Pushing through the Battle

Photo credit: Me!

I sometimes live within a double standard. I tell others to write or talk about their struggles but I find myself hiding in my own little world when I am struggling. I do talk to my sponsor, mentor, therapist, etc but I don't often share outside of those handful of people that I am struggling. I get this idea in my head that I have to be a strong statue of recovery. A warrior. Beating my battles. Not falling down. I forget what I tell my mentor all the time: that what I love about her is that she is real with me. She doesn't hide when she has her struggles. I am able to relate to her, feel that I can be honest with her, because I see her as a human being, not as a robot. 

So I have not written since I moved back to school. I knew this would be a tough transition but I did not realize to what extreme, or how I would need to brace myself. Things that I thought would be hard turned out to be easier and things I thought would be easy turned out to be hard. It goes to show that you never know what life will bring. While restricting has been a small problem, the biggest problem is my head space. I'm finding Ed lurking in every corner. Or even yet, the larger problem is that sometimes I don't even see him but he is there. I'm lucky in that I have others who are able to see him for me, not everyone has that. He gets in my head, picks my body apart, finds ways for me to avoid eating or just procrastinate eating. Slowly destroying any bit of confidence I had built up over the past year. Making me believe I am unworthy of the support I have, or the love I receive. Thoughts that isolation would be better off for everyone so that I don't cause pain for them. When I step back and look at my thoughts though, I can see that they are not mine. Those are thoughts of my disease. MY thoughts are ones of recovery, ones of life, hope, dreams and a future. So despite the discomfort, the tears during meals, the arguments on the phone, I keep pushing through. My RD may have given me permission to run X number of days this week, but I know deep down that if I do that many times, it's going to go straight to me head, especially since the last 3 weeks I haven't been able to run at all. So for my own recovery, for my own life, I will drop that number down because in the grand scheme of things, a couple weeks of running is not going to make a difference but a couple weeks of relapsing can take awhile to get out of and that's IF the relapse stops right away. I'm grateful to have people in my life to help me make these rational decisions. 

I was reminded yesterday of how bad my life was last year. I do NOT want to go back to that point. I will keep pushing through because no matter how hard the battle is, no matter how bad my day is today, my worst day today is still better then my best day a year ago. 

Why do you keep pushing through the battle? What helps you?