Motivation

When I finally realized I might actually need help- I could deal with being proactive about the medical aspects (to a certain degree), but the idea of changing my thoughts, my patterns, and my ways of thinking blew me out of the water. The saying ‘fake it till you make it’ became my new mantra. I could completely recover and get healthy easy. Who really changes how they think anyways? How do you even do that? I found no real reason to work on changing my thoughts, I’d focus on fake recovery, i.e. gaining the weight and eating what I was told, and just be done with it all.

Shit was I completely wrong. It’s not that easy. And the one thing truly missing was my motivation.

I wanted to be healthy again, but I didn’t want to give up the habits that made me unhealthy.

I wanted to change my thoughts, but I wasn’t willing to change how I thought about myself.

I was going through the motions of treatment (well kind of), but there was nothing really motivating me to completely want to change. I couldn’t get out of the hamster wheel of ‘fake recovery’.

Change is scary, actually it’s downright petrifying. Usually we are so motivated to change something in our lives that motivation alone is the driving force. But what if that motivation is lacking and change is necessary to lasting survival?

In the beginning I used my family as my motivation, and as amazing of a motivation as my family is- this motivation was not driven by me. I also used my doctors. I’m a people pleaser so this was pretty easy, but once again it was not driven by me. Thankfully my doctors are pretty good at smelling out a rat and the jig was up. I needed motivation that only I possessed, but I had none.

I spent so much time making lists of what motivated me to want my life back; what I wanted to regain, and what I wanted to return to. But the lists I kept creating never really helped. They never really helped because what I finally realized was I didn’t want my old life back, I actually couldn’t ‘afford’ to have my old life back if I wanted to recover. Nothing I was doing or the ways I had been thinking had been serving me, and what was worse was there was nothing in my life that motivated me more than the eating disorder.

The sad truth is that the eating disorder trumped everything else.

It gave me immediate gratification.

It gave me a sense of control.

It was an all consuming entity.

It had seeped into every aspect of my life- the eating disorder was my sick motivation for most of my interests.

So when I looked at those lists of ‘what motivates me to recover’ it started to make a little more sense. I needed to find some new motivations that the eating disorder had not seeped into yet. Replace old motivators that were not working until I could drag myself out.

I didn’t dump my old life, rather I built onto my current life. And once I started to build on, I built motivation that allowed me to release old patterns, old jobs, and old relationships that did not serve me.

For me, this has been the key to wanting to get better.

Finding what my new life, without the eating disorder, would look like and accepting it’s ok and necessary to change.