Sunday, June 17, 2012

June challenge 17: End

Endings are hard. I associate the word with pain. We moved house first when i was two and I could only cope by sitting on the floor with photo albums as the removal men packed up the house around us.
Since then, there have been many more endings: leaving Harpenden when I was 9 and the anguish at being separated from my friends; leaving Solihull at 16 then a month later leaving home to go to boarding school... two years after that, the pain at leaving that school and my very close friends was just as bad. I could go on.
However, in typing this, it is clear that each painful ending has been followed by another one precisely because that ending has been a new beginning. If I'd remained deeply unhappy at leaving Harpenden and had not been able to move on and make new friends and find a new life in Solihull, my pain when leaving there at 16 would not have existed.

This kind of reminds me of the metaphor of anorexia as a life raft in a shipwreck. It manages to keep you afloat in a time of deep turmoil but you have to let go of it in order to swim to the ship that has come to rescue you. But letting go is terrifying: how do you know that you will reach the ship? isn't it more likely that you'll drown in the space between the two. Yet the ship represents safety: a new beginning.

The ending point of an ED, the start of the recovery process... these things are terrifying. They will cause all sorts of pain and anguish. But we have to trust that time will allow us to find safety in something better: in life; in living; in finding and being ourselves.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Loved the ship analogy, and all of your words. Thank you for sharing yourself. :)