manifesting my dream life through pinterest
maladaptive daydream potentially transmuted into something more?
trigger warnings: eating disorder mentions, body dysmorphia, related topics
Hello my sweet, sweet friends… and my sweet, sweet enemies(?). I’ve had this silly little newsletter since quarantine times, but never had the nerve to post anything. I used to be so worried about “how good” and “how interesting” my thoughts and ideas were, but now I believe those things don’t matter.
Anyway, lately I’ve been trying to turn my horribly unproductive maladaptive daydreaming into something else, anything else. While scrolling through Pinterest one day, I came across someone manifesting their dream life via an extremely organized board. This seemed like a great idea to me- I love Pinterest, but I spend too much time on it dreaming of a life that I could live. It never truly occurred to me that I could do something, that I could transmute that desire into something tangible, and that it was not very hard to do. Because of this, I decided to compile everything that I wanted and everything that I loved into a similar board with seeeveraaal subcategories, and thought about what I could do to bring what was in my head into the real world.
I started with my living space, which isn’t finished being decorated yet. I’ll most likely do some kind of ““room tour”” when I’m finally satisfied. I thrifted several textiles, vintage wall decor, shelves, wall hangings, CDs, whatever so I can make my little hovel a bit more hospitable. I then moved on to my closet, where I’m currently gathering up all my clothes that I no longer wear and no longer fit so I can donate them all to Value Village. Next I decided to work on ~the self~, where the steps one could take are a bit less concrete. Personally, I struggle with body dysmorphia among other things, and feel like it’s, quite frankly, ruining my life. Of course something such as this takes lifetimes upon lifetimes to recover, where a good part of that recovery is done in the presence of affirming others, but I’m determined to at least do my part. Getting rid of clothes that I felt “ugly” in was one part of it, but all the other parts so far involve journaling, doing movements that feel good, and eating well-rounded meals instead of punishing myself for feeling hunger. Body dysmorphia is an ever-shifting beast and targets borne from it are constantly moving, which is why the journaling helps. It helps ground me. It helps keep my thoughts in order. It helps me think about where my motivations lie and if those motivations are helpful, positive ones.
“Everything I look at, a war, & all day long I'm looking at me [...]” — Jeremy Radin, from “Eating Disorder Recovery Center of Los Angeles”
A primary thing that persists with the idea of my “dream life” is a “dream body”. A dream body to take walks in, to sleep in, to do what I need to do in, to simply exist in. It took a while, but now I know that this “dream body” doesn’t exist. The targets constantly shift. The first weight is never good enough. Neither is the second. Nor the third. It’s hard to break out of this mindset completely, to break this cycle of samsara, but if you never leave you’re trapped forever. The only way out is recovery.
Of course, the road to recovery is an eternally rocky one, especially since we live in a culture that is deeply fatphobic and unhappy with bodies and selves that do not look the way it wants. It doesn’t help that thinness is tied so strongly to health. We are taught to never be satisfied until we have shrunk, sometimes shrunk so completely that we cease to exist. It’s frustrating, and for me, the fact that this idea of “shrinking” is so correlated to living a “dream life” in my silly disordered mind is, to be honest, disturbing.
“There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, a mirror that doesn't matter anymore.” — Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls
This may sound silly, but Pinterest has helped me a bit in visualizing a life where I’m happy, irregardless of the body I inhabit. Seeing individuals with bodies like mine go hiking, drink champagne, garden, look beautiful, and just be is slowly helping me reframe my prebuilt way of thinking, where “to be happy, you have to be thin”. It helps me see that this is not true, it never has been.
In closing, here are some podcasts that have helped me a lot in my active recovery: