It’s Still Complicated – ryan

Something I never expected?

For pregnancy to heal my eating disorder.

Okay, maybe that’s not completely accurate . . . but man, I have never experienced freedom like I did in those 10 months. The moment I saw those two pink lines and knew my son was somewhere in it all, something just clicked.

Not in a blurry, oversimplified “I’m all better and will never think negatively about my body or overthink food again” way. But in a clear, proclamatory “I will do anything for this child” way.

I would still do anything for my child. What I must now consider is whether I would do anything for me.

Discovering my pregnancy remains one of the greatest moments of my life, of course in part due to the time-stopping, breathtaking realization: There is life inside me.

But hasn’t there always been life inside me?

The realization of my pregnancy also signified, for me, an immediate and stark division from the body policing and food restriction that thus far defined my life.

In an instant, I knew I had to eat.

In an instant, I knew I had to release my body.

From that day of discovery until the day of my son’s delivery, I had so few thoughts about my body, how I was being perceived, the food I was eating, and my weight that it was truly unbelievable.

Looking back now, I cannot believe it. Years and years I spent at absolute war with my body, confining it to regulations and quotas, never relinquishing control enough to let it be. Years and years I spent counting my calories, restricting my intake, or compensating for eating in some way or another, constructing a prison for myself that never really felt safe— it just felt comfortable.

Pregnancy and Healing

All it took to resolve so much within me was to look toward my son. And maybe to look towards the sun too.

It’s not lost on me that the depth of all this goes far beyond how I understand my body and food and my role as a mother— it gets to how the world has programmed me as a woman, how I have molded myself to fit my own aims of perfection, and how food, to me, has never been a positive relational source.

Still, what I know to be true is that the moment caring for myself became caring for my son, everything changed.

My son is now 17 months, and for the 10 he was growing inside my body and all of his life on the outside, I have been the/a source of nutrition for him. I can say so much about breastfeeding and the challenges and successes we faced over time (and I will!), but the knowledge and embracing of this alone completely altered the way I thought about my body and food.

For the first time in my life, I ate what I wanted.

For the first time in my life, I removed the scale.

For the first time in my life, I thought not about how to keep myself thin, but how to keep my son strong.

For the first time in my life, I thought, This is how I want to live.

In thinking more sincerely about how I’ve experienced this journey, I am willing to admit that pregnancy gave me a free ride out of eating disorder land.

I didn’t have the time, nor capacity, nor energy, nor interest in prioritizing my disorder anymore.

I had a baby to prioritize.

I’m also willing to admit that I abandoned my bodily expectations and relentless pursuit of smallness.

I didn’t have the time, nor capacity, nor energy, nor interest in prioritizing my disorder anymore.

I had a baby to prioritize.

I’m also willing to admit that I deconstructed my vision of health rooted in restriction, acknowledging that food was never the enemy.

I didn’t have the time, capacity, energy, or interest in prioritizing my disorder anymore.

I had a baby to prioritize.

And so . . . the healing began. The healing turned into freedom that metabolized into joy and fulfillment. And so it went.

It was in pregnancy when I first felt the truth of freedom, perhaps most apparent in the shape of bagels, lattes, and pastas (all I could stomach for the majority of my pregnancy). I remember the visceral feeling of guilt falling off my shoulders more and more every day, and even though I couldn’t understand why, I was happy.

These waves of freedom were accompanied by the welcome arrival of new and beautiful perspectives (and of my son!), more reflective of such vastness, limitlessness, and wonder of the world, and less so of the binding and inescapable cage of shame I had constructed so deliberately.

I felt myself longing for more freedom. To hold onto the feeling. To chase that freedom and wonder, rather than the control and smallness that had defined my recent years.

Still, I kept waiting for that wistfulness to leave me. I wondered if it might eventually leave me. If I would be able to silence the voices in my head pushing only for my own destruction, should they arise again. I feared my brain might be able to conjure up a spell that trapped my “free self” back into the web of my disorder at any moment.

