How hope remains
Well it has been a long hiatus since my last post. Being back in the working world has really changed my weekly structure but having now been in the job 10 months, I can say that I am really enjoying it and it is going well.
Last time I wrote, I had just got over a huge crisis, ironically timed with it starting a couple of weeks into my new role. In all honesty, it hasn’t been the only one I have had to navigate in the last 10 months but on the whole, I can definitely say that the gaps between my crises are getting longer. What’s more, with the right support, I am far more able to cope with them.
Sometimes I wonder about the philosophical compatibility of being employed to show people that things can get better and still experiencing periods of crisis myself. How can I inspire that hope in people when, at times, I can still feel so hopeless myself? But each time I think about it, I come to the same conclusion. Things have got better. Compared to where I was at the height of my illness, things have improved vastly and that’s the hope right there. No matter if I have a bad day, or couple of weeks, no-one can take away how far I’ve come or how much things have improved over time. Recovery is a journey - hence the title of this blog - and it naturally has ups and downs or twists in the road.
In some ways I think it is helpful to compare my journey with EUPD / BPD / Complex Emotional Needs (this is now my preferred term for the difficulties experienced by so many people as it doesn’t depend on diagnosis and yet encompasses the difficulties of those who do identify with one too - such as EUPD, BPD or C-PTSD), with my journey towards recovery from my eating disorder. I was so unwell with Anorexia in my 20’s that I had to be hospitalised for treatment. It was a huge battle to restore my weight to a healthy level and learn to eat again. However, now, more than a decade later, most people would never suspect that I’d had it. I still don’t classify myself as “fully recovered” but rather still “in recovery” from it. That is because the thoughts that drove my restriction still play a part in my life. They are still there every day and every meal time but the fact is that for the majority of the time, they are totally manageable. I can push them away to the back of my mind and behave appropriately around food. Sometimes - particularly when I am struggling with my mental health in general - they turn up with a little more force than usual and I have to properly engage my mind to fight them off. This happens far more infrequently now than it did in the past and thankfully, even more rare, are the occasions where the thoughts win out and I end up skipping a meal. I don’t think the thoughts will ever go away completely for me (maybe they do for some people) but the main thing is that as time progresses, their strength is generally waning and more importantly, they have less and less impact on my day to day life.
The reason I brought that up was because I think my current recovery journey is very similar. With time, my crises (like the skipped meals or restricted portions) are becoming farther apart. The thoughts that once led to me constantly believing I should end my life are becoming easier to manage, and day to day interactions with society that once made me believe that I was just inherently bad at ‘adulting’ run far more smoothly on the whole. I don’t know if they will ever disappear completely but my sense is that they’ll eventually learn to take so much of a back seat in my mind that they’ll barely bother me.
Maybe to some people, that doesn’t sound hopeful at all. What’s the point in trying now if these things are always going to be there? But I’d argue that there’s still much to be hopeful about. I’ve written before about how my life used to just be a mere existence and the biggest thing recovery has given me is the ability to live again. No-one goes through life with absolutely no cross to bear so if I can minimise the weight of mine to allow me to live as full a life as I can for the majority of the time, I’ll take the fact that it might not disappear altogether.
That hope, the hope that things will become increasingly manageable with time, is what keeps me going and is what I try and inspire in those I now work with. It doesn’t matter if I have hard times along the way, it’s the general direction of travel that’s important.
