it is designed to go after that specific thing. And then there's the group itself. I didn't fully anticipate what would happen when I put these women at this exact life stage in a virtual room together. Women who are done pretending they're fine, who don't need to explain themselves, who are walking the same stretch of the road. The cohesion that's emerged in our first group has been truly one of the most powerful things I've witnessed in this work. If you've applied before, even if it wasn't the right fit then, I want you to apply again. Timing matters, readiness shifts. The door is so genuinely open. The application is in the show notes. Very few spots exist, and this is how they fill. But I can't wait to meet you and talk to you inside the quasi-recovery exit. Wow. When I do these episodes, I always start thinking, like, oh, this is gonna be kind of funny because it's my journal. It's kind of funny. It's not that was not funny at all. Yeah, I mean, that's a very raw depiction of what it feels like to be fighting in recovery. You are not going to feel motivated every day. You're not even gonna feel motivated a lot of the time. It's such a back and forth, and it's so hard and so painful. And I think what I was feeling there was, of course, having talked to my friends that were out living their lives in college, people that I really loved and missed. They were sharing what was going on with them, and I was just sitting there knowing that what I had done that day was eat my food and cry. And that felt really bad because I wanted to have exciting things to share. I wanted to have direction. I wanted to know what I was going to be doing next, but I didn't. And that was so scary. And then I felt so distant from both of them, both of my friends that I talked to, because it had been so long since I'd seen them. It had been so long since my life looked anything like theirs. And I thought, I have no one and nobody actually cares about me. They're moving on without me, which wasn't true, but it was all I could see in that moment. It wasn't true that nobody cared about me or I had no friends. Yes, it was true that I isolated myself a lot back then, but there were still people that cared about me if I cared to look or let myself believe it. But in that moment, I just felt like nobody else understood, and I felt angry that I had gotten myself to this place. But even in my worst entry, in my darkest place, I was still writing that there has to be something more. Life has to get better than this. I said, I will figure it out, and I guess reading this back, I'm so proud of myself that despite how hard it all was, I tried every single time to return to hope. And that carried me such a long way. I think that's down to the support I received. That while all of me was hurting, I still heard people say, it can get better than this, keep going. And so I guess if you're in that space now, I want to tell you that it can get better than this, keep going, and it will. If you can relate to any of those words, I have so much empathy for where you are. And also I want to tell you, it's been 11 years since I wrote those words, and life did get better. A lot better. Worlds better. That girl would not even be able to believe where we are right now. That's really special to acknowledge, and I also hope that it gives you a sense of what can happen. Oh man, we're gonna need to lighten it up pretty soon, but this this next one is a little heavy as well. I'm not sure I could feel much worse than I do right now. I challenged myself with a muffin, but the muffin turned out to be huge. This was probably a distortion. I just want to pause and say that this was probably not actually an enormous muffin. We have a way in when you're stuck in an eating disorder to magnify the things that scare us, and the magnification of that really intensifies the fear, and it's a vicious cycle. But I just want to say, I know even reading this back, I'm sure it was not a huge muffin. And it says it was a lot bigger than the last muffin I had. I freaked out, mostly because today at Coffee Bean, I saw a muffin comparable in size that was X amount of calories. We went to outings on the weekends and we would get to go to a coffee shop, which was like the highlight of my week to be able to have coffee. We couldn't have coffee in treatment, and I understand why, but it was the highlight of the week. But unfortunately, when you go out into the real world after you've been sheltered in eating disorder treatment, you're again exposed to those awful menu signs that have calories on them, and that is what I saw. So naturally, I fixated on that number. I feel like such a messed up person. I hate myself. I couldn't even taste the food. And now I just filled out my menu, and one of the lunch options on the main menu is a muffin. And I say then in all caps, did I just eat a lunch for snack? I hate everything. I feel enormous. I wish I could undo it. I wish I could restrict. I wish I could exercise. My body image is shit, and my urges are out of control. This is horrible. I feel like a balloon, my stomach aches, and I feel so disgusting and guilty. The worst part is that tomorrow I screwed myself over and ordered ice cream. I hate everything. I hate everything, I hate everything. I just have to close my eyes and pray that things are going to get easier and that I'll start being okay with the way my body looks. Because a muffin should not have the power to make me feel worthless. I am powerful. I am more than this idiotic monster in my head that tells me eating a muffin makes me shit. I am not shit. I am the shit.

