Making Peace with Getting By
Accepting the chronic ebb and flow of recovery
When I started my recovery journey in 2011, I expected to get well. After nearly losing my life to anorexia, I made a commitment to change. I would no longer subject my body or mind to the torturous monotony of calorie counting, ritualistic meal patterns, rejecting invitations to socialize, and letting my life be dictated by the number on a scale. Now that I’m finally conquering my eating disorder, the depression and anxiety will dissipate.
This was the pipe dream I’d been feeding myself during a month-long stint in an inpatient hospital. It wasn’t my first, but this time felt different. After my failing health caused multiple trips to the emergency department within a week, I faced a breaking point. Confronted with my own mortality, I reluctantly admitted I had a problem with food and needed help.
I’m now nearly 10 years into my recovery, and with some ups and downs, I can safely say “I get by.” However, life on the other side is not the dream that I expected when I walked out of the inpatient hospital years ago. The depression didn’t vanish, and the anxiety has continued to overwhelm me. What I had expected to lift my life from a pit of despair actually had forced me to confront the grief and emptiness that I’d experienced since childhood.
Certainly, I’d made progress. I restored my weight to a healthy number. I ate three meals a day and then some. My physical health had made great strides, and I actually started feeling like a young adult.
But taking away the crutch only meant I had to confront the things I’d been running away from for years. Worse yet, I could no longer communicate “something is wrong, please notice” with my physical appearance, the way I always had.
I had to fully assess the damages in my life and react. I had to experience the depression and anxiety head-on and learn to replace my eating disorder with healthy habits. When you’ve lived with trauma and mental illness for so long, happiness is a skill that has to be learned and practiced. It’s taking a lot longer than I had initially expected.
Fast forward to 2020. My life is nearly a polar opposite of what it used to be. I’m a single mother to a five-year-old, and I experience love in ways that were previously unimaginable. Several years ago, I’d been on disability for my illness and anxiety, conditions that were at one point expected to result in my death. However, after a few years in recovery, I’d improved enough to start working as a peer support specialist, helping others who were also struggling with mental illness. Although my illness caused me to drop out of high school, I was eventually able to get my GED and obtain a degree in psychology. Now, I’m a behavioral health researcher who gets to carry out her passion every day. But still, I don’t feel “well” the way 20-year-old me had imagined. I still get by.
Often, I still get depressed. Near constantly, I still feel anxious. I still take medication and block off at least an hour per day to use the coping skills that I’ve learned and adapted throughout the years. I struggle with my relationship with food and body image on a daily basis, even though my weight is healthy. Motherhood has presented additional challenges to my mental health, but it has also provided me with a strong incentive to keep trying. I feel worlds different than I did in 2011; but happiness and peace do not, and maybe never will, come naturally for me. I’m okay with that.
I’ve made peace with just getting by.
I spent my earliest years in recovery grieving my mental wellbeing and beating myself up for continuing to struggle. I caused myself more anxiety and more guilt by worrying about what recovery should look like. I am a person who lives with mental illness, and yes, it’s a chronic obstacle. However, it doesn’t define my life or my sense of self anymore. I have qualities beyond anorexic, depressed, or anxious.
Those parts of me have shaped my life journey immensely, and they show up in various aspects of my day-to-day life. Continuing to overcome them is part of my daily routine, and the more that I do it, the better I get. Like happiness, resilience is a skill that has to be learned. When living with a mental illness, it is perhaps an even more important skill to develop.
So for now, getting by is proof of my strength. Because I know that as long as I’m showing up for myself and doing the best I can each day, I’m succeeding in my recovery.
