My sweet friend Charlotte wrote this post. She is such a strong woman- an ED recovery warrior and mental health advocate, Charlotte also has a blog (https://www.livingfreec.com/blog/10-lessons-i-learned-from-treatment) and an AMAZING Instagram (chaca_livesfree). Thank you for holding space today as Charlotte shares her journey in finding freedom. If you would like to share your story, email me at acristadoro15@gmail.com. 
Up until recently, my whole life has revolved around control. Control over my relationships, control over school and my career, control over my food and body, and especially control over (not feeling) my feelings. Anytime I felt particularly “out of control” I would react in negative ways: panic attacks, acting out, and full-on breakdowns. I felt like I was trapped within the confines of my own mind and temperament.
Eventually I began to “express” myself by taking over full control of food and my body, in the form of an eating disorder. As my illness (and the accompanying anxiety and depression) progressed, I felt less and less free. I felt completely at a loss and it seemed like the illusive concept of control was always just out of reach, constantly slipping through my fingers. I was struggling to keep my head above water and it felt like I would never find true freedom.
As counterintuitive as it sounded and felt at the beginning, trying to give up that sense of control has been a lifesaver for me. As I began to learn, the longer I tried to be in control of everything in my life, the less time I spent present, actually engaging in it. I’ve spent the last 13 years at war with myself and my body and not actively living my life. The more I spend time ruminating on the past or worrying about the future means I have very little time to actually be present.
For me, finding freedom first meant letting go of control. In my recovery from my eating disorder this means allowing myself to engage in the moment and to practice acting opposite to truly have food freedom. This means trying to shut out the eating disorder voice to allow myself to be there in the moment, more spontaneous and less rigid. It means I now have the freedom to break away from a planned meal if I walk by something on the street that looks or smells good (and living in NYC that happens a lot!). It also means that I try to have a looser grip on things like school and my future career. This entails reminding myself of all my strengths and all that I am doing to work towards my goals. It also means having a little faith that things are going to work out the way they are meant to. I’ve found that not worrying excessively about my next internship or job has been extremely liberating and has given me so much mental space back.
The biggest thing that has given me a sense of freedom has been choosing recovery and building a life worth living. According to DBT, a life worth living is one where you are living according to your values, achieve goals that are important to you, and have worthwhile, loving relationships. By working to actively create my own life worth living, I’ve found I have to have some freedom. My values and goals don’t include or work well with staying trapped in the depths of my mental illnesses. To live a full, fulfilling and meaningful life, I have to move outside my comfort zones and go beyond the arbitrary, rigid rules that my mental illnesses have created for me.
Freedom means no longer pushing feelings away or numbing them with behaviors, but actually feeling them. Freedom means I don’t have to keep everything to myself—that I’m allowed and encouraged to share what I’ve been through and what I’m feeling. Freedom doesn’t mean the absence of fear, but rather the courage to do the hard parts of recovery and know that I’m capable of doing them.
Freedom symbolizes a time in my life where my eating disorder and my mental illnesses are no longer in control. It’s a time where I’m no longer in full control either. Control is something that has significantly less importance in my life, and I’m working on being okay with that.
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