How (eating disorder) recovery helps me be a better writer

It has a lot to do with being able to hang out in my own brain

You are reading Letters from Hannah. If you like it and want more in your inbox, please subscribe.

This month marks 13 years since I stepped into my first 12-step meeting. In 2011, I had just left a job and an ex-boyfriend in Philadelphia and moved into a studio on W 95th Street, in the city that I loved (and still love, <3 you forever NYC!). I had a new job working at Fairway Market as a cheesemonger slash copywriter. On three out of four corners were fro-yo shops. Remember when there were fro-yo shops everywhere? I was about to turn 24. Next week, I’ll turn 37.

I had spent my whole life, really, on a rollercoaster of dieting/binging/vowing to diet harder/counting Weight Watchers points and crying because I ate my entire daily allotment in the form of a disappointing Cobb salad and I was still hungry/hating my body/wondering how long I could possibly go swish-swish on an elliptical machine before losing my mind/dieting/binging/self-loathing/rinse and repeat a million times.

What a miserable way to live. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.

I am lucky that I found recovery so young, but I still mourn so much of my youth wasted like that.

I was about to write “nothing changed when I walked into my first meeting;” meaning that recovery is a slow process, it takes time, it takes often an excruciatingly, ridiculously long time. Here I am, 13 years later, still working through my shit.

But something did change right away. I heard the darkest, most painful words that I said only to myself, deep in the caverns of my brain, spoken out loud. Spoken out loud in a room full of strangers on a rainy day in the back of a wellness center above a bodega near Union Square. People shared about what they did with food at night, with the curtains drawn, and what they did to hide it, and the cruel names they called themselves, and the raw force of feeling lonely, isolated, angry, paralyzed, lost. They said all the biggest things like they were totally normal things to say to a room full of strangers.

Lightning didn’t strike from above. In fact, people nodded, and smiled, and laughed. They exchanged hugs. My mind exploded. I sat there on my subway ride home, my eyes wet with tears, processing, my heart beating fast, still. I nearly missed my stop. I didn’t really understand what I was getting into, but I went back the next day.

I am claiming here that recovery helped me be a better writer - I’ve been a writer for forever - and it did that first and foremost by saving my life. It sounds hyperbolic but it’s entirely true. Recovery brought me out of my eating disorder stupor and taught me how to be a perfectly imperfect person in the world. To put one foot in front of the other even when my thoughts are a minefield of insults. To call a friend. To take a pause.

It keeps saving me, every day.

It also helps me return to the work of putting words on a page.

Here are some of the ways:

• Recovery helps me check my ego! Most things are better when I get out of my own way. While I’m working on a writing project, I can ping between thinking it’s the most brilliant, gorgeous thing ever conceived to complete and utter conviction that it’s a stinking mountain of poop in about two seconds. (In my disease, it would be my body image thoughts, or thoughts of my worth as a human, that swung like a wild pendulum). Recovery has taught me to put the whole debate on a shelf, or try anyway. I am a lousy critic of my own work, or my own worth…but that’s ok, that’s not my job. My job is to show up, write the words, live my life, try my best, be of service, and keep taking care of myself and my recovery so I can show up for to fight another day.

• Recovery helps me sit with myself, even when it’s uncomfortable. Oftentimes the Big Book’s 9th step promises are read at the end of meetings, which are great, but my personal favorite are the 5th step promises, one of which is: “We can be alone at perfect peace and ease.” I cannot always be alone at perfect peace and ease (yet), especially when I’m up at night with a crying kid and my anxious thoughts get unbearably loud. But I am getting slowly better at this practice, slowly more comfy and at home in myself. This is a big one for writing, as I often think the best stories are about staying with the tricky stuff, not simply escaping. Writing involves hanging out in my brain, and recovery is rewiring my brain in the best way, a way to be an ok place to hang out.

• Recovery reminds me that there are bigger things than me. Some people get tripped up on the God/higher power aspect of recovery - but I love that it’s incredibly, beautifully open - that there’s no mandate to be a believer, just to be a seeker. I have always been a seeker and I plan to keep searching. Sometimes my higher power has been my community, the beauty of a brownstowned block on the Upper West Side, the kindness of a friend, the sun rise every morning, really whatever, as long as it’s not me. It’s an enormous weight off my shoulders, not being in charge of everything! That gives me the freedom, levity, and space to write.

• Recovery helps me practice asking for help. It’s so hard, in our pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps (a task that is literally impossible!!) culture. Recovery is not a solo endeavor. I have an amazing sponsor who I have called (almost) every single morning for going on seven years. I have sponsees who call me. I know who to call when I feel overwhelmed, or stuck, or heartbroken. I have learned that being vulnerable is truly powerful. When I help others, that lifts me up. So when I call on others for help, I’m giving them an opportunity. Also, this is still hard. I’m still woking on this. I’m still working on all of this. One day at a time.

Your friend in writing and recovery <3

xo,

Hannah

PS I’d really love to get to 500 followers! I’m close! Will you share this newsletter with a friend? I write about motherhood, cheese, books, recovery, making a career as a writer, traveling with little kids, and other dispatches from my little, beautiful life in rural New Jersey.

PPS Hannah Selinger and I are BACK with our classes. Next up is a book proposal class! On October 21, come learn everything you need to know to land a book deal via a sharp, successful book proposal. Early bird discounted tix are on sale now.

PPPS Come eat and chat cheese with me at the beautiful Wheat & Vine in Doylestown, PA. I’m teaching a cheese tasting on October 10. Grab your tickets here!

PPPPS Speaking of PA, the swing state right down the street from me, please give money to Kamala like your life depends on it, because it does.