Note to Self: Hope Against Hope

I know there a billion note-to-self’s you’ve shelved away in your thicket of tyranny you’ve unleashed on your mind - rather automatically might I add. Whether you feel up for it or not, it's time you wrote one for yourself without deleting it. You’ve garnered yourself a black belt in avoidance as you whiplash the weakness you feel as you deny your body what it truly needs. I know that you’ve unpicked the enamel pin of emergence and slapped on a sloppy iron-on patch of makeshift mediocrity - all because you’ve given up on your ability to make a positive change. I know why you fell - you started to feel like no matter what you did to heal the hurt you wished to, inspire others struggling with the social enterprise you co-founded, and lift yourself out of the trenches, you slammed hard on the pit of reality that you were a fraud that should scram because you will never be the person people want to help them. You were never going to be enough so why bother pushing yourself to continue recovering when your main purpose of doing so became a mockable contention?

Face it, what a fool you were to try and believe that you could really achieve what you dreamt of accomplishing in all those weeks in group therapy sessions. You killed the old self-depreciating version of you but you ended up as an egotistical figure of self-proclaimed inspiration to others. You figured that it was high time to purge the evil you saw in yourself again. You only knew the world in extremes and you’re still struggling to fathom the concept of balance - be patient and hopeful my dear. As your mood started to plummet, the eerie lullaby of your eating disorder started to make an seductive re-entrance through the gates you once locked shut. There you were on the other side, exhausted of jamming the hinges shut and instead you were lubricating the nuts and bolts to allow yourself to immerse in the old familiar comforts of self-destruction.

Before you knew it, you became embroiled in the depravity, isolation and self-inflicted demolition of new monster you perceived of yourself. The world has a gazillion analogies, anecdotes, and quotes on the transformation human soul. However, perhaps what lies in the fine print is the harsh truth that it will take multiple occurrences of moulting, melding, pruning and shedding away old versions of you till you uncover the rawness of you that you were meant to be. It will take all the patience and persistence in the world to realise that you will love to experience the life where you’re finally at peace with you. It’s not one transformation. Keep shedding, keep repairing, keep rejuvenating - I promise that you’ve got infinite mana in the lair you’ve locked yourself in.

Here you are: staring blankly at the cauldron of slew hues of pseudo-recovery; occasionally forced to confront the unsettling thought that perhaps this potion you’ve concocted is going to end in an explosive mess. As you try to avert the logical solution of putting out the ominous emerald flames underneath you, it has occurred to you (time and time again) that no ingredient you plonk in your stew of death can compare to the antidote of real recovery. There is no amount of Netflix that can numb this struggle you’re denying you face. As you post whatever video or photo exhibiting the happiness you’re pretending to have - it can never compare to the fearless expedition of happiness you made yourself embark on last year.

There’s a difference between happiness and being distracted from sadness. There is a difference between temporary relief of staying stagnant on the scale and genuine joy from the memories you forge with souls around you. No amount of water you drink can fill the void of lies you are immersing yourself in. Face yourself and acknowledge that you’re depleting the quality your health. There is only so much hunger you can deny with water or work before this act of repeated water-logging erodes the foundation on which you stand. I see the times when you’re stumbling along the grey alleys of MRT interchanges and how you burst through the door of the nearest restroom because your gastric reflux has handicapped you from living the full life you are more than capable of living. Don’t take it with a pinch of salt anymore - take it as a timeless wake-up call to come to your senses that you don’t have it all under control no matter how hard you try convincing yourself and others around you.

As the sassy singlish soul in you would exclaim, wake up your idea!

I know you miss the person you once were before the wrecked her to the ground out of self-disgust at self-perceived arrogance. Last year, doctor tried to rationalise with me - perhaps because I’ve become so accustomed to level 0 on the self-confidence scale, that a normal level of 7 seems like a level 10000, encroaching on narcissism. We all need a basic level of confidence to get duties done and there’s nothing criminal about possessing that.

I know you miss the old version of you.

It was imperfect but as you patch together the little gems about you in every version you’ve metamorphosed into, don’t you see the mosaic of brazen beauty? This version of you is dead-beat, dull beyond belief and I know you’re tired of this pretending to have this bucket of vivacious energy. There is only so much of a pretence you can exhibit before the phoniness of your performance makes you wanna throw rotten tomatoes at yourself.

“I know you see the galaxy every time you stand up.

I know you think it’s romantic to see the stars through dark clouds,

But really, it’s not.

The cosmos is still far away as ever.

This is just you

Failing your body. I know you are unhappy.

I know that existing in this state is not as exciting as all the poetry and lifetime movies would have you believe.

I know the boring.

I know the repetition, the monotony,

The drab days and days of ritualistic movements.

Checking and rechecking. I know it all feels so empty but What else did you expect?”

I know you miss so many things about yourself from your various reincarnations. You’ve hardened your heart to hope because you are tired of disappointment, bitter at failure and afraid to envision a better life beyond this because you don’t think you’ll ever be able to attain it or allow yourself to reclaim. I know you tell yourself it’s safer to dream within your bubble of pain because you’d much rather stop being let down with over-ambition.

But hey, it’s time to hope against hope again.

Let me paint the image of where you stand right now:

At MBC, you wonder when it'll be your turn to join the team in the pantry with their takeaway mala and noodles. You wonder if you'll ever fit in or ever dare to allow yourself to live like they do and take it as a given that you'll have an opportunity to choose whatever lunch you're feeling for everyday.

