An Open Letter to My Eating Disorder

This is an open letter of two halves to you, my eating disorder.

For you have been named Bulimia, I write,

Dear Illness,

I start this letter as a “homework” task from my weekly meetings with an eating disorder specialist. This letter has been a long time coming, and hence to the pressure and difficulty, I now experience looking you in the eye, per say. I doubt the words that follow, the meaning and the intentions and to who, if any, I am speaking for.

I do not look to my side for I feel the walls of your shadow.

As a friend, you bring me comfort; you are a security blanket and you can make anywhere feel like home.

This is to say that I feel safe when we are together.

This is to say, I cannot see me without you. I have become dependent on your ways as I suppose you have mine.

We host each other’s parties, partner each of our dances.

Friend, at the present, it is more accessible to stick with you than it is to fight against you. Your arms are always opening, your pathway always clear.

You’ve been the shade from my growth.

Friend, you are the ill to my health.

It may be said that you never fail me and it is from holding on to you so tight that you now account for more of me than I.

You are corrupt in all that you do.

As my enemy you bring me down, you don’t ground me, but bury me.

Your pathway is so clear for it is so well worn, as I run towards a sense of safety and search for my future. I will you this strength, my desire to live and to live with a quality of which you deny, to find and walk other pathways. From the presence of your walls, I am not without courage to break through, go around or make openings in the many walls of the outside world. I know that doors can be reopened and doorways reversible.

As a partner you are abusive, as a person you are a thief, as a shelter you are a prison.

The safety you provide is superficial and willed into existence from my desperation, my hope.

I have become subject to you, your power is dependent on my energy.

I am the host in your invasion, you extort my life.

Bulimia, you have had a magnitude of time and resources. I am reaching for support and tools which are substantial and enabling of both the quality and longevity of my future through all the overgrown and unmarked pathways.

Bulimia, I have no smart or quick last line. I won’t thank you or forgive you, not now. I will continue to know you and with this, I kindly ask that you begin to unlearn me, for who I am is not who I was nor who I will be. I will dance in the rain, to swim in the ocean and to find for myself my needs so please take down your shelter, let go of your governance and let your location be known for I will roam spaces using the light of my own.

I let these words be for there appears to be little sense to continue to hide.

Yours no more,
Potential