Holding my Key

Last year I wrote myself two letters.  Two very different letters.  I don’t want to share them word for word as they’re quite personal, but I thought I would give you a snapshot of the dilemma that often races through my mind. The first was to a Lizzie in five years time, still battling Anorexia. The best way to sum it up was utterly depressing. I wasn’t married, I was alone. Alone with my thoughts and with a ‘life’ filled with hospitals, machines and the dreaded word, food. I had let it conquer my life. Anorexia had won. I had thrown away every hope and dream I had left inside. There was nothing left inside me fighting for freedom, the only thing left was a small, flickering flame that kept my eating disorder alive and powering through. S had left me long ago, my siblings had given up on me, and whilst my friends experienced all that comes with life in their late twenties, my life was empty. I burst into tears after writing it.  The second was to a Lizzie in five years, ...

It is the end of Eating Disorder Awareness Week 2021. Often many posts shared on this week are filled with transformation pictures, showing sufferers in their severely underweight figures next to a more recent image in their newly-found ‘healthy’ body. The reality is there is so much more to raising awareness than just wanting to validate your own illness through photos to prove you were the 'sickest' (I'm aware it sounds strange that people with an eating disorder might celebrate being the most unwell). When people talk of ‘awareness,’ this should mean a time to remind and educate others about eating disorders and the full scope of them. I have often found that ‘awareness weeks’ that occur all throughout the year casting light on a whole variety of issues and illnesses occurring in the world, can become albeit monotonous. Someone recently told me, ‘every week seems to be awareness week.’  I guess they are correct in a sense, however they exist for a reason. They exist beca...