Keep you chin up and your food down

I read somewhere that you can only conquer the voices by knowing how to get them out of the subconscious part of your mind, and that willpower alone will not do it. There a lot of things like this that I read about eating disorders, most of which sound like a bad Celine Dion song - lyrics that attempt to elicit feelings of deep emotion and poignancy, but which more often than not end up eliciting a gagging reflex.

However, ten years of living in this Dawson’s Creek reality of being expected to talk incessantly about your feelings and anxieties, my cynicism has evolved into an acceptance that there is in fact, no way to live with an eating disorder without embracing your serious side and learning how to have that elusive ‘deep and meaningful conversation.’

I takes a lot of time and work before you can truly open up to people and talk about the real distress of living with these disorders, largely due to the fear of it sounding like an acceptance speech. Once you learn how to talk to your family and friends openly and in a matter of fact way about your problems, you tend to find that they are actually listening, that they actually care, and that they will not – as dreaded – remark with a comment about you being a cheeseball.

Living by my slogan of ‘keep your chin up and your food down’, just does not seem acute enough anymore. While it is possible - and at times very necessary - to make light of the problem, there reaches a point (probably somewhere after the fifth year, or 500th purge) where the immensity of the disorder becomes very real.

Real enough that the thought of living with this for the rest of my life violently shakes my core, terrorises me, frightens me, controls me and overwhelms me in ways that Celine Dion lyrics cannot.