Morgan DiPrimo heard about an exercise on a podcast: write your story twice. First from the perspective of the victim. Then write the exact same story from the perspective of the victor — zooming out beyond what happened, focusing on how you responded, what you survived, what you learned, and who you became. She decided to emotionally excavate her entire life for fun.
The post is built around an old parable about two wolves fighting inside of us — one representing anger, fear, resentment, shame, and despair; the other representing hope, courage, compassion, love, and strength. The one that wins is the one you feed.
Morgan reflects on how much of an eating disorder can become tangled up in proving pain. Proving you are struggling. Proving you are sick. Proving that what happened to you mattered. She traces how many people learn early that simply saying “I’m hurting” does not always produce the response they need — and how, somewhere along the way, the thinking becomes: If I can show you how badly I feel, maybe you will finally believe me.
She also pushes back on the cultural hierarchy of suffering in eating disorder recovery — the way people are asked about their lowest weight, how many hospitalizations, how close they came to dying — as if a story only becomes legitimate once enough evidence of suffering has been presented. Your story does not become more important because the number on the scale was lower. Your illness does not become more legitimate because you were hospitalized more times.
The piece holds both versions of the story at once: the victim version and the victor version. Both of them are true.
Originally published on morgandiprimo.substack.com.
