In this episode:
What if recovery isn’t a finish line, but a place we learn to live in? In this deeply personal episode, I sit down with journalist, professor, and author Mallary Tenore Tarpley to talk about her upcoming book, SLIP: Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery.
Mallary shares how losing her mother at age 11 shaped her relationship with food, and why chasing “full recovery” can sometimes feel like chasing a mirage.
We dive into the often-overlooked “middle place” of healing, that space between crisis and full recovery, and why slips aren’t signs of failure, but invitations to grow, reflect, and extend compassion to ourselves. If you’re navigating sobriety, disordered eating, or any kind of recovery, this conversation is a heartfelt reminder that healing isn’t linear, and you’re not alone.
Resources Mentioned:
Follow Mallary on Instagram and Substack
Jessica’s Resources:
Six-Week Writing for Healing Program Is Open for Enrollment!
Bottomless to Sober – Coaching, Classes, and Workshops
Transcript:
00:03 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Hi everyone, welcome back. I am so glad to have a special guest here today. We have author Mallary Tenore Tarpley, who’s a professor, journalist, speaker and also the author of the upcoming book Slip Life in the Middle of Eating Disorder Recovery. Any of you who have been listening to my work and my story know that I have a complicated relationship with food. About one third of people who struggle with substance use disorder of some kind also have complex relationships with food, and so I’m really excited to have Mallary on today so that she can speak to her book, speak to her lived experience and hopefully you all get some good nuggets out of this conversation. So welcome, mallary, so glad to have you. Thank you so much. Some good nuggets out of this conversation. So welcome, mallary, so glad to have you.
00:47 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited, awesome.
00:50 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Awesome. Well, let’s go ahead and let’s dive in. So I know that your upcoming book specifically centers on the idea of this quote unquote middle place in eating disorder recovery. Can you kind of share what that means, what it means to you and why it’s so often kind of just overlooked?
01:08 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
Yes, definitely so. The middle place is this name that I’ve given to this liminal space between acute sickness and full recovery from an eating disorder, but I think it can apply to recovery from addiction and recovery from mental health illnesses. And so, for me, I was in treatment for anorexia nervosa when I was a teenager and cycled in and out of the hospital and residential treatment, where I stayed for about 17 months, and so was in treatment for quite a while. And when I left I really felt like I needed to achieve the gold standard in the eating disorder field, which is full recovery. And yet it wasn’t until many years later that I learned that even the field has not yet arrived at a consensus definition of what full recovery even means.
01:54
And in our society, which is just steeped in diet culture and fat phobia, the notion of full recovery can seem quite murky and difficult to wrap our heads around. And so for about two years I was living out a life that felt kind of equivalent to full recovery, and I felt like I wanted to be the poster child for full recovery, so left residential treatment, went back home, went right back into my junior year of high school and was eating well and exercising. And president of the National Honor Society and graduated top of my class and was doing all of the things and was really sort of thought of as the recovered girl. But then when I went to college I fell into this very vicious cycle of binging and restricting my food intake and really felt like at the time I was struggling and failing at both recovery and at anorexia and I didn’t quite know what it was that I was struggling and failing at both recovery and at anorexia and I didn’t quite know what it was that I was struggling with. It seemed like some new manifestation of my eating disorder, but I struggled with that for about 10 years in silence and felt a lot of shame around the fact that I was still struggling, and in public I was living under the guise of someone who was fully recovered. So it was very much hiding the struggles that I had.
03:06
And it wasn’t until I began working for a nonprofit where I was helping journalists to tell more stories about the messy middle of recovery and the aftermath of trauma and tragedy that I realized that that could actually be a really helpful framework for my own recovery story, and so I began to think about the fact that in recovery, slips are bound to happen, which is why I titled my book Slip, because for the longest time, I thought that slips were something to be hidden, something to be ashamed of. And now, as I live my life in the middle place, I realize recovery is possible. But slips often happen, and they don’t have to be grounds for failure. They can be opportunities for growth.
03:47
And so I talk about being in recovery as opposed to being fully recovered, because I think it’s still today something that I need to work on. And lastly, I’ll just say that for a long time, I thought I was the only one in this middle place, but I surveyed about 700 people for my book and did almost 200 interviews, and of the 700 people I interviewed, 85% said that they could relate to this idea of the middle place. And in the eating disorder space, this middle place is often not talked about, and so my hope is that I can give voice to people who find themselves in this space, because it is quite populous.
