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neurodiversebones · 11 months

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I want to hear the ed + recovery thoughts. I want to hear them so badly. I have post notifications on for you and saw your post within a minute because of how much I love your thoughts.

should i be sleeping? yes i have to leave for work in exactly 8 hours (i said when i started this . as im finishing it we are looking at 7 hrs 15 min lol) . but i Have to Talk ! also just letting you know you almost made me CRY with this ask you guys are all genuinely so sweet and kind to me i cannot believe it 💗💐☀ i love you all :-((

OKAY gonna put this under a cut so anyone who doesn't wanna see ed related content can SCROLL AWAY ! gonna avoid being triggering but . protect ur peace and all that <3 also i wanna put out there that this is mostly based on my own experiences with seven years of various eating disorders so if you are reading this and it doesn't fit your idea or perception of ed's that may be why !

ok so the three main characters i have ed-related headcanons for are brennan, angela, and cam (before anyone comments that it's only the women . there is no correlation i promise . i am projecting and these are my Projection Characters .)

i hc brennan as having arfid and orthorexia-- arfid developed for her from a combination of sensory issues with food as well as food-related anxiety from foster care (not always having enough to eat, rarely having any choice in what she ate, food-related punishments within abusive homes). being avoidant is an easy way to ignore the anxiety and stress that comes along with eating, between her sensory issues and the fact that she wasn't given an opportunity to develop much of a healthy relationship with food. orthorexia also developed as a control mechanism, but later in life (around college age). it was the first time since her parents left that she had control over her life, and that included food-- she became very obsessive about what she was putting in her body, because it gave her some of that sense of control back. her obsession with being "healthy" allowed her to feel like she was the one in charge of her body for the first time since she was fifteen.

in regards to recovery, she really didn't realize she had a problem for ages. since she wasn't medically unstable or engaging in super obvious behaviours, she didn't see herself as suffering from an eating disorder at all. it wasn't until sweets pointed out her disordered eating habits that she realized there was anything wrong with what she was doing-- she brought it up to booth, who agreed, which culminated in a fairly major argument as she didn't see anything she was doing as "bad" or disordered, just "healthy" and "in control". after a Real Conversation though, she eventually accepted that she might have some sort of problem and started looking into it more. she is definitely still in recovery, as it is a very slow process after so many years of disordered eating, but she makes an effort to engage in things that scare the disordered part of her brain. her favourite memory in regards to this was getting *real* ice cream for the first time in god knows how long when her and angela were out with the kids <33

my headcanons in regard to angela's ed are very connected to my headcanon that she has bipolar disorder-- many of us with bipolar really struggle with disordered eating and i specifically hc angela as having bulimia. it started when she was a teenager and first starting to experience bipolar episodes-- when manic or depressed, it's incredibly easy to fall into b/p cycles. when she was manic, it was like a form of thrill seeking, and she didn't have the capacity to care for the destruction it was causing, and when depressed, it felt like she was putting her awful feelings into something physical. it was hard to express her emotions through words, so she used her body instead.

i think she entered recovery for the first time in her late teens (around 17) when her mental health hit like . rock bottom and her dad decided that they needed to do something about it. she got the treatment she needed, and also took time away from school to tour with her dad-- exploring the country and having so much time to just sit with her thoughts (especially now that they were a little easier to manage with medication) is what made her start doing art really seriously-- if she couldn't express her hurt with her body anymore, she was going to do it on a page, and she created some of her most beautiful paintings during that time that she is still very proud of to this day. she still has slip ups to this day when she is struggling with her episodes, but with hodgins and brennan she is much more capable of talking through it before it gets to a dangerous point of relapse.

as for cam's ed, i feel this is the one i've talked about the most before bc she is my comfort character in this aspect? i headcanon her to have anorexia, specifically restrictive subtype. for her it's a control and perfectionism thing, as well as a "growing up masking autism" thing. cam has a very perfectionist and obsessive personality type, and it's mostly directed toward herself. everything she does needs to be perfect to be enough, and she needs to feel in control at all times. food is one of the easiest ways to do this-- if she can control her body and the food she consumes, obsess over numbers and physical changes and symptoms, it makes her feel a little more at ease in her life because she feels she has *something* under her control. as for the masking thing, she often masked with hyperfemininity growing up-- she was praised frequently for being a "good girl", and part of keeping up that image was looking the "right" way (aka, thin). if she could keep up this image, people wouldn't notice the things that made her odd or how unnatural everything felt to her. it's another control thing, but with another layer to it.

cam took a *long* time to start real recovery. she had phases where it got less severe, even some to the point where she barely thought about it, but restriction and denial was always still a part of her mentality and routine. it wasn't until arastoo came along that she felt comfortable enough to explain her pain and her thoughts to another person-- she was always too scared to unload on anyone else, so she kept it a secret essentially her entire life. arastoo was the first person she trusted to listen without judgement, and he encouraged her to talk to her other friends and loved ones about it (all of whom were incredibly understanding and supportive). in a similar sense to brennan, recovery is really difficult for her, having struggled for so incredibly long and having her disorder be a part of her daily routine for the majority of her life. however, she tries incredibly hard-- arastoo is teaching her how to cook (she never learned) and she's learning to find the joy in food through that, and allowing herself to relax around it a little more <333

that is all !!!! wow this is so very long lol . i hope you enjoyed this it was cathartic for me

#local girl with anorexia projects onto their silly little scientists to feel better .#anyway i feel like it should be more normalized to talk about ed's the same way we talk about any other mental illness . this was cathartic #temperance brennan headcanons #angela montenegro headcanons #cam saroyan headcanons #tw ed #mental health headcanons

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