Everyones recovery story, and even their definition of recovery, is unique and personal.
People may be at different stages of recovery and move between those stages in a nonlinear way.
Recovery also doesnt mean perfection, ora total absence of relapse.
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Since childhood, my relationship with food has always been a tension, Alicia tells SELF.
Growing up in a larger body, they experienced significant bullying.
That is where my experience with eating disorders began, they say.
After reaching that initial goal, I didn’t feel that I could stop.
Their anorexia eventually transitioned into bulimia.
In 2015, Alicia started looking into treatment programs.
But being genderqueer, the programs were very cisnormative and not conducive to my recovery, they explain.
Instead, Alicia sought support through online peer support groups and an independent psychologist.
I don’t believe I will ever view myself as ‘recovered,’ they say.
I am living my best life currently, and that for me is where I always seek to be.
At 20, she began therapy.
And today, eight years later, she occasionally purges.
Intense pressure or hardship is definitely a trigger for me, she says.
Recoveryvale la pena, she says (which means its worth it).
And I really believe I am living that life right now.
Sarah attempted to recover for 17 years.
Still, they were never diagnosed.
I think this wasmostly due to my size.
No one thinks that a fat person restricting or being obsessed with clean eating is a negative behavior.
No one thinks that a fat person losing a significant amount of weight is unhealthy, Sarah tells SELF.
Our culture typically praises and congratulates this behavior.
Most of the time I am completely accepting of my body size.
Does this mean Im participating in eating disorder behaviors?
It is very much dealing with the culture that we live in.
She recognized that she had an eating disorder as well.
Today, at 27, she considers herself in recovery.
I see things on a continuum, not a straight-shot destination, she says.
She adds that the thoughts and the mindset are the hardest parts about recovery.
After a bad car accident in the summer of 2017, Olivia developed depression.
What started as restricting shifted into bingeing and later purging.
By November of 2017, she entered an inpatient treatment program and later moved to an intensive outpatient program.
I consider myself as recovered as one really can be with this disease.
Today I’m in a much better place in basically all areas of my life.
A formal diagnosis at 19 confirmed what Marissa already knew: She struggled with anorexia and bulimia.
However, it wasn’t until about four years later that she began making real strides in recovery.
I decided on my own that I wanted to get better.
Thats what you get after so many years of being conditioned inside of a heteronormative society, she says.
Rebecca struggled with body image since about 10 years old.
I was aware that being fat was bad and being small and skinny was good, she tells SELF.
I often tried to be anorexic, but anorexia wasn’t my eating disorder of choice.
I liked to eat too much.
With the help of a psychiatrist, dietitian, and Prozac, she considers herself recovered today.
I no longer feel urges to binge and purge.
Permission is the hardest partrecovery is all about giving yourself permission to eat all types of foods.
And when something isn’t ‘forbidden’ anymore, it’s just normal.
But when Rebecca still struggles with body image, she writes, meditates, and practices yoga and gratitude.
And I tell myself that I love myself every day at least once.
I know, I know.
But that’s really what I do and it works for me, she says.
She also pays attention to who she spends time with.
It’s not healthy for me, she says.
Today, she works within the field of eating disorders and body image and considers herself in recovery.
I don’t think that [my eating disorder] will ever magically disappear.
I’m not cured of it; I simply manage it, day to day.
Binge-eating felt like a comfort, and purging felt like a release, she tells SELF.
The short-term relief will cause long-term consequences, she explains.
From the ages of 11 to 21, I had a cocktail of eating disorders, Caroline tells SELF.
She saw everyone from therapists and eating disorder specialists to acupuncturists and nutritionists.
It was the choice to get recovered and stay recovered that kept me in recovery.
I have a really incredible relationship with my body and food on the whole.
It blows my mind that I’m at this juncture.
I can’t believe it’s the same person sometimes, she says.
I will have emotions and feelings and thoughts the rest of my life, she says.
It isn’t in my wheelhouse to hurt myself as a way to cope with being alive.
Instead, she gives her body whatever it’s telling her that it needs.
However, she emphasizes thatherview of recovery isn’t the only way to recover.
We have to make space for the expansiveness of recovery.
It is possible to recover and not struggle every day, she says.
And it’s equally important for someone to face challenges every day to survive.
There’s no one answer and no one way for recovery to look.
We have to be able to support each other in that.