04:25 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I’m so glad that you are speaking to that. This week with the current news cycle, I was in conversation with someone who is currently struggling with maintaining continuous sobriety as they navigate the ups and downs of what’s happening in the world, and this individual was really giving themselves such a hard time and I was like listen first of all. Like you know, like yay, Continuous sobriety is great, Like that. That’s what I experienced and I’m very grateful for having continuous sobriety. But I was like the fact that you go weeks, months without a drink and then you have a slip. I was like let’s practice some compassion here. Let’s talk about the fact that you’re giving your body massive breaks from alcohol and let’s talk about the fact that you’re still constantly striving to take care of yourself and we don’t celebrate that.
05:17
I think in sobriety spaces we often only look at wins.
05:21
We consider those to be like 30 days, 90 days, 60 days a year, X amount of years and like, while, again, the more time away from a drink for a person struggling with alcohol addiction is great, there’s so many other huge wins to be considered in someone’s life beyond, just like days passing on a calendar Right.
05:40
And so you know for this friend who has noticed that when sometimes a drink happens during turmoil in the world, I feel like, absolutely, yeah, it’s an opportunity to look at, well, what are my stressors, what are my triggers? Let me get curious and maybe let’s see how I can handle the next time I’m set off by the news cycle, maybe a little bit differently as opposed to you know, absolutely like, just, I always say poo-pooing on ourselves. You know, when we, when we have a slip, cause we’re, we’re human Right and so I, I love that you, you speak to that. I think that that’s important. So when you speak of the middle place, how do you feel like that impacts your compassion to yourself versus before, when you were striving to be like this poster child of recovery?
06:23 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
Yeah. So you raised so many good points. And previously when I would slip, I always thought, well, I’ve blown it, so I might as well just continue down this path. So if, for instance, there was a day when I would binge, I would think, okay, well, I’ve blown it, so now then whole next day, I need to restrict. And it would just perpetuate this cycle. So it seems like every time I had a slip it would turn into a slide to the point where I really did relapse in college.
06:50
And now when I think about slips, I try to give myself a lot more grace and I try to recognize that these are part of the process.
06:58
I may slip I’m most likely going to slip from time to time, but I need to be able to use that as an opportunity to say okay, what happened, why did this happen? How can I get back up again? And it’s interesting because when I was interviewing someone for the book who was an eating disorder clinician, she had said well, I wouldn’t title the book slip, because that word has a really negative connotation in our field. And I said well, that’s precisely the point. Right, I want to remove the stigma and shame around that word, because even if you think about that word slip it in and of itself defines or suggests some sort of movement, right, because you can’t slip if you’re standing still, and so I now think about slips as being really something that can provide opportunities for growth, and certainly reframing my thinking around. That has been really helpful in terms of my own movement forward, knowing that this remains this ongoing kind of journey for me.
07:56 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I love that and you know, when you talk about the slip and the movement, I kind of envision, you know, say, the athlete who might be running a race and obviously there might be times when they trip or they fall, or a child learning to walk or learning to run. They’re going to have to slip sometimes, but that’s the only way that they’re going to get better and master the art of the basic walk Right or master the art of like running. It is going to be through those tumbles, Like they’re. They’re absolutely necessary. So I appreciate that perspective. Now you mentioned slip and then you also mentioned the word relapse and I’m always curious because I I’m a firm believer that everyone has to kind of define those terms for themselves on their own journey. So I’m curious in your journey, what is a slip to you versus a relapse, yeah.
08:39 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
So I think that that is a really important distinction and it’s something I’ve given a lot of thought to, because when I was in treatment in the late 1990s, these words really did not come up, so we didn’t talk about slips or lapses or relapses, at least in sort of the treatment centers that I was in.
08:56
But I like to think about slips as blips in the road to recovery, and they’re common and inevitable, and yet they’re often stigmatized in the eating disorder fields, which really persistently pushes for full recovery.
09:09
But slips occur when someone’s trying to make meaningful progress, because, again, you can’t really slip if you’re standing still. And so for me the goal is to really sort of recognize the slip and learn from it so that it doesn’t turn into this slide or relapse. And when I think about relapse, I think that it’s more so a repetitive pattern of eating disorder thoughts and behaviors with an inability to get back on track, and so I think that we move from a slip to a lapse to a relapse. Often the relapse is going to require perhaps higher levels of care, because it’s sort of a situation in which you really are stuck in these repetitive behaviors without seeing a way out of them. So I think it’s important to recognize the differences between the slip and the relapse, because certainly slips can lead to relapses, but they don’t always have to, and that’s something that’s been really important for me to just recognize in my own recovery.
