Moving On… Quite Literally!

In this post I thought I would share a bit more about what is happening with me..

I have written before about my background and what led me to start this full on recovery attempt a few months ago (Read More About Me! if you have not!).

In that post, I wrote about the fact that I moved back in with my parents, having hit the age of 40 earlier this year.  I experienced a reality hit that recovery really was never going to be easier than now and it was going to take more effort than I have ever put in before to get FULLY recovered and not just to a dangerous semi-recovered state that always caused me to slide back in the past.

So, for the past few months I have been living in my parent’s spare bedroom.

A grown woman, facing a process of recovery that is the hardest thing I have done in my life.  I have sat in my childhood home eating, resting and facing emotions, anxiety and distress to levels I did not know were possible.

I have also written before about the fact that in the past decade I have had multiple attempts at recovery both inpatient and as an outpatient… including with a recovery coach.  Each of these recovery attempts did not get me to a full recovery and now I know why.  I was not 100% committing at those times.

I was talking the talk and making some changes but I was not pushing myself through the really intense emotions and distress that I now believe were essential to experience in order to get to the point in recovery that I am at now.

In May I returned from travels around the world to live with my parents and I was so depleted in every sense.

And today, just five months later, I am not recovered but I feel further in recovery than I ever have been… mentally, physically, socially, emotionally.

Life feels more possible than ever and I have more hope for my future than I have had in 13 years.

So… I wanted to share here, for those of you who do follow me and have offered me so much support too, that next week, I am moving out of my parent’s home.

I am going to be moving into an apartment and will live alone again.

Of course, last time I lived alone, I was isolating myself, I was living in a cold and dark eating disordered bubble existence and it was such an unhappy way to be…  Although, at that time I had so few emotions, that feeling the misery of it was thankfully impossible.

So, this new move is one that I am feeling a mixture of emotions about.

I am excited and I am happy and I know that my future life can be colourful and very different to how I was living in the illness.

This new apartment is one that needs to represent my recovering and then recovered life.  The eating disorder is not welcome… but having moved to try to escape ED so many times in the past years, I am not naive enough to believe that a new home will be enough for the eating disorder to stay on the outside of the front door!

No.. the emotions are very mixed about this move.

I am excited but also anxious and a bit frightened.  I know how easy it can be to inadvertently slide back into the cruel arms of an eating disorder again and I am terrified of that happening….

But, I will put measures in place to try as best I can to protect myself in this recovery.

And… I do feel ready.  I need my independence and I need my own home to start to rebuild the life that has been shattered in many ways by this illness.

So, next week is me, moving on quite literally to the next stage in my recovery and it is stressful, yes (any move is stressful!) but it is also holding hope and gratitude.

I am so grateful that I have reached this point, to be well enough to do this and I am grateful to everyone who has helped me get to this point… of course my parents but also the Instagram community and a few special people there (I hope they know who they are) who have also supported me in ways that I will never forget.

I might not be posting as much over the next week with the move and keeping my recovery as priority one while I do so, but I will still be around and once I am moved and life calms down a bit I know I will be writing more and keeping up with all the happenings!!

And don’t think I am going to forget about the #ChangeEDTreatment Petition either…  That is not a campaign I will be giving up on and I would love people to join the fight with me to get treatment changes made in eating disorder treatment around the world.

So many of us are going through recovery without treatment and we should not have to!!