anticlimax

11/21/2025

(content warning: eating disorder but semi-recovery focused, oversharing about sex (with permission from my partner))

things are happening but not exactly how i expected and i’m trying to make myself okay with it

it’s been roughly a month since i last purged, 2.5 months since i’ve binged, i stopped counting calories and compulsive exercise is impossible with migraine symptoms. behaviorally, this is the best i’ve been since my eating disorder developed six-and-a-half years ago. i am doing better. i /am/.

so why does it all feel so wrong?

i always heard that recovery is a struggle, a battle, an active effort you have to make day after day no matter how tempting it is to fall back into the comfort of sickness. i haven’t had that. during september, i realized i would feel worse if i binged and purged while i had a migraine, so i told myself “okay, i’ll wait, i can do it later when i feel better.” later came, and i had no desire to resume my behaviors. it just happened - no war fought and won, merely a slow subsidence until one day i realized it was gone.

purging went similarly. i would still vomit on occasion after the binging ebbed away whenever i felt uncomfortably full or dealt with acid reflux, but that stopped around the time i met my partner. i can’t recall the exact date, so that’s the marker i use. i just stopped thinking about it. occasionally the thought arises now, but usually as a ‘what-if?’ instead of the all-consuming compulsion it used to be. there was no work, no fight. it simply evaporated.

despite all this ‘progress’ (if you could call it that), i remain at my lowest weight. in fact, i even lost a couple pounds at the start of the month - perhaps i’ve rebounded since then, though last week i was still at the exact same number. i don’t know how to feel about it. there is comfort in being light, but i don’t get the euphoria i used to. now all i feel is exhaustion.

it doesn’t make sense to me. i’m consistently eating more than i have in the better part of a decade; perhaps not ‘enough’ strictly, but still more. weight loss used to be such a struggle, every ounce something i had to claw from my body until it relinquished, and maintenance necessitated constant paranoia lest i start slipping. now i just have it despite no longer aiming for emaciation. there’s a sort of irony in my situation.

i’m told to celebrate my victories no matter how small but my nurse also suggested ensure, so i don’t think i’m as successful as i’m made out to be. we’ll figure it out. i’d like to be a little less bony for cuddling purposes at least, my collarbone juts out prominently and while they haven’t said anything, i believe it’s fair to conclude that’s unideal when someone lays their head on my shoulder.

speaking of them, we’re still going strong. it’s only been three weeks. i can’t finish that sentence that’s just how it feels. we’ve moved fast, some ways i’m enjoying and others not so much, though i think momentary discomfort is a part of human interaction. we’re both learning how to communicate with each other - as partners, people, all of it - and while that process may be messy, that isn’t a bad thing. tl;dr: trying to beat my doomerism and practice distress tolerance

the latter half of last week was... a lot. the most basic summary: on wednesday, i went over to their house, one thing led to another and they went down on me. thursday, i had an ocd-fueled breakdown over the moral implications of finding them attractive which they blamed themself for (it was not their fault in any way shape or form) - the first rocky moment in our relationship, though we talked it out in the end. friday, they informed me they’d bought condoms. saturday, i slept over. i’m sure you can put two and two together.

the escalation was too rapid, something we’ve both realized in retrospect. i was nervous going in but tried to tell myself it’d all be fine; i’m still learning that i should trust my instincts more often. the night itself was fun, just messy. we were both incredibly nervous and also decided to get high - i’d never smoked before, but i wanted to try. mayhaps i shouldn’t have overlapped those firsts.

they did nothing to make me uncomfortable, i was entirely worried about my own performance. i’ve never been penetrated, so i wasn’t sure what it’d look like, and in the end it didn’t happen. being on T for six years and nervous in the moment must’ve made me clam up. we tried for a while but couldn’t manage more than the tip which always slipped out shortly after.

i felt absolutely horrible, especially when i tried to go down on them and was unable to do so for more than a couple minutes before my gag reflex made it impossible. i was genuinely worried i might throw up on their dick, and if that had happened i think i’d die of shame on the spot. miraculously, i did not, and they reached orgasm in the end, but the unease remained. i’ve fantasized about sex for so long and now my stupid useless body can’t even do it right when presented with the perfect person. ugh.

they cried after. they said they didn’t know why but were quick to reassure me it wasn’t my fault. honestly, it didn’t matter to me if it was; i would’ve held them regardless. i can speculate as to why, but ultimately that feels inappropriate to share, so i’ll say that i have good reason to think they put an undue amount of pressure on themself and after the fact it all just broke. how humans work, really.

we’re taking things slower now. i was afraid to bring it up, worried they’d misinterpret it as a personal rejection, but then they said they were overwhelmed too. they were following my pace apparently, though i also felt like i was following theirs, so what were we even following? an imaginary standard, i guess. the mythical idea of how it ‘should’ be. that fairytale of correctness haunts me in many regards.

i’m still processing this, hence all my rambling. my therapist is on vacation this week and the next, so i don’t have that crutch for once. i dunno. it wasn’t the perfect erotic fantasy i had, but i think that’s better because this time it was real. messy, awkward, full of mistakes, yet real. the smell of their skin as we laid together after, sweat-damp and shirtless, was well-worth every moment leading up.

in some ways i feel like i’ve changed a lot and in others i feel entirely static, the eternal dilemma of being too much or not enough. i’m no longer actively disordered, but i’m not recovered. i’m making progress in relationships, yet i’m not quite the boyfriend i want to be. i’ve been thinking about a piece of my own writing lately, over three years old now yet still felt deeply:

“Above all else, I want someone to look at me and say ‘This is okay. This is acceptable.’ Because I am so fucking tired of being both a handful and empty air. I want someone to scoop me up with their hands and I want to fit perfectly no gaps unfilled and no flesh spilling through their fingers but in the end I don’t even want to be perfect I just want to be enough.”

i don’t have much else to say. i believe PMS brainfog is setting in. once again, fuck my stupid baka life

~april