Metabolizing Love: What Grief Has Taught Me About Recovery

I’m sitting at a new desk, in a new chair, looking out at a new view. I’ve just moved homes after closing a significant chapter in my life, and things feels tender, liminal, becoming.

New roots are still finding strength. Branches reach out unsure, yet bravely, into this unfamiliar terrain. My inner trunk steadies as I slowly make sense of what has ended and what is beginning.

Becoming My Own Inner Tree

In this transition, I am learning that no one can be the roots for me. No one can reach out and make choices that are ultimately mine alone to make. No one can act as my center.

I am being asked to become my own inner tree from the inside-out. I am learning how to show up for myself.

This wasn’t always the case. Just before moving, I reread a diary I kept during my time as an in-patient at an eating disorder clinic, sixteen years ago.

I had just finished high school, and on 2 December 2009 I scrawled: “in a depressing, badly decorated place to eat a lot of food.” Back then, I could only frame my experience through anger and rejection.

Grieving My Younger Self

The only thing I knew how to show up for was the eating disorder itself. I clung to restriction, obsessed with the size of my stomach, and grasped onto exercise to punish, soothe, and escape.

Reading those pages, I felt deep grief for my younger self who was always trying to crawl out of her own skin. Every emotion was masked as “feeling fat.” Her world shrank with each repetitive thought of “just one less kilo”, the world spinning out of control by the slightest bloat.

As I read between the lines, I could see how she was afraid of existing as herself. She wanted to be so small, so perfect, her belief of “I’ll never ever be enough” driving her out of sight.

Her obsession with muscles was her attempt at building armor, a shield from an overwhelming world she feared would crush her if she exposed her authenticity.

At the core, she feared the very vulnerability that makes connection possible — and so she remained hungry for it.

Learning to Love Without Restriction

If I could name the essence of my recovery, it has been this: learning to love without restriction.

Sixteen years later, another ending calls me back to that same lesson. As I navigate letting go, I notice the part of me that wants to go small rise again.

Rather than pathologizing it, as it had been when I was an inpatient, I welcome it in. I no longer see the ED part of me as something bad, but rather as a protector carrying wisdom.

Perhaps you’ve had moments too, when heartbreak, grief, or change stirred old patterns of wanting to control, hide, or “tighten up.” In my work, I see this often — how old survival strategies surface during times of groundlessness, not to harm us, but to remind us of the importance of moving toward safety and presence during turbulent transitions.

I’ve come to believe that even the chaos of an eating disorder is attempting to point us toward greater order and alignment.

Recovery in Real Time

As I usher this scared part that wants me to go small and give it space to be heard, I hear it whispering something deeper than the fear of “feeling fat.”

She says: “I’m scared. I don’t know if I know how to love. If I open my heart, I might get crushed — or even crush another. What if I end up alone forever? I fear I might get to the end of my life having restricted myself from experiencing love.”

I feel tears as I write this. The belief beneath these fears is simple. It’s not “I’m too fat”, it’s “I am not lovable.”

That belief shapeshifted itself into maladaptive food behaviours and body image obsessions, distracting me from seeing what was truly beneath the surface.

Beyond Food: What Eating Disorders Teach Us

Digging deeper into the words that I wrote in my diary as an 18-year-old, I was once again reminded of how eating disorders stem so much further beyond the food.

Maybe you've seen this in your life too. The belief of “I’m not loveable” may have made you shrink (physically and/or emotionally) until there was no room for love to land. It may have led you into relationships where you could not show up fully, or where the other could not show up for you. It may have driven you to keep busy, always moving, never yielding close to anything.

Each time I meet this part of me that wants to shrink out of fear, I notice I can stay a little longer with it. I meet it with softness and compassion. This is recovery in real-time.

Grief and Love: Dancing Sisters

And here I am, invited closer to the love within myself. To know its textures: from the pummeling of grief to the soaring of bliss. What a gift this moment is — an opportunity, a lesson, a rewriting of how I meet endings, transitions, and beginnings.

For how we grieve is how we love. Indeed, grief and love are dancing sisters, two sides of the same coin.

My recovery has always been about one thing: learning to metabolize love (and therefore grief). To drink it in. To taste every part of it, even the pain. To lick my lips knowing that I exist — a human, in a body, able and willing to feel it all.

Thank you for being part of this journey. I write this with the knowing that my healing is your healing, your healing is my healing, and our healing is inseparable.

If this resonated with you, I would love to hear how it moved you.