I watched a video about the hardest parts that happened in her life and I thought it was a good idea to talk about what the hardest parts about having an eating disorder as well as carrying a burden of multiple other mental illnesses because personally I don't think it can be spoken of enough.
I immediately thought of 50 million things and there are for sure, but there are defenitely some good things that come out of it. I'm going to talk about the hardest parts of living with mental illnesses. Everyone goes through their own hell, no matter if it's mental illness or not. I've been through a lot other than battling the demons in my head. An eating disorder is considered a mental illness, most people deny or try to belittle the very known fact. If you google it you will see that it is a very real mental illness but more importantly they have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.
I have dealt with this for 4 years, it has gone very fast but also there are days that drag by and i'm just waiting for the day to be over just to wake up and do it all over again. It's very emotionally and physically draining when you have thoughts that just bombard your mind with weight, calories and numbers all day every day. Another thing is, the thoughts never go away, even when at some points you have a brief moment of it seeming like your ED has finally dissipated for a short while.
It's not only hard for me but it also affects my family and other important people in my life. I'm ashamed because I can't control my thoughts, there's no stopping them. The hardest part I think with living an eating disorder is it never goes away for one second. Nothing can prepare you for what is going to happen to your body and mind, it sort of just hit me in the face as if I slammed into a wall at full speed. A couple months later I woke and controlling my food intake suddenly became my life.
Your mind becomes your enemy. You no longer live carelessly, your days are either good or bad determined by the caloric value of the day and those black little evil numbers on that shiny glass scale; when you wake up in the morning and the multiple weigh-ins in between. It's really hard living a life where you don't ever get a break and your smile becomes tainted by the control your thought would change your life for the better.
Numbing the itchy pain of life and numbing your low self-esteem by disguising it with something you hope to make yourself feel at least remotely okay and safe, in your own little bubble. All you were hoping to achieve was to numb yourself from the scary world. Which to an extent, you have achieved. The scariest realization is when you realize that you will never be able to get to where you feel "good" at because that "high" doesn't exist.
Your constantly chasing something, anything as a piece of evidence that your self-torture is worthwhile, no longer exists. That's the scariest part. Realizing you will never be good enough in your own skin while living with your own self-induced torture. I know my goal, my way of thinking that my life will suddenly be perfect. Will I want something different? I won't know until I get there. Until I get there. I know there might be a possibility that my "good enough" number may change and that is when I realize I may never be good enough because my good enough is determined by the damn number on the scale. That number is never good enough.
The hardest part is still staying with the eating disorder because it is "safe", it always has been. It does a fantastic job of numbing and disguising you into a shell of a human being, as if you are invisible. People think you are crazy when they realize that you honest to god want to be an invisible shell. People who have never gone through an eating disorder will never understand the reason why we want to be as small as possible or why we use food or lack thereof to cope.
One answer. To protect us. Protect us from the painful experiences we have gone through and being small protects us from reliving the pain whatever that may be. I feel better when i'm hungry because I finally found something that I'm good at.
That's the hardest part of living with this. All day. Every day.
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