u/pessimistic_witch

Some context for this post:

I’ve been struggling with an ed for around 7 years now and the first 5 years I was constantly in and out of treatment and hospitalized. In 2023 I discharged from the hospital on a harm reduction plan and have been maintaining since.

Up until my last hospitalization in 2023, I had loads of friends and people who supported and cared about me wholeheartedly. Ever since my last hospitalization I’ve had more and more friends leave me with almost no explanation as to why and now I have zero friends and when I do make new ones or go on dates they rarely last long. While I am not recovered, I am a much more lively person with loads of interests and qualities outside of my ed compared to before. My whole personality used to revolve around it and it was the only thing I would talk about. Now that I’m not severely uw, all of my behaviors are in private, and I barely talk about it unless the topic comes up, nobody cares about me or wants to be friends with me anymore. Now if none of my qualities had changed and the only difference was that I was not actively restricting then the reasonable explanation would be that people got tired of my ed, but this is not the case and I don’t understand why everyone leaves me. I thought that not revolving your life around your ed was supposed to make things better, not worse. It just puts me off to ever fully committing to recovery and makes me more inclined to not follow my harm reduction plan anymore as people obviously like me better when I’m sick. Idk if anyone could give me some insight or relate to this.