During your fave pay shifts, there you are gazing longingly at the customers who settle into their seats at restaurants, browse the menu, and order what they want as they chat gleefully with their friends and family. Your mind wanders off into the outings you once went on with friends - oh remember when J, S and you went to a Japanese restaurant together and J accidentally lit the hotpot paper on fire and tossed it into the table in a panic. Remember how we basked in that embarrassment as we garnered judgment yet laughed at ourselves for being too enthusiastic about eating the food we had just ordered? Don’t you want to feel that again?

As you step back in old spaces, don’t these memories rush in and make you crave for the way things used to be? I know that you’ve clamped down on the possibility of ever being able to settle into a new restaurant with friends or family, but please continue hoping against hope - soon, it’ll be your fingers flipping through menus and not merely taking photos of them to obsess about analysing the caloric safety of the dishes on your phone. Soon, it’ll be someone else telling you to enjoy your meal instead of you telling customers that without doing so for yourself. At school, I know you miss the confident, sociable, and flexible person you used to be. You miss the sassy meme dealer you were to your friends. You look at the rest of your uni mates spontaneously going off on overseas trips or out for lunch and you think gosh, as much as I wish for some of those things - they will never be. Please continue to hope against hope because you will and deserve to experience whatever life has to offer instead of sabotaging yourself to avert uncertainty. Along the streets on your own and observe the bustling social scene around you, you can’t help but wonder “what if?” You’ve spent all your years on this earth without allowing yourself to live spontaneously with friends and invest in any romantic relationships. I know you aren’t keen on many of the elements of these aforementioned but don’t you ever wonder about the stories and memories that you’ll amass from diving into the unknown? What about the travel adventures you’ve always longed to make? Don’t forget them or rule them out because you’ve become resigned to the fact that this is the way you’ll be forever. Don’t think it’s impossible to reclaim the parts of you that you’ve missed and weave in new dreams into your story?

“In the past, some of my logic for staying stuck in the eating disorder was, “But what if life doesn’t get better afterwards? Like what if I recover / weight restore / stop using X behavior and life is still awful, but I just have no way to cope with it?” And I was surprised how many times in treatment I heard a similar sentiment from my peers.

I remember a friend talking about how she was so afraid that the trauma and pain and misery would still be present if she let go of using disordered behaviors that she would rather stay in the misery she knew - a familiar, safe misery. We had both been staying in the hell for fear that there was hell on the other side. But what if we were wrong? I know, I know, you may not fully buy that, but hear me out: What if? Hold space for that question for a moment:

What if your vision of the future right now is distorted, because the fog of the disorder is so heavy around your mind that you can’t see clearly what’s ahead of you? What if you recover and let go and it’s not more pain? What if you can create a life that you actually want to present in, one in which you don’t have to numb out constantly just to survive?

Here’s what I’m not saying: life will be pain-free and sparkly-glittery-unicorns every second of every day. Life is complex and filled with all kinds of experiences, but Y’ALL. What if we were wrong about everything? What if there is actually so much goodness ahead of us? Isn’t that worth fighting for? Isn’t it worth fighting with every ounce of energy we have left in our tired bodies to get to the other side?

It’s easier to succumb to the siren song of the disorder, a song of protection from pain and numbness to the trauma we’ve faced. I’m not asking you to commit to recovery or give up your self-destructive behaviors.

I’m asking you to consider, even just for a second:

What if you were wrong about hope?”

Every night, day, waking moment, there you are on your phone/laptop favoriting all the goodies like the granola list on iherb is your (non-existent) instagram feed. Whenever you catch yourself in a mall, there you'll be, along the aisles of the supermarket looking up the calorie count of every snack you’re considering of adding to your limited list of allowances. You obsess over them, refreshing the page despite memorising it down to the digits, hoping that somehow they’ll breathe new fresh life into you - but, deep down, you know they never will. 5 years from now, would you really be proud to know the calorie difference between brands of rice thins? Wouldn’t you rather much want to find yourself refreshing the page of online shops when there’s a flash sale? Wouldn’t you rather much spend the time to recheck in with more people you’ve neglected instead of checking in with the inanimate objects at NTUC? As you lay there on your bed, jostling with the uneasiness that you’ll be up every 2 hours to decide whether you should grab food or suppress your need/want with sleep.

Don’t you want to remember what it’s like to have a whole night’s worth of uninterrupted sleep and actually wake up to have breakfast and not compensate for the binge you had through the night. I know you feel like a rat rummaging through the kitchen in secrecy.

I know you feel ashamed whenever your parents catch you in the act of pitifully eating crumbs from a granola packet. Remember that there is no shame in trying to nourish yourself in any shape or form. Every little step counts even if the voice in your head is screaming at you for acknowledging your hunger. Listen. You are not a glutton for feeding yourself. This is you trying - hoping against hope, not giving into helplessness. This is you fighting the good fight. This is not heinous or worth condemning yourself for. You deserve to live on to unveil what life has to offer.

I know you think that this has gone on for way too long and you have accepted, and even passively embraced the chronic nature of this but please continue hoping against hope. You may feel like you've lost all you are and there's no coming back from this - but there is. You'll find the nerve to return to yourself again - just like you always have.

You will regain the joy from the things that once made you smile and laugh. I promise.

“Try again even when you have fallen so many times that your body hitting the floor sounds like a broken record. Try again even when you are so tired the ground feels like a feather filled mattress and the part of your brain that is trying to kill you whispers that this is a good place to take a nap. Try again. Try again. Try again because okay, maybe it’s true, maybe you will never stop falling, but in order to fall you must have been standing up to begin with, and even if you only have one good day a week it is worth getting up for that one day.”

Have heart.

Have hope.

You'll find your way home (and so much more).