Why I’m Choosing Liberation Over Recovery to Describe My Experience of Healing From My Eating Disorder

Recovery advocates and treatment centers set folks up to fail. Treating folks with the expectation of a one-size-fits-all view of “recovery” is largely not working for folks who are suffering.

“Recovery” as made popular by many advocates and treatment centers often features a young, white female in a conventionally attractive, straight-sized body happily eating a pink donut. Some folks make space for variations of that image, but this ideal “recovered person” assumes that all folks have the same struggles. The ideal “recovered person” also does not experience the same degree of oppression as folks in marginalized bodies. Oppression makes it exponentially harder and even impossible to achieve this ideal.

Working towards an impossible ideal which has been pressed upon folks who are suffering (often through coercive and relationally carceral tactics) merely trades one cage for another.

We’ve got to do something different.

Even in a privileged body, “recovery” isn’t attainable to me. As a disabled and neurodivergent human, I will never be “fully recovered” from ARFID because it isn’t realistic or accessible to be. And, I’ve come to a place of greater liberation. I’m no longer medically compromised. I’m learning to accept and work with my ARFID instead of constantly trying to fight against it at the expense of my mental health. I’ve been able to let go of some other manifestations of the eating disorder and have found so much freedom there. Leaning into liberation allows me to look outside the sick/recovered binary to find a life that works for me.

As Alice Wong put it, “abolition means that all the cages come down, including those that function under the guise of psychiatric ‘care.’”

So let’s tear down a limiting and carceral conceptualization of healing, of “recovery,” and lean into an individual and collective liberation. It’s about damn time.