First Step into Recovery

Of anything that I’ve published so far in this Recovery Diaries series, it is this entry that is seared into my memory. It is the very first time I said yes to recovery. The first time I admitted to someone outside of myself that I had a problem, and it was a problem I could no longer think I could overcome on my own. I recall so distictly the visceral sensationI had walking (or floating) down the stairs after a therapy appointment. Even as it was happpening, I could tell it was more than a dissociation. It was my body’s engine lights flashing, and for once, my mind being able to tune in to the warning. As with all posts in this series, this one comes with a trigger warning. If you are someone on your own journey of dealing food, exercise, or body image issues, take care.

July 11th 2017

Two weeks ago, I found myself googling eating disorder therapists. Things are getting worse. I’m not sleeping, waking up every hour from nightmares about food and eating and being unable to stop.  I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this. I can't trust myself anymore and it’s exhausting trying to try. My mother and I are fighting constantly. She’s threatening to ban me from using a vehicle, and I need to get to work. She said she would only get off my back if I got help. So here I am, putting myself at the mercy of some stranger who thinks a few university courses makes them more qualified to figure out how to think and live than other people.

My google search yields pages of hits. All kinds of therapists, pychologists, social workers. I scan the faces and initials quickly as I scroll… couples therapy…. depression…anxiety…weight management. Eating disorders is listed as a footnote in several. Then I stop. There is a picture of a young, pretty blonde woman. She looks more like a character on degrassi than a therapist. “Specializes in the treatment of eating disorders.” I go on to read the description and she talks about having gone through recovery herself. I click on more info. Her practice is in…unionville. In the same building as the restaurant where I used to serve during my summers. I fill in a quick contact form, providing the basics. I had an eating disorder. I’m trying to recover. Call me.

2 weeks later.

I’m at work at the Science Centre with some time to kill that morning before starting my shift. I find myself walking slowly and aimlessly up the hill I make myself spend all my breaks walking and running, looking up the number of this specialist again.

Every inch of me is vibrating with anxiety and loathing. It’s another day of the same, feeling miserable with hunger and lazy and gluttonous at the same time, about to go in to work where I know I will find every opportunity to pace and run stairs and not eat until I got home where I would break down, eat my bodyweight in fruit and granola, and remain in a state of panic and desolation until I kick my ass out the door for a 7 kilometre run that would then allow me to proceed to eat dinner. I’d go to bed stuffed and ashamed, vow not to eat breakfast the next morning, and find myself somersaulting down the same hill on the verge of losing all control. 

I don’t want to live like this a single more day. I am so far away from the person I wanted to be. I don’t even remember how it felt to be different. 

I stop at the top of the hill, a mixture of sweat and goosebumps pricking my skin in the morning sun. 

Ringing.

Hi, Megan Fearnley speaking.

Shit. I was planning on leaving a message.

Oh. Hi.

I ask if she had an appointment in the next weeks. She has an opening the next day. 

I hesitate. That was sooner than I planned. But I know I would only be prolonging the inevitable.

Ok. Sure. I venture. I’ll take it.

Good. She chimes. Because really, another day spent living with an eating disorder is another day wasted.

I hang up and start walking down the hill and towards the building, thinking just how true that was. 

I arrive at that first intake session ten minutes late. I have come straight from work. I planned it that way so I wouldn’t have any time to go home in between, and possibly risk eating something and losing control. Besides, I figure she wil probably want to weigh me. My hands wander to the flesh of my thighs, pinching a fold of skin. I kinda feel like I have to prove myself to deserve to be there.  

I walk up a flight of stairs and walk into the door of a naturopathy clinic. A bell rings and a receptionist smiles at me. A click clacking of heels on the tile floor echoes through the small quiet space, announcing the arrival of a tiny blonde woman.

Hi, Jordan? She smiles, her voice as delicate as she looks. Megan Fearnley, hi. She shakes my hand gently and I think I see her blue eyes swiftly run over my body. 

Is she judging me? Does she that maybe I was wasting her time? Without realizing, I find myslef giving her the same once over she’s giving me. She’s tiny, in heels still a hair shorter than me. I notice the green veins in her upper arms, and her slight frame, filling me with both hope and jealousy. How can it be that she could be recovered from an eating disorder and still so thin? I could only hope I would have the same fate. 

In Megans’s office, she speaks with exceeding empathy, a hint of something between pity and compassion in her voice in every word she says to me. Carefully. Deliberately. But she does not seem to coddle me.

Apparently, she’s a hard ass. I have a ‘food first’ policy. She explains. She says if I wanted to work with her, that I would need to commit to eating and gaining weight in order to do the “emotional work that psychotherapy involves”. 