unknown

Okay.

SPEAKER_00

Well, maybe that gave us a little bit of comedic relief. I am I'm not shit. I am the shit. Okay, Chloe. Okay. I liked the word shit, it seems, back in the day. There is some humor here and also just some reality. And I think if you can't laugh at yourself and pull back and just laugh at the crazy things that eating disorder will tell us sometimes, it's gonna be really hard to survive recovery. So, my one of my best pieces of advice is we gotta have a sense of humor about this sometimes. I know that muffin was not a big deal. I could probably eat it right now and not have a second thought about it. But I can see where this went wrong. First, I challenged myself. It was a food that was difficult for me to eat. And I want to say not everybody's fair foods are the same. So if for you a muffin doesn't feel hard to eat, that is totally okay. Everybody's disorder conceptualizes it differently. It doesn't mean your eating disorder isn't valid. Just have to say that when we talk about specific foods. But I saw how many calories was in a muffin out at Coffee Bean, and my brain latched so hard to that number that it created this whole story about how much I had just consumed for my snack. And that was probably not true. And also, it just shows how much power those numbers had over my whole life. And I'm so glad that I'm no longer in the era of counting calories. And yes, I think my brain probably remembers a lot of calories just from back in the day, but it doesn't bother me anymore. I don't think in that sort of framework of calories in, calories out, I think my body knows what it needs, my body knows what tastes good to it, and I can trust my hunger and my fullness to regulate it, which amen. What a beautiful place to land. But back then, numbers were everything. And so that was first what went wrong. I challenged myself and then I was exposed to numbers that made me freak out and stuck in my brain. And then I saw that on our lunch menu for the week that one of the main meal options was a muffin. And that made me freak out because then I had thought that my snack was the same size as a lunch, which it wasn't. The lunch included a muffin, it wasn't the whole lunch, obviously. Um, but dang, it spiraled quick. And then the urges went crazy. So we can really follow this thread. I guess the first thread would be I was challenging myself, doing something hard already. Then I got triggered, then I got triggered even more, and then the eating disorder was like, mayday, firefighter needs to come in and put the fire out. Like we are in crisis mode, and restriction urges came up, exercise urges came up. I was like, how can I tolerate this? This is not okay. However, I know that journaling was probably how I got through this because I was just writing down whatever I was feeling, and by the end of it, I realized, hey, why does this muffin have so much power over me? I should not be controlled by an inanimate object. The fact that eating a muffin made me question my own worth as a human. I realized writing it down that was not okay. And I realized I don't want to feel this way forever. I have to believe I'm more powerful than this. So I closed my eyes, I took a breath, and I said, I am the shit. And I guess it worked. I mean, I can hope that it worked. Okay, this is the very next day I'm writing. There's always so much going on in my head. My mind races from thought to thought, feeling to feeling, so fast that I can't tell what is true, but it all feels true. On the walk this morning, I got such a strong desire to live. I wanted to get well and live life to be happy. And seconds later, I was terrified and did not want to ever leave treatment. Then I wanted to leave tomorrow. Then I wanted to not exist and not have to worry about it. It is beyond overwhelming to have these racing emotions. The same things happen to me when I think about quitting theater or changing my major. So, for those of you that don't know, my whole life plan was to be on Broadway. And right before my eating disorder went off the rails, I was successful in my career. I deferred from college and started working professionally. And so then the thought was, okay, after treatment, do I go back to college and do I stay in my musical theater major or do I just change my entire life? Do I change my major? Do I go to a different school? It was just a mess. I go from excited to terrified to obsessing about making the wrong choice to just wanting to stop the noise by staying sick so I don't have to make the choice at all. Yesterday I was engulfed in depression. I couldn't stop crying, and everything felt intensely triggering. It wasn't much, but I did a little exercise in the bathroom. And afterwards the voices stopped for a while. But now I'm stuck. I have to do it again today. It became a rule. Not only that, but the calm I felt afterwards was addictive. I can't decide if I should tell Nikki, my therapist, I did this or not. I want to be honest, but I don't want them to think this is a bigger deal than it actually is. On top of this, my guilt from snack last night and enjoying it is eating away at me. I just started worrying about theater again. I hate