Why Am I Doing This

Treatment. Recovery. Patient. Those words make me cringe.
But I am a patient who's in recovery and undergoing treatment.
And I ask myself, why am I doing this?

No one is making me do this, I choose it. I voluntarily, although reluctantly, choose to get treatment. Sometimes when someone is getting treatment for something, it involves medicine and there can be unpleasant side affects, to say the least. Due to the nature of my illness, my medicine is not what one would normally consider to be medicinal. I don't get hooked up to an IV when I take it nor do I receive it in pill form or injections. It does, however, give me distressing and sometimes painful affects: nausea, dizziness, headaches, stomach pain, fatigue and those are just some of them. My medicine is food. You may be thinking, "Seriously? That's it?" Now while it may not make my hair fall out or give me sores in or on my body, it does still affect me in ways that are uncomfortable and (according to my mind) even negative. And that's where a lot of the problem is. My mind. Hence the term mental illness.

My mind is sick, yet my body is where it shows and sometimes it's not always obvious. I can smile and laugh and appear engaged in what you're saying while receiving my medicine. But on the inside, my mind is in torment. Berating me for indulging, chewing, swallowing without purging. Reciting to me that every bite will have to be "made up for" later and reminding me of the consequences if I don't follow through. Failure. Fatness. And the fact that I'm not really sick and don't deserve treatment. A lump forms in my throat as I try to swallow the anxiety and the food without attracting any attention to myself. Disgust slides down my throat along with bites of my meal. I have become quite the expert at concealing inner agony. As my "ordered" (as small as that may be) and "disordered" self fight each other, I want to run away. Take my head off of my body and have just a tiny bit of peace. Like a child who is having their scraped knee cleaned with an antiseptic, I want to pull away and cry and scream.

Leave me alone! Who cares if it'll get infected! I'm fine! The pain of getting better hurts worse than the pain of being sick. And honestly, who likes taking medicine? No one, that's who. But despite all of this, (for some strange reason) I don't remove my leg. On Tuesday, I go back to "have my knee cleaned" and I'm sure at some point I will end up asking myself, why am I doing this?