One Year in Recovery

Today marks one year since I left work and began treatment for my eating disorder.

I was so in the dark when it all began. I had been told that patients usually stay in partial hospitalization treatment (the level at which I started) for four to six weeks, and I remember marveling that in just a few weeks I might be rid of this thing that had plagued me for more than a decade.

Eleven months later, when I finally did leave treatment, it was quite apparent that I’d had no idea what I was walking into on Dec. 11, 2013. I didn’t know that after seven-and-a-half weeks in PHP I would be sent to residential, and that six weeks after that I would return for another eight or nine weeks of PHP, and then intensive outpatient treatment after that, and then another round of intensive outpatient after that… I didn’t know that I would have to plan my wedding from inside the walls of an inpatient treatment center. I didn’t know that everything I thought I knew about myself and my life would be razed and built anew.

And maybe that was for the better. I think if I had known what I was about to endure, I would have run the other way.

To say that I’m “glad” that I did not run away doesn’t even begin to capture the sentiment. The process that began on Dec. 11, 2013 literally changed my life. Saved my life. I didn’t just rediscover the self that had been smothered by the eating disorder — I created an entirely new self. A self that I enjoy being each day. A self with whom I feel comfortable moving into the future. A self that I can finally, for the first time, share genuinely with my husband and with everyone around me.

I feel like there is so much to reflect on and so much to say about the past 365 days that I don’t think I can say much of anything at all. So, I won’t try — sometimes words just can’t cut it.