Christmas wishes

This is my first Christmas living with my boyfriend. Last Christmas I was kind of unofficially invading his house, but I was also spending every waking minute living and breathing my PhD thesis so Christmas was reduced to a three day intermission in that process.... So this year it feels special. Christmas has always been really mixed for me. I'm religious and it has a great deal of spiritual significance, few things are more moving for me than midnight mass. I have also always loved the feeling of magic that surrounds Christmas, especially when there are children involved. But, it also brings up some very painful memories - some of which I can still barely tolerate thinking about - and brings up a huge amount of anxiety around some difficult and unresolved family dynamics. And then of course there is food.
I have been trying to embrace the excitement that the kid in me still feels over Christmas - making the house sparkle, gift-wrapping and bows, candles, the smell of mulled wine and Christmas baking. On Saturday, we got a tree, and I spent hours carefully choosing decorations and making it pretty, and just as I wanted (as a kid, our tree was always chaos - I wanted a colour scheme and symmetry, my sisters wanted EVERYTHING on it, they won...). I love our tree! It's pretty and it lends a touch of Christmas magic to the room. I have delighted in buying (too many) presents for my niece and nephew, carefully choosing this years gift-wrapping colour scheme, and picking out cards for each friend abroad that best matches their personality and taste. I have come up with plans for ice-skating and Christmas markets, bought mulled wine, and filled the living room with Christmas candles.
The thing is, I've also been avoiding and suppressing my terror over spending an entire week with our families. Or rather, I had been. Then I got blindsided by an unexpected surge of total panic on Saturday evening, was unable to sit or stay still, unable to tolerate the fear, I wanted to run away to the sea, to make everything stop somehow. I even tried buying cigarettes (on the plus side, this confirmed I have definitely lost all desire to smoke, a spectacular waste of money that went straight in the bin)!
When I'd eventually calmed a little, I tried to explain. I described my fear of being trapped, unable to leave the house all day. Just sitting, eating, talking, being evaluated. My boyfriend very gently suggested that this sounded like my anorexia was scared. I insisted that wasn't it... I still don't really know, but I think there is definitely a bit of both... Part of it has nothing to do with anorexia and everything to do with other stuff around reliving memories (to do with my family, not his) of feeling controlled and judged and forced to play the part of the person other people want to see. And part of it is the very anorexic fear of sitting around unable to walk off my anxiety whilst meal after meal, and snack after snack appears, and the inevitable comments about my appetite (from my boyfriends family) and avoidant chaos-making (from mine) increasingly make me feel a conspicuous failure.
This has been nagging at me ever since. My boyfriend deserves to sit around, relax, enjoy catching up with his family and sharing Christmas treats. He works really hard, and comes home everyday to his anxious girlfriend wobbling around attempting a DIY recovery whilst the NHS offers SFA in terms of guidance or support. That is tough. Really tough. Whatever Christmas means to me, to him it is all the things it should be, all the things I would wish it to be for my kids if I had any - togetherness, sharing love and joy, and giving gifts, having meals together, playing games, resting and relaxing. Coming together with those we love to celebrate, catch up, and relax. I don't want to take that away, I don't want to bring any tricky associations to his picture of Christmas, the way that past events have done to mine. At this time of year more than any I wish that he and I both had a little support around this.
I absolutely believe that recovery has to be for oneself and not just about pleasing other people. And there are many reasons that I want recovery just for myself. But I also want it for my boyfriend... I worry so much that all this wobbling around trying to figure out what on earth I'm doing isn't just putting aspects of my life on hold, but also aspects of his.
The more I think about all this, the more I'm really saddened by it. Sad for him, and sad for me. I really want to be doing better, to be more on top of my anxiety. I really wish I could be the girlfriend I feel he deserves. Being passive and self-critical isn't the answer. Neither is waiting for the NHS to commission community support for eating disorders. Nonetheless as things stand my (incredibly selfish-feeling) Christmas wish is once again just to make it out the other side without any major catastrophe or humiliation, and my Christmas mantra is once again "this too will pass". I genuinely love Christmas and yet again the combination of anorexia and a somewhat tricky family dynamic threatens to reduce it to an endurance test. It is rarely as bad as I fear in the end, but 'not as bad as I feared' is a million miles from 'fun and relaxation', which is what my boyfriend has in mind. I have less than two weeks to change this and I am really struggling to figure out how.
The one thing that is crystal clear from this is that even at a stable weight and relatively healthy, as long as anorexia still plays any part in my repertoire of coping strategies, it will forever threaten to sap the fun out of not just my life but my boyfriends too. So I guess my real Christmas wish for us both is that one day we get the Christmas we deserve - one without so much of a shadow of anorexia in the room.