Well, your questions are still coming! I’ll keep going until the questions run dry, so if there’s anything at all you want to ask, just leave a comment on any post and I’ll collect them and go from there. No need to backtrack to the original Q & A post.
Question # 13 comes from Stella:
“How can you fill the void you feel when you stop restricting so you can't count on anorexia ‘support’?”
Excellent question! I did a post about this a long time ago, back in 2007. I called it “Filling the Gap.” This is something a lot of people struggle with as they try to recover, and it’s a concern for a reason. Letting go of something so all-consuming is difficult. It stands to reason that you wouldn’t want to be left with a void after you “let go.” That wouldn’t feel very good.
Check out the link to my old "Filling the Gap" post for some elaboration. It all centers around the question: What do you want to do?
The more open-ended the question, the better. Your life is like a blank canvas and you get to paint it.
Sometimes it's hard to remember what it is we actually like to do. Sometimes we never even learned what those somethings are. We never had time. We were all-consumed with our eating disorders. But there is beauty in discovering what we're good at, what we enjoy, what makes us smile or feel accomplished (besides eating disordered behavior), what makes us laugh or tap into our creative sides.
I challenge you to find out. I challenge you to rediscover (or to discover for the first time) what you enjoy about this world, this life. There is a plethora of wonderfulness out there waiting. All you have to do is start with the question What do I want to do? and then go DO it. It's often as simple as that.
2 comments:
Dear Arielle, thianks for your answers to both my questions.
What do I want to do?
It's hard to find an answer, to me.
When you live a lot of years in the arms of anorexia, it becomes every day much difficult to find a way out.
But I know that inside the loop I have to find a way to get outside.
I don't know what I want to do, in this moment. Well, I promise that I'll do my best to find and answer to this question.
You've answered my questions, so now I have to answer your.
Thanks for your inputs, very precious to me.
A big hug
Thanks for posting this. This is something I have been thinking about a lot lately. The what next. And, honestly, the ED part of me is resisting going on to these "whats next" things--even if its something as simple as watching TV and not being distracted by ED.
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