Is it your first time in Paris?
This is a question I’ve been asked many times during my trip here. No, I say, I visited when I was eighteen with my mother. It was just before I started university, a treat for doing so well in my final exams. On our first night in the city, we were about to leave the hotel and my mother told me to change my shoes. I refused – these are my favourite flipflops, I told her, I could walk for miles in them – and she sighed heavily but didn’t argue with me. Cut to approximately twenty minutes later. I was getting off the Metro, slipped on the wet ground, and slashed my knee open. I spent the evening in hospital, getting the wound stitched up.
This is the story I tell people about my first time in Paris. But it’s not the full story.
What I don’t say is that I spent that weekend trying to eat as little as I possibly could.
What I don’t say is that I spent that weekend wondering how many calories there were in snails and French onion soup and croissants, and calculating how much time I had to leave after meals before I could escape to the bathroom without raising suspicion.
What I don’t say is that I spent that weekend resenting my mother for merely existing, for wanting to talk and laugh with me, to have this special weekend together to celebrate the end of my school days, when all I wanted was to be alone with my one true love, my eating disorder.
I don’t tell the story about how I finally snapped at her in the Louvre, told her to give me some space, and how her face fell, but she said fine, that she would meet me in a few hours out front. I don’t tell the story about how I immediately snuck off to the museum’s restaurant and, finally alone, I ate and ate and ate and ate. There would never be enough food to satisfy me, I thought. I was a bottomless pit; I was a black hole. I would never be full.
What did you think of the art? my mother asked me afterwards.
Amazing, I lied.
That is the story I do not tell about my first time in Paris.
***
Today, I have been in recovery for seven years.
The 18th of June, 2017. My therapist at the Eating Disorder Centre Cork had requested a meeting with my parents, and the three of us sat there, slightly nervous, waiting for her to begin. She asked my parents what they knew about my anorexia and bulimia, and my mother and father talked about everything they had witnessed over the last seventeen years. All the ways I thought I had been clever, how brilliantly well I thought I had disguised my behaviour; they had seen through most of it, they had known far more than I had been aware of. I cannot explain the shame I experienced, watching these two people who had done nothing but love and encourage and support me, who had tried so hard to help me, and how powerless they had felt when their efforts proved futile. Their pain, their frustration, their grief, but their acceptance too, that I was an adult and they couldn’t force me to recover if I wasn’t ready. I’m not sure which one of them said it, but someone said something along the lines of We have come to terms with the reality that this is something Louise will always struggle with, but we just want her to be happy.
Oh no, the therapist said. That doesn’t have to be the case. People recover. I’ve seen it happen. Full recovery is possible.
It is possible.
It is possible.
It is possible.
Those words seemed to float through the air and I swallowed them down, feeling them expand in my lungs, in, out, and it was like I could breathe for the first time in years. I had this glimpse of another version of me, someone well, healthy, healed. Happy.
Full recovery is possible, she said, and I clung to those words as hard as I could.
***
I read once that our body fully replaces itself every seven years. That we are constantly shedding cells and tissues, new ones forming in their place. I’m not sure how scientifically accurate it is but I like the idea, all the same. It means that today, when I woke up, there wasn’t a single cell in my body that remembers having an eating disorder.
I feel the truth of that. I am here in Paris and I walk for miles but I do so because I want to see the city, I want to absorb its pulsing energy into my veins, not because exercise is a way to burn calories. I eat crepes and souffles and Berthillion ice-cream because they are delicious and I deserve pleasure, but I also look for salads and greens because I listen to my body now, and I give it what it tells me it needs. I respect it. I honour it.
I am an entirely different person today. Every cell in my body is new. I am fully recovered because full recovery is possible.
When I think of my eighteen-year-old self, ignoring the art in the greatest museum in the world because all she could think about was sating her insatiable hunger, I have compassion for her but I do not know her. This is not a rejection of her or of my past, but when I think of those seventeen years of being sick, it feels as if they happened to another person. There’s a distance between me and that reality, where I can remember what I went through, I can talk and write about it, but I do not have any sense memory of it in my body. There is something miraculous about that. I was fourteen when I developed anorexia, sixteen when I discovered bulimia. For seventeen years, I careened wildly between the two. In 2017, at 32 years of age, I’d had an eating disorder for longer than I had not. The entirety of my adult life had been mired in cycles of starvation and binging and purging; I had no idea how to eat ‘normally’, what my body felt like when it was hungry or full, how to listen to my appetite. I had come to a point where I could not imagine what my life would look like without the shadow of the eating disorder. It had grown so large that it dwarfed everything else, devouring everything around it whole. It was, as I said, my one true love, but it had also become my identity, my personhood. Who would I be without it?
Peaceful, is the answer. Calm, sure, steady. Honest. A person with integrity. Someone who loves fiercely, who calls her people in closer rather than pushes them away. I became myself. I became.
Because full recovery is possible.
It took hard work to get here, I will not deny that. Recovery is the most difficult thing I have ever done, and it is that of which I am most proud. I had to challenge every single negative thought that arose, hundreds of times a day, and replace them with new ideas, ones which were more supportive to recovery. I had to interrogate every belief I had about food and bodies and weight, and the ways in which I had stitched my self-worth to all of these. I completely rewired the neural pathways in my brain that had been carved in there over seventeen years, until the urges to abuse food not only faded, they became unimaginable. I kept that vision in my mind’s eye, of the healed version of me, and I pushed and pushed and pushed until I got so close to her, I could reach out and touch her, take her hand in my mine.
And here I am, seven years later, and not a cell in my body remembers having an eating disorder. Because, my friends, full recovery is possible. It doesn’t matter how sick you are, how long you have been struggling, how hopeless you feel in this moment.
It is possible.
It is possible.
It is possible.
I cannot express how beautiful and painful and wonderful this is. ❤️
You are an inspiration. I'm so glad you are OK. Enjoy Paris, just don't wear flip flops in the rain!