Ambition: an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame or wealth, and the willingness to strive for it's attainment.
It's no secret that I'm an ambitious person. I've always been striving toward some insane, seemingly unattainable goal: becoming a professional ballerina, going to medical school and becoming a pediatric neurosurgeon, training to run a half marathon, having the "perfect" body. I guess until just recently I have never realized that all of this ambition comes with a great price. It's really no secret that I've been doing pretty pitiful with this whole recovery thing as of late. My weight has been slipping, I've been acting out a lot, and I haven't really been taking very good care of myself. Last week my nutritionist and I were talking about why I wasn't doing so well, and the only thing I could come up with is "I'm just so stressed. School just stresses me out." So, she and I decided that I should come up with boundaries for my school work - and so I set up daily "office hours", for lack of a better description, for myself. But when I started thinking about limiting my study time to just those minimal hours a week I started to panic. It wasn't enough, I wasn't going to be able to study as much as I felt like I needed to, I was going to fail. But 40+ hours a week to study is more than ample for an undergraduate. Why is it not so for me? And why do I feel like if I can't get that much in that I'm going to fail, that I'm going to end up a failure - a homeless person, working at McDonalds? That's totally irrational.
So, then there was more thinking. I realized that school is not the only thing that I feel this way about. I feel this way about EVERYTHING. I always feel as if I should get things perfect, especially the first time, or else I'm a failure. I'm a disappointment. I'm a fuck up.
The problem with this line of thinking is that I'm always striving for extremely difficult things to attain, and I expect myself to be able to do things perfectly, but most of the time that just isn't possible. So I fail. And therefore, I'm a disappointment, I'm a fuck up.
Ambivalence: the coexistence within an individual of positive and negative feelings toward the same person, object, or action, simultaneously drawing him or her in opposite directions.
Recently I've been feeling quite ambivalent towards recovery. I want to be healthy, but I don't want to be uncomfortable. I want to be happy, but I don't want to work for that happiness. I would rather just stay with the familiar. It's easy to forget that when you are in your eating disorder, you are still always a failure. You can't lose enough wait, you can't fast for long enough, you can't exercise enough, you eat too much, you're too fat...I could go on. But at least when I'm in my eating disorder I'm thin, right? And then I'm not a disappointment, right? Rationally, no, that's totally wrong. But I've convinced myself of this. I've convinced myself that because I'm always going to be a disappointment to everyone else, a failure in everything else, that I should at least just go back to my eating disorder because at least then I'm not a complete failure.
So these days, I guess I'm just praying for balance - to even out all this hasty ambition I've got, and for direction - to mitigate this nasty ambivalence.
