Time for some quick math:
- For the better part of a decade, I had an active Eating Disorder
- About a month ago, I turned twenty years old
- As an American woman, my life expectancy is about 80.8
Here it goes: 80 years - 10 years = 70 years. That's seventy years of my life that I have the chance to spend recovered. Think about all the things a person could do in seventy years other than have an eating disorder. The list in endless, my future has never been so bright!
For the last 349 days I have been free from eating disorder behaviors. That's 49 weeks and 6 days without engaging my eating disorder in any physical way. 349 days ago, I was sitting in a sunken-in leather chair in my psychologist's office, telling him there was no hope for me. I believed that I was doomed to live a life filled with self-loathing, torture, and regret. I had almost given up; but I didn't.
Instead, I told myself to take it one day at a time. I began setting small, achievable goals and, before long, I had made it through that first week. I sit here, looking back at the frail young woman I once was and I don't even recognize her as myself.
Some might say it's a miracle, but I just call it recovery.
