Lia

This is what I’m truly terrified of. That I caused my POTS. That I did this to myself. That it’s my fault. I’ve struggled with an eating disorder for as long as I can remember. While I never was a severely low enough weight to be diagnosed as anorexic, for years and years I starved myself. Eating only enough to get by and to avoid suspicion and other people (my parents most of all) noticing. Even now, when I’ve been at my healthiest (eating disorder-wise that is), eating is…complicated. I eat relatively normally, or at least I think I do more or less, but it’s hard to remember to eat. My appetite is ****** up and my brain doesn’t necessarily correlate being hungry with then needing to actually go eat. I used to make myself wait 24 hours at least between having a single relatively normal-sized meal. All while playing a high intensity varsity college sport (and suffering from other really severe mental illnesses and undiagnosed POTs…which went about as well as you’d expect it to, which is to say: not at all and, god, that’s the understatement of the century). This was the pattern for years. So even now, when I’m not actively having eating disorder brain or even having any major ED thoughts or intentional behaviours, eating is still hard. I’m rambling. I doubt anyone will read this anyways. But I need to express this. My POTS has stabilised and I can mostly function like a normal human being. Normally my POTS is manageable (even with the constant chronic pain that never goes away). But I’m currently in a pretty bad POTS flair up and in so much pain all the time, so I’ve been thinking about POTS a lot (and reading about it too), trying to find ways to manage it, to make it not hurt so bad all the time, to make it go back to being an inconvenience and not devastatingly crippling. And so much of the POTS treatment and management recommendations are to do with changing your diet and eating smaller meals more often. But…eating is hard, even when I’m not struggling (and I am very much so struggling with mental health stuff right now, which probably brought this POTS flare up on in the first place). Despite the irregularity of my patchy appetite where I’m just not hungry and go long periods of time without eating and forget to eat lunch or occasionally even dinner too, my eating disorder is mostly quiet. The less I have to think about food and think about eating, the easier it is. But if I have to think about food, and particularly, if I have to think about what I can and can’t eat, then eating gets really hard and the ED thoughts become so much louder and harder to ignore. And I inevitably start slipping back into the behaviors. And I know, I /know/ that not eating makes the POTS symptoms worse. I know that. But…Eating is hard. Even now, I sat down to look up what would be best, most beneficial for dinner, how to eat to help my health, both physically and mentally. And here I am 2 hours later, 9:15pm, still not having eaten and no longer hungry, no longer even motivated to eat. Eating now feels like a chore. Something I should probably do but would rather not. Something that’s no longer worth the effort. And it’s now, reading about all these dietary restrictions and recommendations, that this thought, this dread, this terror comes back to me: I brought this on myself. That I ruined my body beyond repair. That no matter how much my eating disorder recovers, I will have to live with the results of it my whole life.