A picture speaks a thousand words...

..but it doesn't tell you what's going on behind the eyes

and those words could very well be lies.

So before you see what you think you see,

Close your eyes and listen to me. 

I did promise myself I would stop looking back, stop being overly reminiscent, dragging up the past. I promise, I'm slowly learning there is no need. There is only a need to look (and move) forward in recovery. 

However, when talking about 'goal weights' and goals in general I needed to take a look back and think about times when I have perhaps been 'happier' with my body, my weight, myself. Cue plugging in my external hard drive and opening up a folder in Pictures labelled - Ana & Me. 

It's not a folder I wanted to open this early in my recovery, it's full of weight loss pictures, thinspro, pictures of food (lack of food) and my old journals. It could have been a trigger, it could have pushed me back to her life, rules and made me go backwards. 

The reason to this crazy behaviour was something Mrs W and I spoke about last week. How would I feel about setting my old UGW as my target for restoration now? Would it feel different now I am not on a one-track mission to create 'Anorexia's perfect body' would it be the ultimate kick in the bitches teeth to make that my first recovery goal? (Yes, I still need to restore to G1)

Well, I opened up the folder 'UGW Reached' and you know what my first reaction was? Oh, I look really fat. FAT, yes, FAT. I looked straight at my stomach, my thighs, my sides. (N.B my weight plummeted past my original UGW earlier in the summer) No, that weight wouldn't make me happy. I hate that picture. I hate all these pictures. Every picture documenting my fight with AN, every new bone showing, every pound lost, every half pound loss. A set of pictures illustrating my spiralling mental health, the shut down of my life and my pain. But I can't stop looking and looking and looking.

I had to snap out of it, close the folder and rethink this idea... 

The next thing I did was look at old pictures, of happy times, from uni, from London, pictures of times when my mind told me I was fat, but I was happy enough in other areas of my life to tell Ana to zip it and leave me alone. Cue another set of emotions... 

On the outside I look happy, I am smiling, I am with friends, I am even eating cake and sweets and chips in some, but this is what I mean. These pictures hurt EVEN more than the 'Ana and Me' ones, because I don't look back and think of the fun, I look back and see FAT. I see the pain behind my eyes, I see my imperfections and I see all the things I used as ammunition to allow my fall to Ana. 

I saw one photo this morning and had to burn it. It was horrific and the abuse my ED launched at my when I saw it hurt. Instead of seeing me at my nieces 2nd birthday, I saw fat, I saw hippo, I wondered why noone told me to lose weight, I wondered how the guy I was seeing at the time EVER found me attractive. I hated it. So I burned it. 

So, there isn't get a conclusion to this, I don't know how I feel or how much a photograph really proves about happiness, I think it might even say less than the scales, in my eyes at least.

I just need to stop looking back at photo's and memories at the moment. Maybe I'll open up (and burn) more when the time feels right.