Unfinished business.

Few people prepare you for the realities and responsibility that come with recovery. Suddenly you are expected to know how to eat, to cope with being alone with a full cupboard and chaotic mind and to respond to hunger in an initiative and healthy way.

Too much responsibility can be overwhelming, not empowering; when you have lived in the dark for longer than you have the light, you forget how the light can burn.

How do you know when to eat and how much when you have taught yourself not to feel these things?, when you have spent years training your receptors to not react to this instinctual need, how do you reverse this? It is hard accepting something you denied yourself.

It is true that recovery makes you incur a feeling of loss and disillusionment. Do not mistake this for longing; you will miss the presence of the disorder, but eventually, not the disorder itself.

There will be days you wish to test your own limits; to push the boundary between where you are now and where you were- It is tempting to see how narrow those boundaries are. The irony of this is that you don't want to be ill again; this is an admittance that you need, that a desire holds a greater power over you than you hold over yourself. You have a void that although vacated, seems reserved for something greater, more powerful than the confines of comprehension.

Sometimes you emerge as a person you never were, you don't return to who you were prior to the disorder. The expectation is there. This is not because the disorder is all you were, but because you have lost what you recognise as being yourself; in the midst of the disorder the lines between it and you blur, and recovery is making something from the smudge.

Why it is wrong to say I am a recovered 'Bulimic':

Often, when talking about recovery we will use our affliction as a descriptive aspect of ourselves. We say this as easily as we might say our name when we introduce ourselves.

And this is fundamentally wrong; When we have spent so many years bound by it, and many more trying to escape being classified within a neat box labelling that which is otherwise inexplicable, referring to ourselves as if our afflictions were us isn't justified.

Arguably, whilst they play a fundamental role in creating who we are in the present, it is vital to remember that they are not, and never were a part of you. Your eating disorder never defined you as a person, and you should not let it define who you are in recovery either.

Realising this is truly what recovery is about; the disassociation between the disorder and yourself.

So from now on, I will stop saying 'recovered bulimic' and start saying 'Recovered from bulimia'