From Feeling Trapped to Finding Freedom: What Kilimanjaro Taught Me About Recovery

Four years ago, I was trapped in my eating disorder and convinced that no matter what I did, it would never get better.

Every day looked the same. The same rules, the same exhaustion, the same voice in my head narrating everything: what I ate, when I exercised, who I avoided so I wouldn’t have to explain myself. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done anything without calculating it first.

This January, I stood at the summit of Kilimanjaro, watching the sun come up.

And I understood, clearly, in my body and not just in my head, how far I had come. I didn’t get there by accident. Everything that got me up that mountain, I had learned first at Imani Treatment Centre.

Before treatment, I was numb. I had disappeared into my illness so completely that I’d forgotten what it felt like to be a person with a personality, with opinions, with laughter that came easily. I could see the toll my eating disorder was taking on my family, and I knew I had to try to fight as hard as I could, even if I didn’t want to get better for myself.

My mum had written a list of reasons she wanted me to recover. Things she hoped I’d get to do or feel again one day

Right at the bottom of that list was: climb Kilimanjaro, with her.

At the time, it might as well have been another planet.

Finding myself again

Turning up at Imani was a surreal experience. I had flown across the world to South Africa and suddenly had to live in a house with people I’d never met. My immediate thought was: I need to go back home now. I was terrified of not having my eating disorder because it had been with me for so long. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to live without it. But once I met everyone properly, I realised we were all the same in the ways that mattered. The other clients and the RA’s became a family that could understand me in a way I had never experienced before.

Somewhere during my time in treatment, I started coming back to myself.

I remember noticing it almost like watching someone return from a long way off. I was laughing more. Making other people laugh. Feeling things again instead of simply enduring them. But coming back to myself meant feeling everything, not just the good parts. There was grief, anger and fear that I’d been avoiding for years by staying sick. There were days when I wanted to go back to feeling nothing because nothing seemed easier than this.

But I didn’t want the good parts to disappear either.

So I kept going.

I was becoming more Coco every day and less eating disorder.

The lessons that stayed with me

One of the things that has stayed with me most from Imani is something that also used to annoy me the most. We were always told that “fat is not a feeling.” I would argue against that all the time because it was the only thing I thought I felt like. The truth was that “feeling fat” had become the only word I knew for when I was sad, overwhelmed, tired or angry. I simply couldn’t recognise what was actually going on underneath it.

Now, when I find myself “feeling fat”, it is a signal to stop and ask what is really happening.

Do I need to rest? Is something bothering me? Am I overwhelmed? Do I need to talk to someone? Do I need to give my body more fuel because that’s what it needs? That understanding didn’t happen overnight. It has taken the past three and a half years to figure out, and I know I’ll continue figuring it out forever.

I think that’s beautiful.

If you’re in treatment right now and someone has just told you something that makes you want to argue back, hold onto it anyway. Write it down, even if you hate it.

The things that annoy you the most are sometimes the things that end up mattering most later.

Learning to live without control

Recovery didn’t just change how I related to food. It changed how I show up for the people I love and how I connect with people I have never met before.

It’s a typical thing to say that I’m more present now, but I really am.

Not just present in the sense of being around, but actually listening and hearing what someone is saying instead of being stuck inside my own head while they talk.

It’s taken a long time, but my family trusts me again. I can tell people how I’m feeling and ask how they’re feeling without disappearing and isolating myself the way I used to. And perhaps most importantly, I have discovered freedom. I genuinely didn’t think I’d ever feel spontaneous again. Even on a good day in recovery, I still wanted to control everything.

Now if someone offers me cake at work because they made it for me, and I say yes.

Plans change. A restaurant is full. And it’s just… fine.

None of that would have been true a few years ago.

The illness hasn’t disappeared completely. It’s still there.

But I am not trapped inside it anymore.

And that is what allowed me to say yes to something as big and unpredictable as climbing a mountain in another country, with no control over the weather, the altitude or even my own body’s limits.

The old version of me would never have signed up for something with that many unknowns.

Coming full circle

The opportunity to climb Kilimanjaro came through my job at the altitude centre. I hadn’t gone looking for the last thing on my mum’s list.

It just arrived.

What got me was the timing.

Almost to the day, three years after I first flew to South Africa for treatment, terrified and certain I’d never survive without my eating disorder, I was flying back to Africa again.

This time, to climb.

I’ve always said that the mountains in Cape Town were my higher power during treatment. On hard days, they were something I could look at when nothing else made sense.

So flying back to Africa, almost exactly three years later, to climb the last thing on a list I never wrote myself felt less like coincidence and more like fate catching up with me.

Standing on the summit, cold and breathless and completely present, I thought about the version of myself who first walked into Imani.

She wouldn’t have believed this was possible.

Not the mountain.

The life.

If I could go back to my first day of treatment and speak to the girl I was then, I would tell her:

Stay strong, and stop being so stubborn.

Stop fighting recovery so hard.

It is a million times better than being sick, and you have no idea yet how much is waiting for you on the other side of this.

To anyone reading this who is where I was: the click moment comes. The freedom comes.

And one day, you might find yourself standing somewhere you never thought you’d reach.

Maybe it will be on a mountain.

Maybe it will simply be in your own life again.

Completely.

Finally.

Yourself.