Recovery is a long road. Sometimes there will be bumps and hills and the occasional spiral, but you learn to make yourself stronger each time you are set back.

Eating disorders come in many different shapes and sizes. Some people have it their entire life, some people limit themselves so much that their bodies starve, some people have binge eating disorder.

We didn’t speak about it at the time, about what it was like for Kate, or what it was like for her, going through this thing that we were both going through: Alex’s eating disorder.

When I was suffering from anorexia, I was striving for what I believed to be the perfect life.

I guess the truth is that I am only at the very beginning of my recovery, and whilst I am doing really well, it almost feels harder than ever.

I used to think that writing about my own story and struggles with an eating disorder was a bit self-absorbed or maybe even pretentious.

Five years ago, I left my studies at university, gripped by depression and anorexia. I was living a life of darkness, shame, misery, hopelessness, helplessness and grief over a long-term relationship that I couldn’t admit to myself was falling apart.

It is not your choice if you get an eating disorder, which is part of what makes them so cruel and unfair. However, you have the power to decide whether you will fight to recover from your illness to get your life back.

Throughout the years that I have suffered from an eating disorder, all the attempts that I have made at recovery, I would read other people’s stories and think, “what’s the point? It will never happen for me.”

Dear Ana,

I’m breaking up with you.

We’re done. We’re through.

2018 is going to be an amazing year. That’s what I thought back in January. I’d not long landed my dream job, I’d moved back to London and I had a list of destinations to which I intended to travel. I also had an official diagnosis of anorexia nervosa to my name

I soon learned that rushing recovery was one thing that was stopping me from recovering. I was trying to be not only perfect within anorexia but also to have a perfect recovery – both unreachable goals.

What I can tell you about my experience of the early stages of relapse I hope will be helpful to friends/family/colleagues and employers and people in recovery, to make helpful choices and not ones that mirror the eating disorder anxiety and control.

I have always thought of myself as a very logical, objective person. But looking at the person that anorexia has made me become, I couldn’t be any further from that.

The thing I would like to talk about is the support that I have received from my family and close friends. At times I have tried to hide everything from everyone, but I did a terrible job because the problem became clearly visible when my weight plummeted.

I suffered from an eating disorder from the age of 12 to 22 and throughout this time and in the years after, I experienced social isolation and loneliness in many forms.

An eating disorder is not about an extremely low Body Mass Index (BMI) or an emaciated figure, and even though this is how it ended up for me it makes me wonder, now I am on the road to recovery, if my road could have been different.

None of these things would have been possible had I given in to the voices which told me I was too fat (they still do), that I didn’t need that much food, that as a skeleton, I had achieved perfection.

Eight years of suffering from an eating disorder. Almost eight years spent in utter denial over the fact anything was wrong. Even in the darkest times spent as an inpatient in hospital never once did I use the “a word” because that was something other people struggled with.

It is incredibly difficult to say those three words within your own mind, let alone unleashing them aloud: I need help.