The Metaphor Of Two Homes

If you are working to recover from an eating disorder or make peace with food and their body, this is for you.

For you, critical thoughts, mistrust of hunger/fullness cues, disgust of your body’s appearance and inner feelings, and a constant sense of shame feels like home. All roads lead back to this suffering spot and a “truth” of hopeless captivity.

You didn’t lay the foundation of this so-called home. You didn’t construct the framework. You didn’t lay the first, second, or one thousandth brick. But a part of you is reinforcing this structure (along with our culture of “power and safety in thinness and beauty”). You can find your way around this place with your eyes closed and both hands bound behind your back. You know the walls, the scent, the creeks in the floorboards because you have lived there for so long. 

The one thing you cannot seem to find is a way out. 

However, maybe you glimpse another place through a crack in your home by way of a song, a poem, the story of a friend, a dream, a bite of delicious food, the scent of fresh air, the feeling of unexplained homesickness. 

You may see a door out. You may have even stepped outside for a bit, but run back or are pulled back into your known place; this only home you’ve ever had. 

Could it be that you confuse familiarity with safety? You’ve learned to tolerate discomfort because it has been so prominent?

Then, one day, you meet someone who can help. A “safe other” who gladly accepts the role of co-creator, co-conspirator, and collaborator (and, oh, you labor sometimes) in building a new home. 

Brick by brick.

First, daydreaming of possibilities. Then the slow, steady work of construction (sometimes it feels like the taping-off phase of painting, sometimes the fun and quick roller-brush part). As this new home takes shape, you and this “other” stand back and admire progress. You may do a walk through of the not-yet-close-to-finished product, grasping the frame and shaking it to test its integrity. Eventually, you do step a toe in and to eventually stay for a while. 

At the beginning of this work, you return often to your first, not-great home. You need to go somewhere! That’s okay. Sometimes, you can’t remember where the plans went. Frustratingly, what made sense last week may make zero sense today. A first, it may be really hard to even find the path towards the new construction site.

Building a new home takes time. It takes work. It requires assistance from others who have done it before. Master builders, new-home owners, self-taught craftsmen, and so on.

Please know this: there is no need to destroying the old home. Allow it to part of the landscape as long as it needs to be. And, just like anything in nature, the less this old home is cared for and reinforced, the more of a chance weather and time can do their work to return it back to the soil; Dissolving it out of sight, quite miraculously, (I can’t even believe it because it blows my whole mind), even adding a richness that supports more beauty, growth and vitality of your new home.