Power and resilience...

This weeks been hard, in fact one of the toughest I’ve faced so far in recovery, but also one of the most important. I left Orri on Tuesday evening in a bad place, a very bad place, anorexia had all of my power and the place it took me to was well, indescribable. 

This illness is at best malicious, and at worst malevolent. And I’m angry. I’m angry at all of the moments it’s tainted, the opportunities it’s stolen, and the person it’s made me become at times. This unwanted guest has stolen my power for six years now and that’s not okay. It wasn’t okay then and it certainly isn’t now. 

‘You need to take back YOUR power. Because you DO have power, you have immense power Jemima, and so much to give’, Kerrie voiced the following day. I haven’t felt power or autonomy over my life for such a long time now, and that’s so wrong. I so often put the good things that happen down as ‘luck’, and the bad as ‘reality’. But why? Why is anything good that happens to me down to pure luck, and the bad expected and deserved. Who deserves illness? Who deserves an eating disorder?

What Kerrie said to me on Wednesday really resonated, for the first time in far too long I actually thought, ‘Perhaps it doesn’t have to be like this?’, perhaps if I gave even the smallest space to the idea that I have power in all of this things could change, I could beat this.

Anorexia loves giving me the illusion that I have 0 control because then I’ll keep relying on it. Stealing every inch of self-belief Mima once held so strongly is what maintains it’s power. Over the past week I’ve been ferociously fighting back against anorexia, trying to reclaim my power, which is why the backlash that built up exploded so colossally on Tuesday evening. It was anorexia fighting back, taking an adamant stand and warning me that, ‘to go against me really won’t be worth it, I really wouldn’t even go there!’. 

I won’t sit here and lie, I am now pretty petrified to keep fighting back… but, if I don’t then what? It’s winning, and if anorexia wins then Mima looses. And as was said earlier this week, ‘there’s too much at stake for us to give up on you, you have far too much to give this world’.

So although at the moment I can’t see my power, place, or worth in this world, others can, and maybe I just need to trust that.

I have to take my power back, and use the resilience I’m building at Orri to strengthen that.