Someday Melissa. What an amazing impact her story has had in the eating disorder community. I am constantly inspired by what Melissa’s mother has done to honor the memory of her daughter, as well as bring awareness to the tragic reality of eating disorders. Our society seems to simply define this terrible disorder as weekly blurps of celebrity frailty in US Weekly. The severity of eating disorders is often unknown to most unless you or someone you love is suffering from one. And even so, I feel even my very own friends and family still cannot grasp what I have gone through and continue to go through on a daily basis. Maybe that is why I am so drawn to Someday Melissa. I am in complete awe of this mother who has gone to every corner of the country telling her daughter’s story. Eating Disorders are not pretty. They are hard to describe, diagnose and even harder to understand. I am drawn to people and stories that are making a difference because that is what I hope to do one day with my experience and story. But I don’t want to ever portray some picture perfect story of recovery…I want to show and tell all sides of this illness and life in recovery – the good, the bad and the disordered. And that’s what Someday Melissa does. It doesn’t candy coat the horrific reality of what we as ED victims go through. But yet it also inspires people to share their stories and their Somedays.
I often wonder what would my ‘Someday’ story be. Then I realized…Today is my SOMEDAY. I am finally living a life that I did not know was possible. I was deep into my disorder’s spell for basically my entire adolescent and adult life. I had no idea not just what recovery looked like, but what life was supposed to look like. I thought I was destined to live in this constant spiral of hell, a never-ending cycle of secret self hate, loneliness and despair. If you would have asked me two years ago what would my ‘Somedays’ look like I would have said:
Someday…I will order fries.
Someday…I will get dressed without crying.
Someday…I will keep food in my house.
Someday…I will not live by numbers.
Someday…I will be a mom.
Today, I am all of those things. Most recently I accomplished my last ‘Someday’ with the birth of my beautiful baby boy. My dream of becoming a mother is what pushed me through my darkest days in treatment. I knew God put me on this earth to be a mother, but I refused to get pregnant until I was stable in recovery. It is funny how God and this crazy universe work because my son was born exactly one year to the day of my last symptom use. It was all meant to be – no other way to put it. And just because I have achieved that list of ‘Somedays,’ it doesn’t mean my list is over. That is one of the many blessings of life in recovery. I am constantly learning new things about myself, discovering what direction I want my life to go in and what kind of person I want to be. So I am looking forward to creating a new list of ‘Somedays’…
My Someday.
