Hopewell Faces of Recovery: Camille Richard

The first picture was taken 2 summers ago and the right one, this summer. In both, I have been recovered. What do you see?

I see confidence, I see strength, I see vitality and growth. I see joy, I see hope.

I'm 21, a student at university of Ottawa in Social Work and Psychology. I am also a Mental Health & Self-Love Coach at Brave & Hopeful (IG is the same), and a mentor/ facilitator at Hopewell.  My passions includes writing, zumba, traveling, photography, food and animals.

I remember being 10 years old and being self-conscious about the size of my body. With time, it only got worse. In high school I was obsessed with "clean eating", I had orthorexia before it was even a thing. Trauma and my "need" to lose weight made it develop into anorexia.

Here is the part where I think I'm pretty lucky. I had a good support system and I had instant access to therapy. Maybe a year after it started I decided it wasn't a way to live ; sad, depressed, anxious, overwhelmed...everything was ruled by the food I ate, my weight, my shape etc. My eating disorder gave me a false sense of control in a period of my life where everything seemed out-of-control. It made me special.

But what's special about dying? What's special about being sick? What's special about having mood swings and no energy?

What helped me recover was to understand that the relationship with food and with life was a direct reflection of the relationship I had with myself. I had to dig deep down to realize I wasn't truly afraid of having fat, I was afraid of not being loved. And since forever, society had told us being thin would make you happy. What a crap of lies. I've been overweight and underweight, I wasn't happy in either. I became happy when I made peace with food, with myself. When I learned to love and appreciate the person I was and the body I had. I got rid of all the toxic people in my life and started respecting my boundaries ; no diet talks, no more comparison, no more negativity. I'm not talking about avoiding to feel the painful emotions, no that's still necessary if you want to heal. I'm talking about back-stabbing, rumors, complaining, name-calling and emotional abuse.

If you only keep the people that uplift you around, the more you will uplift yourself. And here's another thing, recovery is a full-time 365 days a year job. It's a daily choice you have to make. It gets so much more easier to make that choice after awhile because you start to know how good you can actually feel.

Nonetheless, don't ever take it for granted. It was your coping mechanism for a long time, it was useful to deal with the shit in the past, it became your instinct. When things gets stressful you're natural tendency is to go back to it. That's when you need to reach out. Make sure you're safe. Go to therapy more. Do more self-care...

To heal an eating disorder as effectively as I did, you can't just put band-aids over it. Getting rid of the physical symptoms isn't truly going to help you get rid of the mental ones. You need to find the root of it.  Take off the dead flowers and plant new ones darling, it's time. Give yourself a chance. It might be scary to abandon your old ED friend, it might feel like it will always be a part of you.
However, you deserve better. And I promise, the new pieces of you will be 100% more amazing.

-Camille Richard