10:04 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I love that. That’s to me super clear and I hope anybody listening finds that helpful. You know, as you all, as listeners, navigate your own definitions. I wanted to switch up and kind of talk a little bit about grief. I know it’s just kind of like reading about you a little bit.
10:19
I learned I’m so sorry to hear for the loss, but that you experienced the loss of your mother fairly young, I want to say, maybe you were about 11 years old or so and I know in one of the interviews that I watched about you you shared that your disordered eating pretty much began after that loss, and so I’m just curious to learn a little bit about how grief did shape your path and then, kind of, how do you manage your grief now? I think, like a lot of us, what we realize when we step into recovery, we are grieving a lot of different things. Some of us it might be actual losses of people that we loved. Sometimes it is the loss of a lifestyle, but there is a lot of loss that happens when we start healing, and so I’d love to kind of hear how you are doing with your grief now, what it was like back then and where you are now with it.
11:08 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
Yeah, it’s something that I care a lot about and I write a lot about it and slip, because my mother’s sickness and death really did kind of lead me to develop an eating disorder. Death really did kind of lead me to develop an eating disorder. So my mom was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer when I was eight and she was sick for about three years and at the time my family’s way of coping was to always believe that she was going to be okay. So we used to refer to her as a soldier in a battle and as the little engine that could, and we would always say she’s going to get to the top of the mountain, she’s going to be fine, and we maintained that storyline even as my mom got sicker and sicker and even when the cancer had metastasized to her bone marrow and her liver and her brain.
11:52
And in writing my book I went back and I was able to retrieve my mother’s old medical records and it was very clear in looking at them that my mom wasn’t going to make it. But my father in particular really wanted to hold on to hope, and I did too, as my father’s daughter, and so when she died it really did feel like this complete shock. So she was 40 and I was 11. And I thought, as just a natural perfectionist, that the way for me to handle this was to pretend that I was okay and to sort of perfectly quote unquote grieve. And so I went to school the very next day after my mom passed away and I wrote a eulogy for her funeral which I read without crying and really tried to kind of put on this happy face, but inside it felt like my whole world had crumbled and I didn’t know how to grapple with that. And the more time passed, the farther away I felt from my mother, and so I found myself really wanting to stop time. And around this same time I was in a seventh grade health class where we were learning about good foods quote unquote and bad foods, and learning about how to eat healthy and how to avoid unhealthy foods, and some of these sort of lessons really started to stick in my mind and I began to conjure up this idea that maybe, if I stayed the same size I was when my mom was alive, I could somehow be closer to her, and so I began to restrict my food intake, and it was almost this warped form of time travel. So for me, the eating disorder was never about being skinny, but more so about being small and feeling like I was closer to my mom somehow.
13:31
And of course the irony of eating disorders is that we think they’re going to give us one thing and yet they completely take that away from us right, similar sometimes to addiction. So my eating disorder really gave me no control. It sort of stripped me of all of my control and it made me feel farther away from my mother than ever before. So it wasn’t until I was in residential treatment that I really began to grieve the loss of my mother’s death. And for the couple of years that I was in treatment before that I still really was kind of denying the seriousness of her death. And for the couple of years that I was in treatment before that I still really was kind of denying the seriousness of her death. And wasn’t until I was in treatment for a longer period of time that I was able to really kind of grapple with that loss.
14:11
And that was a huge part of my own recovery was just being able to explore the origins of my eating disorder more and come to terms with the ways in which I thought my eating disorder more and come to terms with the ways in which I thought my eating disorder would make me closer to my mom, but the ways that it ultimately drew me farther away from her. And so when I think about grief now, I think about it a lot in terms of this idea of the middle place, because for a long time I thought of it as something linear and I think that for many years that was the mindset, because we would have the five stages of grief and it sort of was this idea that okay, you go through these five stages and then you reach this finish line and you’re fine, and I had that mentality for such a long time. But when I think about it now, I realized that I still in many ways mourn the loss of my mother. I still think about her all the time and there are stretches where I won’t cry for weeks or months and then sometimes something will happen in my life that reminds me of her and it’s just a waterfall, right, I just start crying and I’m thinking about her.
15:13
And so in regard to this idea of the middle place, I think that in a lot of ways grief is ongoing, just like recovery can be, and the load of that loss is much lighter than it once was for me, but I still carry it right. It’s still there, and so I don’t know that I’ll ever arrive at some sense of closure when it comes to my mom’s death, but it’s easier to grapple with. And I will just say, too, that this book is going to be published in August, and I just turned 40, and that’s the same age my mom was when she passed away. So I’ve been thinking a lot about these questions of what does it mean to outlive your mother and what does it mean to begin this next phase of life your mother never got to experience. So in many ways it feels like just this ultimate way of honoring my mother’s memory to be putting this book out into the world at this really significant moment in time.
