Eating Disorders, Dementors, and Dumbledore

Lately the volume on my ED has been turned up a little louder than it has been the past couple months. I know this is due to a couple things. First, there are a lot of changes happening in my life. In 3 months, I'll be starting a new job and moving across the country (again) to do so. On top of this, I went out this weekend and had some drinks with my husband. Drinking is a definite trigger for me, because I have always considered drinking alcohol "unnecessary and useless" calories. Plus when I drink I tend to get munchies and snack and then hate myself for it. Then there was the fact that I looked at old pictures last night. It was innocent enough. My husband's laptop has been broken for the past 8 months or so and he finally got it fixed. He was going through and deleting a bunch of stuff when he found a file named Lexi's Phone, which had a bunch of old pictures on it from over 3 years ago. Yeah, that fucking sucked. If there is anything worse than looking at old pictures while you're in recovery, I haven't found it yet. To turn down the volume, I've been watching my go-to a lot the past week-Harry Potter. I effing love Harry Potter for so many reasons, but lately it's provided me with 2 1/2 hours of my life where I can completely immerse myself in the wizarding world and forget about ED. Which is awesome.

This Harry Potter immersion got me thinking. An eating disorder is a lot like the god damn dementors.

They come and suck your soul out. They take every thing away from you. They make you feel, in the words of Ron Weasley, "like I'd never be cheerful again". They make you relive your worst moments in life. They are evil.

And like dementors, I truly feel that the only way to fight them is with happiness. That's how you conjure up a patronus in Harry Potter. You think of your happiest moment. For eating disorders, I think you need to think of a happy moment when you were present, or not thinking about food, or sometime before your eating disorder. But like in Harry Potter, sometimes this is easier said than done. The reason patronuses are so hard to conjure is because first off, you have to think of a memory strong enough, and second off, that memory has to be able to fight the crippling feeling you get when the dementor is sucking out your soul. So this can be really fudging hard when you're looking at old pictures of yourself.

But like always, Dumbledore offers a piece of wisdom in the Prisoner of Azkaban that gives me hope. He says "It is not our abilities that show who we truly are, it is our choices".

Which I interpreted this way: My brain has this stupid ass ability to conjure up all these eating disorder thoughts. It also has the ability to turn them up when I am stressed about changes, drink or eat what I normally wouldn't, or look at old pictures of myself. BUT that ability does NOT have to be who I am. I can choose to fight. I can choose not to listen. I can keep choosing recovery in the hopes that one day these thoughts won't get louder. Who I truly am is my choice to fight those thoughts. So I will keep fighting. Even when it sucks. Even when I see old pictures. Even when the thoughts of recovery seem too hard or not worth it.

Because I want to be a fighter.