Postpartum Haunts and Radical Honesty

Over the years, my recovery has borne witness to the highest mountaintops and the steepest valleys. In the months after having my son, there have been some good days, but there have been many more hard ones. The discomfort of relinquishing control in return for freedom is a transaction I am continually working on and one that never seems to subside. I endure raging body dysmorphia in my new, postpartum body more days than others.

I still often cry at the end of long days, particularly when I have tried to challenge myself and indulge in a food I’ve reverted to fearing, have fought the urge to over-exercise to exert control over the newfound softness of my body, or refrained from calculating my caloric intake to ensure the maintenance of my weight.

And most of the time, I don’t feel happy about or proud of my attempts to leave ED behind and to recover instead.

This lack of joy and pride might seem trivial, but it is not. In fact, it has been precisely these feelings (or lack thereof) that have brought on practical complications in my recovery and prompted lapses and relapses time and time again. Once proud of wearing my badge of recovery, I have also known myself to spend weeks, even months at a time, beckoning the re-entrance of my disorder back into my life. Though difficult to admit, restricting food, pushing my body to exercise compulsively, and sustaining my life at the size of my self-imposed cage is still one of the comforts I constantly seek.

My eating disorder convinced me this cage of control is safe and protective, that it serves me in deepening my will and preserving my ethic, and that it will never leave me.

Postpartum has not been kind to me, if we’re being so for real. And I imagine it’s even more cruel to those of us in recovery. These days, I have found myself falling back into comfortable patterns to keep my symptoms manageable, desperately clinging onto things I know are at best inhibiting and at worst wholly sabotaging.

Stepping into motherhood and getting to know my new self, I resented my nourished body. With my social routines so wildly disrupted, I struggled to know how to move and eat intuitively. I would spend hours looking at my body in the mirror— pinching, checking, weighing, obsessing— wondering if it was the glass or my brain that was warped. I am currently facing the weight of these challenges still.

It remains an active choice for me to make every day whether or not I want to value my recovery. Right now, things are hard. Truthfully, I’ve doubted my ability to continue and to face the relentless, seemingly insurmountable challenges my own mind presents me with, while being the best possible mom I can be.

I feel fragile, and I don’t think people understand that much. I wake up every day hoping it will be an easier one; that I will be able to consume what I need to sustain myself and bolster my recovery; that I will be able to maintain the will to do so. Even when, and maybe especially when, I don’t have someone relying on me for nourishment or growth.

And so things go.

It still feels like being stabbed in the heart when people comment on my body, or when people compare my body to other women’s. I mean that literally—I feel a physical pain in my chest when I am reduced to my bodily appearance, the body I am still working on tolerating. I am self-conscious about eating and exercising in front of others, and I often don’t have time for these things while caring for an energetic toddler.

Today, I am choosing to reflect and think of how much I lost in the deepest valleys of my eating disorder and remind myself that healing can look like a million little things. It can look like eating a croissant on a picnic in front of the Eiffel Tower, or it can look like getting milk in your coffee.

It can look like getting lost in thought and reading a book in solitude, or it can look like calling a friend for support in a time of need.

It can look like going out to a restaurant you once feared and challenging yourself as best you can, or it can look like sitting in the safety of comfort for a while, so long as the comfort is looking out for you.

It can look like feeling proud of your growing belly during pregnancy or while nursing your baby for 18 months, or it can look like wearing short sleeves to work for the first time postpartum (which I did today, yay!).

That’s the beautiful thing about healing—like so much else in this life, including motherhood, there’s no guidebook or manuscript telling us what to do. So we can do anything and everything.

I am moving toward discovering what freedom looks like in and for my own self, resisting the temptation to only value my well-being when it’s associated with another’s.

What would it look like for me to exist freely in body without pregnancy offering an embedded rationale for a growing body?

What would it look like for me to have food freedom without breastfeeding offering me a built-in reason to consume?

Right now, I can say I. Don’t. Know.

But I’m finding out.

Originally published on the author’s Substack