how much I obsess about making the wrong decision. It seems so irreversible. Like if I decide to give it up, it's over, done, no going back. And in this business, it is that way. If you miss the train, it's gone and it's not coming back. And there is not another one on its way. It's all over. I recognize this is all or nothing thinking, but what the therapists don't understand is that this is an all or nothing business. It's not good enough for me to be sort of successful at theater. I have to be the best, or it's not worth trying. And that's what motivated me to practice so hard and work so long to be the best. Not because I loved it. At least I think it is. I feel like there's still a chance. I let the environment I was in steal the joy I used to feel when I did theater. That's where I'm stuck because I can't tell and I don't know for sure. This all hurts too much to think about. I want it all to stop. Okay. Well, there you can really see the emotional whiplash of it all. It was just a lot to feel all the time. And then it was racing thoughts, racing feelings. I don't know how I feel. I start worrying about one thing and then it turns into a worry about another thing. There was so much pressure to make the right choice that it makes a lot of sense why I wanted to simplify my life and just think about food and just think about my body. It was such a strong desire to shut down all the other problems and just think, all right, how do I lose weight? That seemed so much simpler. And it's hard to even admit now that in treatment there were moments where I let the urges get the better of me. And like I said in this entry, I did sneak a little exercise in. And it helped with the thoughts. It helped with the noise. It's just so hard to let go of what works. And that's the crux of why recovery is so hard. Eating disorders, as I said in my last episode, they're not all bad. They actually usually serve a function and help us in some way. And it's so clear from that entry the way that the eating disorder was helping me. It was too much. Life was too overwhelming. There was too much going on. There was too much to figure out about who I was and what I needed to do next. That I just needed it to stop and to make my life really small and to quiet the noise. And when I acted on my eating disorder, that's exactly what it would do for me. To round out this episode with a little hope, I want to want you to hear what my journals sounded like just a few months later. And this was by no means the end of my journey. This was really just the beginning of it all. I'm, I mean, you guys know that it's been 11 years for me, and there have been ups and downs and relapses along the way. I'm, I would say I'm solidly recovered. And it took a lot more than just this stint of treatment to get where I am now. But the way that this set the foundation for the rest of my recovery journey cannot be overstated. And I want you to hear that as for as many downs as I was experiencing, there were also a lot of ups that helped you fuel me. If it was all down, if it was all darkness, I don't know if I could have sustained recovery. But there were so many moments in therapy and in groups where I had light bulbs go off of like, oh, my life doesn't have to be this way, or oh my gosh, I feel happy. Or wow, I never realized I liked that thing, or that I liked doing this, or I didn't ever see this strength that I had. And I was lucky to have a supportive group around me at treatment and amazing therapists to reinforce all of that. But for as down as I was in residential, just a few months later in PHP, this is the kind of way that I was thinking. I don't know how to explain it, but I feel like so much has changed so quickly for me in the best way. I've been so happy lately. It's almost like I've turned into a different person. Of course, some of the changes can be attributed to me following my meal plan and not exercising to compensate. I no longer feel like a prisoner to my thoughts and urges. I can actively fight the thoughts that are telling me not to eat, to keep moving, and that I'm disgusting and gross. Yesterday in group, so-and-so actually said to me in the nicest, most genuine way, when I have a bad body image day, I should reality check in the mirror because of what I've got is pretty good. And that actually made me feel really good. Another thing I think has contributed to the drastic change in my demeanor is having friends here. I feel like I already have some best friends and I've only known them for like two weeks. I can be as weird around them as I am with my best friend from home. And I laugh with them more than I've laughed with anyone in a long time. So for that, I'm really grateful. And then I say, I don't really know what to write about because I'm just so happy lately. I don't feel like a real human being. Who knows what that means? But I think it means I wasn't feeling connected to all of that dark, brooding energy that I had been so entrenched in for so long. It was like a veil had lifted, and maybe it was my antidepressants working, and maybe it was the fact that my brain had been more nourished than it had been in years, and maybe it was that I was