Going the Distance

Idling. Sometimes in life your foot will find itself firmly on the clutch and poised on the accelerator ready to go, yet will you manage to set off on the journey or will you simply stall and have to start again? The waiting game during recovery from an eating disorder is one of the hardest things to cope with. You have a yearning to get on with life, but the limitations within your mind mean you cannot embark on your future until the block comes away. When it seems that you cannot go forwards, but reversing is not an option either, then you can’t help but wonder what to do, how to handle the situation, how to idle by…

Entering the third year of university I have found my life once again on standby. My reapplication to dentistry has meant that my future is in other’s people’s hands and I find it very hard to accept I am not in control of it. I have no idea what I will be doing come September let alone where I will be living, and this thought scares me. Although I strive for a life of spontaneity, such is my nature that organising myself in advance is what I find safest, or else I start to panic; so waiting for a response from dental schools is a stressful experience for me. Yet again in this situation, my pessimism shines through and I am almost resigning myself to having to find a plan B and give up on my dream to become a dentist. I find it so much easier to cope with potential rejections if I do not hope and set the bar low for myself than if I allow my head to get carried away and dream. Unfortunately, I set this barrier to almost everything I do in life and it is a cycle I MUST get myself out of.

The constant fear of my ‘relative binge’ is still upon me, due to my obsession with chocolate. I keep telling myself, ‘today it’s ok to have this extra square because tomorrow I’ll just have a little a less’, yet this never ends up happening and it’s scaring me. No, I am not overweight, if anything I am only just entering the healthy range so I have a large margin, but what if my inability to control my chocolate cravings becomes an addiction and I can’t stop and I go above and beyond a weight I will ever be comfortable with? It all sounds so melodramatic written down, but my mind is constantly whirring around this thought. I feel I have opened a door whereby I have allowed myself to eat chocolate in an unrestricted manner but it has turned a 180 and I am now eating in uncontrollably.

I have recently started exercising again in the hope to counteract the fact I am a complete chocaholic and also for general fitness. It just made me more aware when I was writing that sentence that my primary reason for exercise was to compensate for extra calories… This is not a great realisation, but at least I know I am not aiming to lose weight in this situation but merely to stay in the comfortable weight zone that I am currently in. On the plus side, my main choice of exercise this time has been yoga, a non-strenuous form of exercise that has really allowed me to relax and ease myself into a life with exercise again. I think this is what is best for me, as if I was pushing myself too fast too soon, I would not be able to moderate my diet to fit around the exertion I would be putting on my body. But I am enjoying yet again being healthy enough to exercise and being in a place where I am not afraid to eat that extra bit so that I can stay healthy.

Most of the people surrounding me currently do not know where they will be next year so I am not the only one currently stuck in limbo. However, I find this creates a limitation on everything we do with a reluctance to commit ourselves to anything or anyone in the fear of having to leave it all behind; no one just goes for it anymore. It makes these few months we are living futile and worthless and we are all in the same boat. I am taking it very hard, as not being busy is one of my weaknesses, as it has always dragged me into depression. Sitting around and waiting for life to happen to me is not something I am comfortable with but I don’t know how to get out of my funk until I can answer some questions for my future but I have to rely on others to answer these for me. I am not confident in moving into the unknown alone but if push comes to a shove I will step off that clutch and go the distance.