In my post at the beginning of NEDA Week, I made a pretty weighted claim: I made it.

What does that even mean though? I made it. It’s a pretty open statement that could look a lot of ways, and it does. Every individual is different, and everyone’s end point is different as well. I still waver back and forth some about recovery being a constant, ongoing, intentional thing or recovered being a state you reach and plateau at, but for the purposes of that post, I made it was the easiest way to put it. That’s not to say I don’t fully believe that and feel that I’m living it because I do; I simply want to dissect it a little more.

There sadly will be some who never reach this point. There will be those who do have to constantly work to maintain the level of normalcy that they’ve reached. I don’t doubt or deny that that is sometimes the case.

I personally hold to the belief that a full recovery is possible, and I hold to the belief that the best shot at getting there is discovering or rediscovering our freedom in Christ. He broke the chains for us. We just have to choose to leave them behind.

In my life, I made it looks like starting my day off with a nutrient packed breakfast. It looks like a donut in class. It looks like leftovers, or whipping up some good ole’ mac and cheese for lunch. It looks like family dinners at the table. It looks like following my body’s cues and cravings and not giving a second thought to what food passes my lips. It looks like Pilates five days a week, or just doing some yoga one day and lifting another. It looks like spontaneous cupcakes and planned Starbucks dates. It looks different every day, and that is precisely the beauty about it. Life is flexible. Life is free.

That is what normal, healthy life looks like.

Being able to live it is making it.

This is not to disregard that there will be times when an old thought pattern will arise. The thing about these times in a place of what we’ll call full recovery is that it is nothing more than that: a thought. And even the thought is fleeting, and instead of it being some huge thing that spirals out of control or has a significant impact, it is much more like a thought any other human being would have. The thing about not liking your body one day is that there will inevitably be a day in every person’s life on which they don’t like their body. That’s just normal. That’s not spending hours picking yourself apart in front of a mirror with a brain that does not even see the proper image.

When I say I made it, I mean that my life is much more normal and grounded instead of at the amped up extreme it once was. I mean that I made it to happiness, spontaneity, flexibility, frivolity, freedom.