OUT OF HIDING

Grab a cup of joe and join me. It’s been awhile, so let's catch up. 

I don’t want to go into detail quite yet, but the silence was and has been needed. Perhaps all the noise around me was too much. I took a step back from social media and blogging for many months. I thought that maybe taking a break from all my writing, blogging, posting on social media, and even isolating would help; yet even those choices and ways of living became deafening and so incredibly difficult. I come out of hiding – my knees a little wobbly and shaky, my heart beating out of my chest, my fingers tingling and palms sweating. Who knows how the world will take this. Who knows how I will carry on. All I know is it is breath by breath, sip by sip, day by day, and – literally – bite by bite.  

Through the beginning of 2021 I was rapidly deteriorating. Life was slipping through my fingertips like quick sand. But, with the strength of my parents, we got a hold of this disease seconds before it took my life completely. I spent a month at ACUTE Denver Health, an Intensive Care Unit for severe eating disorders. Spending 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in a square room no bigger than my own bedroom, with a certified nursing assistant staring at my every move was not how I would ever want to live. But deep within me I know the step was absolutely necessary as I was critically and life-threateningly ill. 

And, to this day it's critically necessary that I keep taking steps forward and not backward. I am not nearly recovered, and I won’t be for a long time. Half the time, I don’t agree with my previous statements, as I so desperately scream that I want to give up and give in to the eating disorder voice in my head. However, I am not just leaning on, but fully laying down on my support system and family who shout back that this disease is still prevalent and still gnawing at me, inside and out. I hear their voices in the distance calling out to me. Reminding me that through the pain and the unknown, I can and must trust that I will be okay, just as long as I keep fighting for life. It is so hard to believe them; it’s like they are telling me the sky is green when I swear on my life that the sky I see is blue. 

My anorexia voice convinces me not to celebrate the positive strides toward a life without her. But against what my brain is currently screaming at me not to do, I want to celebrate that I am making progress. I am alive. I did win. I am winning. The illness did not take me. Yes, this beast still has its gnarled hands squeezing around me, trying to suck life out of me. Each and every day that I rise, I am conquering. 

xox,

j