Something Inevitable

Today’s challenge for DVerse Poetics is to write on the topic of one or more of the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance). I’ll try not to focus on Depression, for once. 🙂 This seems to be quite a challenge for me, but as a writer, I am probably capable of it. The picture is one I took last year.

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I’ve been grieving for a long time. At 19 years old, an eating disorder took over my life, almost took my life. Then I spent 4 years recovering. Those are 4 years I’m never going to get back, 4 years when the rest of my peers graduated from college and got jobs, maybe even started families. I feel behind, like I’ll never catch up. Covid didn’t help anything — thanks to that, life became even more on hold. All my life seems to be made up of recovering from previous life.

I used to wonder how I developed an eating disorder in the first place. Now, after having done a ton of therapy and realizing the commonalities between me and other sufferers, I am more surprised that it didn’t happen earlier.

I’ve been briefly in the “acceptance” stage, believing that God has something else for me, that God is writing a beautiful story. Maybe He is, but that doesn’t stop me from stalking over to the “anger” stage. With a birthday coming up in only 6 weeks, I am seeing even more starkly what is lost and finding fewer and fewer ways to replace it.

“growth in everything?” —
see skeletal arms reaching,
a withered fig tree

Well, that was sadder than I intended. I failed my self-imposed “try not to cry” challenge.