16:05 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Oh, that’s so powerful. And you know, when you mentioned the five stages of grief, I’m so glad that you mentioned that because I also feel like the five stages of grief totally had me fooled into thinking that it was a linear journey and that we eventually just get over our losses. And, honestly, I find more peace in knowing that I’m just, it’s something I’m just going to carry right, like the losses that we have been dealt, it’s something that we learn to live with. You know, we get stronger as time passes, but it doesn’t mean that you know that pain doesn’t just go away. And you know, I feel like the idea of closure. There’s so many times that we’re always like having this entitlement, like I deserve closure, I deserve closure, and I don’t know who taught us that we’re supposed to just always have, you know, closure, but we really don’t get closure from a lot of things. And it’s like learning to navigate the uncomfortable, the murky waters is so important. So I’m just glad that you speak to that. I’m glad you speak to that in your book.
17:03
Was there a moment? You know, I think like, especially when we talk about grief and loss and pain, you know, I do think that those losses can crack us open sometimes, but was there a specific moment when you were like I can’t keep coping this way, I can’t keep trying to keep myself small? You mentioned that things started when you were 11. And then in college you basically it it. College is when you ended up in the residential treatment facility. Is that correct? Was my timeline right?
17:28 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
Um, so I was in the hospital as a teenager and in residential treatment, and then left, went back to high school, thought I was fully recovered, and then in college is when I relapsed. Yeah, okay, gotcha.
17:39 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Gotcha, I was fully recovered, and then in college is when I relapsed. Yeah, okay, gotcha, gotcha. So was there any moment when you realized that you couldn’t keep doing these same behaviors anymore, when they were just no longer sustainable for you?
17:49 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
Yeah, so a big part of it for me, I think, was actually meeting my husband, because for me, in some ways, it made it so much harder to just keep the eating disorder a secret, because for a long time I kept thinking, well, I’m just going to keep dealing with these behaviors for the rest of my life and I’ll just keep hiding them. Um, but when I met my partner now husband I realized, okay, I need to be able to be vulnerable, I need to be able to share what I’m going through with him, with hopes that he won’t turn away from me and leave me if I tell him this. And so, because we were spending so much time together and because so many social outings involve food, of course, I needed to be really open and honest with him about what I was struggling with. And he was one of the first people I really did confide in after sort of having been stuck in this cycle of binging and restricting. And for me, what was fascinating is that being vulnerable with him and sharing my story did not make him run away.
18:51
In some ways, I feel like it drew me closer to him, because he realized that I was willing to share my story with him, that I wanted him to be part of my recovery, that I trusted him enough to be able to tell him what I was grappling with, and around that time is when I was also beginning to develop this idea of the middle place, and so it was really interesting to see this middle place framework come into play at the same time that I was beginning to kind of engage in this more serious relationship. And so those two things combined, I think, made me realize, okay, I need to be able to carve a better pathway forward for myself, particularly as I started to think about the future and wanting to one day have kids, and so there was just more at stake. It felt like at that point in my life and this was when I was in my late twenties and I felt like, hmm, do I really want to be stuck in these behaviors for the rest of my life? Right? And so I began to kind of think about how do I make meaningful progress forward, knowing that it is not going to be perfect?
20:00 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
You know there are two things jump out at me with your response there, like. The first one is you know, I think about people in recovery from addiction and dating and how they’re. You know we navigate getting into relationships and that fear of the rejection when we tell somebody by the way, I have this history right and one thing I always like to remind folks about that, especially if it’s a sobriety support meeting or someone I’m working with one-on-one, I’m like listen, the right person for you is not going to be turned away by your history. Right, be yourself, show yourself fully and if you repel someone good, you did yourself a favor because that person was not for you in the first place, and so I love that you shared that. You realized like I’ve got a lot at stake. I’ve got these big dreams for my future and I can’t do it if I keep this a secret.
20:52
But the second thing, too, that jumped out at me from your share right now also is the idea of letting people in right and how a lot of whether it’s disordered eating or addictive behaviors right, like so much of those behaviors, I feel like they thrive, like the best soil for them is a secret, like put it in a corner, away, somewhere from where you can hide it, and that’s really where they thrive, and I think that you know there’s so many people you mentioned that you were very successful, right like on the outside.
