I'm back at this place again. I stopped believing in recovery. I stopped believing it was something that was sacred, something I had to fight for. In fact, I started believing that it was a corny, cheesy, hoax—a thing that didn’t really exist, at least not for me, but that it was a figment of other people’s too happy imaginations. I came to think that it wasn’t really all that hard. Other people just didn’t get it. They were too trusting, too unicorn-y and gullible. There was no point in any kind of struggle or any kind of melodramatic poetry readings or tearful rock ceremonies. All there was was fat and thin, vomit and diets and binges and sucking it up and stopping with all the complaining. So I lost it. I lost my freedom. I lost the centered, calm, balanced identity that I had once worked so hard to build within myself. It happened slowly (like they always say) and then suddenly (I’ve heard them say that, too), an exponential sort of curve similar to those I’d spent so much time studying in my psychology and statistics classes.

One day I thought that maybe I was just making this all up, and the next day I conceded that, yeah, it wouldn’t be a big deal if I didn’t have a snack, or go to yoga, or practice telling myself how much I loved me. And again and again and again that happened and before I knew it I recognized the stench of my bathroom more than my own sad eyes in the mirror.

Writing is the only way I know how to go back. I need to trace my steps back to the place I used to be. A place replete with joy and sadness and anxiety and embarrassment and shame and laughter. A place of innocence of believing in myself and in the world. A place not to wrapped up in the plastic of cynicism that I was too sarcastic to even see five feet in front of myself. I need to go back to a place of authenticity, where I roll my eyes occasionally and when I mean it, and not because I'm uncomfortable in my own skin and wish I could see myself from another vantage point. I want so badly to experience all the colors of life and vitality, to stop vacillating from one extreme depth of the ocean to the height of the sun without feeling the waves in between. I want to feel the extraordinary waves beneath my outstretched arms, open and free. I want to love myself again, for me.