Eating disorders make many things simple. When you are happy, you eat (or don’t eat, if that’s your particular disorder). Same thing for sad, tired, angry, frustrated, scared, excited, proud, ashamed, humiliated, any emotion at all.
When you move out of your eating disorder, you have to figure out new responses to these emotions. My choice yesterday was crying.
I cried when I found out my carefully planned business trip was canceled for budget reasons. I cried when I realized that we would have to cancel my birthday celebration weekend trip due to my daughter catching a virus. These tears I shed were not so much for the disappointment of the individual activity, but because sometimes I feel deep down that these things happen because I’m not worth any more than that. As a child, my brother’s birthday always took precedence over mine. His birthday was a day later, so my parents always chose to either celebrate my birthday a day late, or his a day early. Always to his advantage. Often enough, we only got one cake, and he being older, got to blow out the candles. Sometimes they’d be relit for me. I learned to bake my own birthday cake, which resulted in my having to bake my brother’s as well.
Always second place, never good enough. My response was to be as perfect as I could, so the people who gave out the rewards wouldn’t be able to reduce mine based on my performance. Straight A’s, over-achieving, do always what you can do well. Control, control, control - the only way to get what you deserve. And eat to cover the fear.
Controlling the situation doesn’t work, because perfect performance doesn’t result in perfect rewards. Eating to compensate doesn’t work, because there’s never enough food to make up for the disappointment. The one birthday party I was to have as a child, in which non-family was invited, was postponed by a snowstorm. Now my kid got sick. My company finds it more important to pay $2.5M bonus to a VP who got less than half his promised results than to spend $2k on a trip to make an improvement to satisfy the customers. These are things I cannot control, cannot compensate for by being better.
So I cried. And cried and cried. And told myself that it’s ok to cry for things that did happen, and for things that might have happened, and for things that happened long ago. And I reminded myself that the emotions will pass, that each acknowledgement of the past and present sadnesses bring me healing. Healing without eating to hide the pain.
