fromjunia

I’ve been exploring existentialism to help illuminate how to handle the hard emotions around my recovery from anorexia. Stoicism is really popular nowadays because it is focused on overcoming the hard emotions, putting them aside, and getting things done: a philosophy built for productivity culture. Existentialism, on the other hand, demands that you spend time with the hard emotions, because when you do you might begin to see some deep truths about what it means to be alive. Stoicism would tell me: the anorexia voice in your head is not grounded in reality, don’t listen to it, don’t listen to the anxiety, just eat. (A pretty common approach to eating disorder recovery, all considered.) Existentialism, on the other hand, would ask me to figure out what role the anorexia is filling, what the emotions around it teach me, and what I want to do given these facts. Stoicism tells us to buckle down and dig in; existentialism asks us what’s going on and what we want to do.

Eating disorders in general have a lot of similarities with addiction. When viewed from an existentialist perspective, they numb us to the difficulties of being alive and constrain our choices. It substitutes out genuine control, grounded in an awareness of reality, for a false control premised in avoidance and displacement. The voice of existentialism says to the overcontrolling anorexic: This isn’t real control. You’re afraid of how little there is to control, and are displacing that on to food. But if you can face the world, you can see what you can control, and how you have a choice in every last moment. There’s no need to control your intake like this, especially since the addictive nature of eating disorders actually reduces how much control you have over your life.

The other part: self-compassion. Existentialism teaches that our individuality is found in a deep, inarguable core, an atom of personhood, where in each moment we are defined by the fact that we are not anything else. We are left as a choice, a moment of emptiness that we get to fill. There is no immediately available criterion for choosing in each moment. That is terrifying. But it’s also pretty cool. It means we’re not machines. We’re not rocks. The very fact that we can genuinely fuck up is what makes us special! Rocks can’t fuck up. They’re rocks. They do rock things. Humans, though, we can fuck up. We can ruin our own life, or someone else’s life.

This perspective makes self-compassion a little easier. When I mess up, it’s not proof that I’m evil and awful and deserve all the badness and no food. It’s proof that I carry in me the same sacred core that all people do. What makes me and everyone else special is that we can do something wrong. It’s the thing that makes doing things “right” so beautiful. If we could only do what we are supposed to do, we would be no different than rocks. Our sin proves our holiness.

This has been really helpful for me as I try to untangle the knot of emotions and thoughts that make up my anorexia. I could try to force myself to eat until the fear leaves, but that wouldn’t really undo the fundamental lack of self-compassion and fear of losing control that sparked it in the first place, and that would leave me open to relapse. Instead, recentering both authentic control, grounded in reality and in my values, and the common humanity I share with everyone else gives me an intellectual foundation for approaching my emotional hang-ups with a grace that self-criticism and self-denial would never allow.