Vegas

Heading off to the grand old city of Las Vegas in a few days, for a business trip that we go on every year, the largest jewellery conference in the world. In fact, I’m writing this in advance, so by the time you read this I will be half way through my trip. Trying to decide what to write about was difficult. I wanted to follow up with something positive, something that showed my progress, or at the very least my enthusiasm for my recovery endeavour.

But I couldn’t help but stop and think this morning. Because this is a yearly trip, I take this time and compare my current life to what it was like in the past, how I was doing eating disorder wise the year before. We usually stay at the same place, eat at some of the places, see the same people. This year, though, the show has moved and so we are staying in a brand new resort, eating in new restaurants. I do not know why, but this terrifies me.

I thought I had reached the point where change like that wasn’t such a huge deal, that no matter what I would know that I can always take a deep breath, and find something on a menu. But now I am starting to get worried, wondering how I’m going to manage to eat meals, how I will communicate to the others in my group when I need to eat and how to resist eating disorder behaviours.

I’m confused as to what this means. The past few months have been interesting for me, I feel like I have been eating better. Yet this year I am terrified for the Vegas trip, while last year I was excited and I wasn’t worried about how I would eat enough. I’m seeing this as a sign that I’m less well than I thought, that I have lost some of the progress that I have made.

This is leaving me feeling bewildered, anxious and very off-track. I know that the true challenge this trip will now be to eat the proper amount knowing that I’m very conscious about it. This is a new feeling to me. Not the anxiety, no, I know that quite well. But this uneasiness, of not knowing where I stand and where I’m going, that is unsettling. How do others deal with that?