Swings, Mirrors and Perspective

Moods are a strange thing, and the weekend brought a lot of things to consider about how I react to situations.  Husband arrived home on Friday, and as always it was a rush of joy to be back together - it doesn't matter whether it's one day, five days or three weeks, I always feel like there's a hole in my very being when he's away. I've tried to get used to it, but it never gets any easier.  I'll be rocketed from the depth of despair that is the state of most evenings I spend alone, to absolute happiness when he's home.  While I've never got used to the situation, I am at least prepared for these moods - however real they are at the time, I can rationalise them to a point.

Not so with the mirror effect.  I wonder if this a feature of mental illness, of uncertainty about ones own judgement or perception - when people close to me feel something deeply, I tend to reflect this mood without any real reason for it in my own life.  I've always been described as 'sensitive', even empathetic as I got older, and without doubt I consider this generally one of my better features, however there are times when I find that it's detrimental to my own health.  Certainly, picking up on how someone feels helps me to understand them, but when being with someone affects my own mood so deeply, it can lead me to consider staying away...  Where does one draw the line?  How much can I help someone unwittingly pulls me down with them?  The answer, sadly, is not an awful lot.

Such was the case on Sunday.  There is a tremendous amount of guilt for removing myself from situations where someone might need some support, but at the moment it has to be me first.  Selfish as it may be.
I found perspective in running, as I often do.

I consider myself extremely lucky, that despite it being a feature of my Eating Disorder, I have been able to reclaim exercise as something that really does give me perspective.  When I run, I know exactly where my body goes to, I feel it as a real, powerful acceptable being, and I am ok with how it behaves for me and how it looks.  I am not and never have been tiny - I have, as they say of a good cart-horse, 'nine-inches of bone', and as such I start to look pretty rubbish around a BMI of 20.  Even at my worst point of being ill I was a 'normal' weight, I never managed to gain the coveted underweight label.  The point being that this doesn't matter to me when I run - I am content with being my physical self, appreciating its strength, and enjoying the speed I can achieve solely with my own power - I feel free.

Not only does it give me physical perspective, but it distances me from the unhappy child/teenager I was.  As a child, I was overweight, unfit and very unhappy, and now I am healthy, capable and have ways to bring myself back to my adult self.  I ran a half marathon a couple of months into my recovery, and never believed I'd be able to do it.  Crossing the finishing line was possibly the greatest achievement of my life - not my degree, not any of my academic or professional successes compare - this was something I did for me, by myself, and is so far from anything I thought I'd be able to do.  This doesn't sound like perspective I'm sure, but it is. I recognised for probably the first time that I could do something that wasn't expected of me... and that makes me free to be me, not just the person that does what is helpful to others.

Perspective comes of putting myself first for a change, learning to recognise the outside influences that hurt me, and take myself away from them somehow.