I was still very fragile, like a newly hatched butterfly, yet I was now ready to embark on the most honest and productive part of my recovery journey. My future, which had very recently seemed black with hopelessness, was now filled with shadows of possibility. I had addressed every aspect of my self-destructive behavior head-on and I had not crumpled. I felt like a warrior. My personality blossomed and my smile became genuine. I finally began to achieve congruence between my affect and my emotions and it was a relief to cry when I felt sad, vent when I felt angry, and laugh when I was feeling joy. I no longer had to hide who I was, what I thought and how I felt. I learned that I could be accepted just for being myself.
I continued putting all of my effort into my therapy sessions and assignments, digging deep into the issues that had led me down the wrong path. Every day brought a little more healing and a little more hope. Meals in the dining room got easier and easier as my anxiety around food slowly dissipated. What I found most shocking was that despite a significant amount of weight gain, I had very few body image issues. I was doing so much deep, emotional work, that I understood implicitly that my struggles had little to do with how I looked. My exercise and self-harm urges were diminishing. I was feeling so positive about my life that I began to do some powerful family work, something I swore I would not do when I first entered CFC. This turned out to be very beneficial to me and ultimately played a significant role in my discharge.
The “shadows of possibility” regarding my future had now been solidified into an exciting and well thought out discharge plan. This was a dramatic conclusion to my ten week stay at CFC. I had entered CFC in the darkest of places. Depression and anxiety had choked all of the happiness out of me and had completely robbed me of the will to live. I had been willing to give recovery a try, but I didn’t think it would change the fact that I could not envision a future for myself. So to look at where I was now and to recognize the transformation that had occurred was thrilling. It had been a transformation from death to life; from despair to hope.
This is the message of hope that I would like to share with others who may be struggling in the treacherous bonds of an eating disorder: Transformation is possible. It will not happen overnight, and it probably won’t happen in a few days. Hell, it may take ten weeks or more - yet, it’s always possible. I did not think I would ever feel a shred of happiness again, but some small seed of survival made me seek treatment, instead of succumbing to the deceptively welcoming arms of my eating disorder. You cannot give up on yourself, and you must believe that you are worth recovery. Even if your insurance company tells you that you aren’t, even if your job tells you that you aren’t, even if your own flesh and blood tell you that you aren’t, you are. You must believe in yourself and believe that you are capable of transformation and that one day, you too will look back in wonder and say to yourself, “look how far I’ve come.”
I wrote this piece after I discharged from Center for Change in Orem, Utah. My experience there was both live-saving and life-changing. This is an excerp from my "Letter of Hope" which discusses part of my transformation.