I remember nodding, feeling numb, but also more willing to trust her than any other professional that had seen me. She tells me she would blind weigh me, so that I would not get fixated on the number, but at least that way know how much “refeeding” I would need. 

I step onto the scale, terrified that the number won't be anywhere close to the kinds of anorexic girls this woman works with in this field, that I will appear too healthy to justify my presence in her office. 

I’m sure she’ll tell me, as nicely as she can, that I don’t really need to be there, and that coming back would be a waste of both of our time.  She crouches down, elegantly as she can in her little kitten heels, and covers the number, not letting me see it.  

Oh my… you can step off now.

I move back onto the couch, as she returns to her chair and grabs a calculator.  The room is quiet as she punched in some numbers.

Do you know how sick you are?

I think I mumble something about knowing I was a little beneath a “quote on quote healthy BMI.”

Your BMI is 15.  That classifies as severe anorexia.  

I also just came from a music festival on the weekend. So I’m probably weighing in less than I normally am.

Even so, the numbers so low, you are still  quite sick.

Oh.

She recommends inpatient treatment.  She says that if I choose to work outpatient with her that I would be on a meal plan and that gaining weight would be non-negotiable.  For a sweet, petite woman, she does not sugarcoat things.  She tells me that I need to call up an inpatient program and have my name on a waitlist so that if I failed to gain a minimum of a pound a week, that when the program called, I would have to agree to go into intensive treatment.

What about the emotional work? I ask her.  Thats what I really need.  I’m afraid a hospital will just fatten me up, and I’ll still be mentally f*cked. 

Below a certain BMI, psychotherapy won’t work.  She gazes at me, solemly, but not unkindly. Your brain is too starved right now to engage in much emotional work at all right now.  First you need to have had some significant refeeding to be physical stable enough for outpatient therapy.  And inpatient would be the most effective way to get there.

This was the third time now I’ve been told this— prescribed “refeeding.”  Like some kind of livestock being fattened up before slaughter.

I feel numb. Like my head is miles above my feet on the carpeted floor of this quiet tiny office. I’m hearing her words, nodding along, but not quite processing everything she’s saying. I don’t feel sick. Everything she’s saying sounds so…extreme…critical…but at her words, from this woman who has never once been contacted by my mother or a concerned teacher or doctor, a question begins to bloom in me… will I ever feel sick enough? Would I ever be at a place where I felt thin enough to embrace treatment?

Are you exercising? She asks me. 

Yeah, a bit.

What are you doing? The gentleness of her voice almost masks a kind of urgency beneath it. almost.

Yoga…cycling…strenth training… running. I run with my dog, pretty much every day.  And some other stuff too-

Please stop. all of it. You’re heart can’t take it.

Is she… begging? She sounds so sincere, so…scared for me. I feel some seeds of doubt sow themselves into my stomach.

What about walking my dog? The heart thing is scary, but the thought of not exercising at all is exponentially more terrifying.

Can someone else in your family walk her?

Not really. And I like walking her.

She leans forward, looks me directly in the eye. If it was up to me I would have you off work, on bed rest, eating, napping, watching Netflix, with maybe some gentle stretching.

I shake my head, cough out a laugh. That sounds a little much. I feel like I have a lot of energy, I feel like I need to use it up, run it off.

You’re running off adrenaline right now. Your body is in starvation mode. You really  don’t know how sick you are.”

She says more things as I sit across from her in her tiny carpeted office. I’m sitting longer than I have in awhile, not fidgeting, just feeling more and more out of body, listening, trying to absorb every word pouring out of her mouth without really thinking.  

Adrenaline. Refeeding. Starvation mode. Energy deficit.

Then the appointment is over. Megan is walking me out past reception and tells me she will see me thursday, at the follow up we have booked two days from now. When the “real work” will start apparently.

Still in a daze, I walk down the flight of stairs I had made the effort to sprint up two at a time before the appointment, to where I had parked intentionally several hundred walk away. I feel detached from my feet. Like a years worth of lethargy and weakness has settled upon me. I feel faint with fatigue, and actually shakey with… hunger.

Hunger? These days I rarely get hungry. Not at this time at least. At not like this.

Maybe it’s an anxious reaction to all she had told me, my body assuming the kind of depleted state she had inferred me to have.

Or maybe I was finally experiencing a rare moment of clarity, where I was able to tap into the real state of my physical being unclouded by a stream of adrenaline.  

My body is starving. I am starving. My heart is struggling. My organs are in danger. Not enough food.

I get in the car drive myself home on what I assume is autopilot because I don’t remember how I get there. All I can think is to keep breathing, as calmly and as slowly as I can, willing my body to keep holding on, just a little longer.

I let myself out of the car and make my way towards the front door, towards a fridge full of food that I have silently committed myself to eat. I step over the threshhold into the entrance. My first steps into recovery.