doing some beautiful work and therapy, and maybe it was because I was connecting with people again, and I think it was all of that. And there are days and moments in these pages to follow where I definitely don't feel that way, but on that day I did. And having days like that and also writing them down was so important. Because on the down days, I could look back and see: all right, this might be a down day, this might be a down week, but there are moments where I didn't feel like this, and I could maybe feel that way again. I just have to get through this. That documentation was really powerful. Okay, I want to end with what I wrote when I was getting close to the end of my stint in higher level of care. It was an assignment that was called the Eater's Agreement, where we had to essentially write out a manifesto of what we were agreeing to from this moment forward in regards to our relationship with food and body. And so this is what I wrote. I agree from this day forward to give myself room for imperfection. I agree to appreciate change and identify mistakes not as failures, but as stepping stones that lead me closer to who I'm meant to be. I agree to strive for happiness and peace, identifying that as my ultimate goal and destination rather than a consequence only achieved by success. I agree to recognize my power and use that power to foster my soul self. I agree to attach my drive and determination to the light that builds me up rather than self-destruction, rather than self-destruction. I agree to open myself up to the infinite, beautiful, bright possibilities of the future, freeing myself of expectations and limitations. I agree to no longer let the fear of the unknown prevent me from participating in the gorgeous gift that is life. That kind of says it all. And reading this more than 10 years later, after I wrote it, I can say that I've done my best to adhere to that. And it's not always easy to do that, and some days I don't. My identity, my worth, and my success to something outside of myself, to achievement, to accolades, to aesthetics, and I found that no matter how hard I tried for those things, and no matter how much I achieved, I was never really happy. And so instead trying to find happiness and peace in the present, making that the goal rather than the outcome that could only be achieved by success, that helped really reshape my world. And it's something that I'm still working on because I do have a strong drive, and I do have that part of me that always pushes to be better. But as long as I keep her in check and I focus on what really matters, my values, my family, enjoying all that I have, all the gifts that I have in my life, that's where I find happiness. Not my body, not eating perfectly, not achieving financial goals or any kind of massive recognition. No, I know that those things might feel good in a moment, but they don't actually fulfill me. And that's what I recognized in my treatment journey is life is about connection and love and being here now. That's all we have. Okay, I hope that leaves us with a positive, inspiring feeling moving forward. While this episode was, of course, a bit heavy, I guess I wanted to show you how my brain was thinking then, what I was working towards, and even the very real-time process of feeling in my absolute worst and trying to return to hope again and again and again, and trying to push forward and keep going, despite I know I've spoken in a podcast episode before about how so much of recovery is tolerating discomfort. And that's what I was doing here for sure. And with a lot of help and a lot of support, it's so not easy to do, and it's really not easy to do alone. But if you want a good place to start for recovery and you don't know where to turn to, you don't have a therapist, you don't have someone to reach out to right now, start with a journal. It doesn't have to be that complicated. Just write down how you feel and see if through that you can make some new connections and establish what you actually believe versus what the eating disorder believes and wants for your life. That was life-changing and life-altering for me. And really helped me tolerate a lot of the discomfort. So I hope that gives you a little bit of a nugget to grow and stretch your recovery. And at the very least, I hope it helped you to feel a little less alone in some of these more difficult thoughts and difficult feelings. This process is so messy and so hard, but I promise you it's worth it in the end. Thank you as always for tuning in. I so appreciate all of you that are here. Let me know what you thought of this episode. If you'd like this to become a series where I read, I mean, I've gotten multiple, multiple journals, hundreds of pages that we could weave through together. So let me know if you want me to do another episode like this. Would so appreciate five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe if you're watching on YouTube, give it a thumbs up. That helps me so, so much to reach other people that need to hear this message. Thank you for being here. Thanks for being a part of the Recover Dish family. Don't forget to eat your food, and we will talk more next week. Bye.