This is a messy blogpost I just wrote on an iPhone on a train. But it's one that has been brewing inside me for some time now. It's full of metaphors and weird comparisons and talks a lot about the color blue, but I hope, somehow, it's telling. I hope it gives glimpses of what life with and after and before an eating is like. I want to help people understand. I want people to be known and to feel like they are not alone. But most of all, I want to give hope.
I hope this does that. So, here we go.
Life after anorexia is interesting.
I’ve tried to come up with brilliant, beautiful, or even remarkable ways to put it, but that’s ultimately what I boiled it down to: "interesting." I am the future.
Writing an about it is hard. Finding the words is hard. So I decided to write about it using colors.
I did.
I wrote about my world now compared to my past two worlds: before anorexia, and in the midst of it. I wrote using the colors that engulfed me, that devastated and corrupted me, that stole my breath and life's fire from me, but ultimately set me free.
My world when I was living in my eating disorder had its colors completely flipped. The sky was a harsh, ugly green, brittle like grass thirsty for rain. The ground was a tired, sad blue. It ached for sleep, for death. It was a blue that filled you, filled the corners of your mind with its weight and heaviness. Its tiredness tightened in your throat, promising an ending. This world wasn’t beautiful or good. It was full of sharp angles and ragged lines. Its wind was blood red and it stabbed your skin, your hands.
It's air was a thick yellow: the color of erratic heart beats and the numbness that pervaded and was always present in your fingers and toes and then your hands and legs. It's trees were fat smudges, ugly to look at, scary if you looked too long, like the hair that came out of your head in clumps.
It wasn’t a pretty world at all. It existed simultaneously beside the one you actually lived in, with its midnight blue skies pricked by soft yellow lights. With its sunsets that were violet and coral and golden all at once, with colors that leaked and bled into each other, pouring over one another to mix into something altogether miraculous and new.
It was like Upside Down. I was the eaten dead thing, always hungry, always roaming, stabbed with an ax with a leg caught in a bear trap. I ignored the other reality, disregarding all of its life, in my own pursuit of what I thought would fulfill me. I destroyed. I took. I tasted blood, and eventually it made the world I was in collapse.
So what now?
Goodness.
My world now still has some streaks of the gray and blue from my last one, but they are the last brushstrokes before the painter dips his brush again. I still feel their presence, and sometimes the tiredness and heaviness press upon me more than I’d ever like to know them again. The wind is still red like blood, but it’s not constant. It is not even often. It is fleeting moments, where I have to breathe through them and refuse to exist within their unkind time.
But this new life is marked by soft, gentle breezes that bring air sweet to taste. It is full of soft, lovely sunrises that are pure colors: violet and pink and baby blue. All the colors we give our newborns.
It's night sky is radiant, making up for all the colors you forgot. It is vast and deep and full, pulsing with brilliant reds and greens and blues. The Northern lights are streams that weave new patterns and occur weekly, because I am still so often amazed and taken aback by this life I forgot for so long.
It's trees are new and little. They bend occasionally. Often, especially when it is windy. But they hold promise. They see older, ancient trees riddled with antiquity and wisdom and life and they know what they’re living for.
The grass is patchy. Sometimes brittle and sharp, but in a lot of places its soft and good. These are the places where Dan and I go to lay our blanket on and look at the stars. It is feeling the earth beneath your palms and smiling thinking what “grounded” means, in all its ways.
It has laughter and joy. It is full of a new energy that makes the air come alive, like lightning is about to strike. It rains a lot, and it’s a warm, kind rain that your brother and sister beg you to come out in to jump in puddles.
And you do, hair plastered to your neck, feet bare, and you think “Goodness, this is all worth it after all: being alive.”
It’s also you crying, and acknowledging the pain. It’s seeing the scars your fire had on the earth and its people. It is seeing the burned places, the dredged ones. It is full of a sad, harsh memory of emptiness: the time you lost yourself.
It is the absence of.
Is is a whispered wonder.
It is a new hope, and an older whisper, saying “Maybe, come back to me,” and a fragile, shaking: “No, thank you. What you have to offer isn’t enough for me anymore.”
It is the tentative prospect of holding your babies, bones of your bones, in your arms and how thinking of that makes you cry. It is a palm that encompasses your own, a hand on your neck pulling you in, blue eyes that light a fire in you. It is sleeping curled against your best friend, feeling her heat beat through her cocoon of blankets and soft pillows that smell like home.
It’s full of taste and wonder and hard things, but most of all, it’s full of second chance. It’s a thirdlife, marked by previous ones, hopefully an evolution, with lots of memorandum and bits of grief.
It is delicate and fragile, lovely and strong. It is mine, held tightly, knowing full well just how miraculous and wonderful it can become, and how very cold and full of blood and bones it sometimes becomes.
It is a new treaty, a new country out of old ones. A new generation with hope and the weight of its ancestors. But most of all it is me learning and stumbling and remembering why I want to be alive. It is me being blinded by color and smiling in wonder, thinking “Surely, there will always be enough.”
It is me learning what it means to truly be full.
It is worth it.
Surely, there will always be enough.
