There is a misconception about eating disorder recovery is that it’s mostly about food. Eat more, eat less, stop throwing up, follow the meal plan, become weight restored, lose weight, whatever. It’s not.
Real, lasting change requires learning how to set firm boundaries. How to start saying yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no. To repeatedly and bravely speak what’s real for you. To no longer put up with relationships, environments and beliefs that are not helping us be the person we know we’re meant to be and live the life we most want to be living. To remember how to have fun. It involves learning how to accept being disliked and rejected, but also embrace being more loved and seen than ever before. It’s a lot more nuanced than following a meal plan, but the exponential growth is endlessly rewarding.
fun
Fun and nothingness.
Re-learning how to engage with expression for fun and nothingness right now, rather than as a means to an end.
After experiencing severe burnout from forcing myself to draw literally all day every day, I went multiple years without doing it at all. Before I had a logical “reason” for, say, spending the entire morning on a watercolor of a vase. “I can justify this because it’s for my animation portfolio. It’s work. It’s acceptable because it will eventually earn me money”.
The picture in the photo is an example of that. It was a birthday card for my grandma almost exactly a year ago, and it gave me a valid excuse to sit at my favorite cafe and lose myself in drawing the tree for 2 hours (or find myself, depending on how you look at it). ;)
It can feel scarier to do something just because we want to. Because it’s fun. Because it’s a necessity that we don’t understand but never goes away. This is when we enter the mystery of life, when we begin to admit to the existence of forces beyond us that we can’t wrap our logical minds around no matter how hard we reason. It becomes our invitation to wonder and to experience the world with new eyes.