21:23
I think so many people can achieve so much on the outside, whether it be career, educationally, things with family, etc. And still be struggling in secret, and that can be so scary, it can be even deadly sometimes for folks. And so, kind of pivoting into sort of like the next thing, I wanted to talk a little bit more about letting others in. I know that you make reference to learning to ask for help, and so I mean you made mention of your husband, your partner, now husband. But what was a big moment for you where letting someone in kind of was a game changer for you?
22:01 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
So for me I mean being able to talk with my husband, I think was what then prompted me to be able to go back to therapy and to actually try to make progress in my recovery. Because once you tell someone, then you begin to sort of realize that you can maybe trust other people with your story as well. And as a writer, I’ve always been sort of someone who likes to share my story, and for a long time I was talking about my eating disorder in different personal essays that I would write or in blog posts, but I was writing them from the perspective of someone who’s fully recovered. And once I started to meet my husband and really explore the middle place framework, I began to experiment with writing more about where I was actually at in my recovery and trying to really sort of embrace the messiness of my ongoing recovery. And so being able to share my story openly through the written word was incredibly healing for me. I always say that writing is not therapy, but it can be therapeutic, and so the sharing of my story through the written word and sort of coordination with talking with my husband and with the therapist, I think was really helpful for me, because I will say that for a long time my eating disorder, especially when I was in this binge restrict cycle.
23:21
It did feel like an addiction in some ways, and I also had struggled with obsessive compulsive disorder and so was very obsessive about exercising and was exercising all the time.
23:33
That felt addictive in some ways, and I don’t use that term lightly because in the eating disorder field there’s a lot of sort of tension around this word addiction.
23:43
Some clinicians believe that eating disorders are a form of addiction, others believe that they’re not. But I defer to the many people, myself included, who have felt at times like the exercise obsessions and the eating disorder is an addiction. And so I think for me, being able to really be more open about my story and get it out in public, right through the essays I was writing and other platforms, that helped me to just feel like I could let go of some of these behaviors that for so long had felt like they had really just taken over me. So for me it was really healing in a lot of ways to be able to share my story more openly, and in doing so I began to hear from lots of other people who said, oh, I can see myself reflected in your story, and for me that is the highest compliment right when sort of me sharing my story empowers other people to feel seen and heard.
24:41 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Absolutely. It’s always helpful to know how you got through or how you are navigating something, because we never know who who’s hearing our story or who’s reading it. You know, and when you mentioned kind of like feeling those compulsive, like urges for different behaviors, you know, that resonates a lot with me, I think, for for a lot of us recovering, say, from alcohol addiction, I think sometimes we find that we may stop drinking and then we’re suddenly catching ourselves really struggling with other behaviors and it’s almost like this sort of like whack-a-mole experience that happens, like you might put down the drink but it means that we still have a lot of work to do in general, right, and so oftentimes for us it’s like removing the alcohol from our lives just kind of opens the door for the real work that needs to start at that point. So I really appreciate you speaking to that. So, with that said, what do you say to people who are scared to open up?
25:57 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
no-transcript. Sometimes people are afraid to share their story because they think, well, I need to find a therapist in order to do that, and they’re feeling like it seems like there’s so many barriers to being able to access care and so I just can’t manage that right now, so I’m just going to continue with these behaviors. I thought that way for a long time because, especially with eating disorders, it can be really hard to find trained clinicians, let alone ones who take insurance, and so I think sometimes that can be a deterrent, and I would say don’t let that be a deterrent. Sometimes just finding a friend or a family member who you trust can really go a long way, and that’s not to say you shouldn’t eventually try to seek professional help. But I think sometimes just being able to open up and to share a small part of yourself and to be really honest about where you’re at in your struggles or in your recovery can then make it easier to begin opening up to more people over time. And I think that the more that we can share who we are and what our recovery is like, the better, because in many cases I think that there is just a lot preventing people from being really open and honest about where they’re at.
27:12
So, for instance, in the eating disorder fields there are these very common terms and they are quasi-recovery and pseudo-recovery, and those essentially are terms that the eating disorder field has used for a long time to describe people who are kind of supposedly better but who are still struggling a lot.
27:31
And for a long time I was afraid of being accused of being someone who was engaging in pseudo recovery or quasi recovery, and now I actually think those terms are quite harmful because they suggest in some ways that recovery is fake or that it’s just not real. I think that those are probably more apt terms for someone like me who years ago, sort of told everyone I was fully recovered but in fact I was really struggling, and so I think it’s really harmful when we use those terms to describe people who are kind of in this murky middle where they’re not fully recovered but they’re trying to work on their recovery. So I always say recovery is real and it’s really important for everyone to recognize that, and recovery takes shape differently. And so I would just say don’t let sort of stigmatized terms or ideas about what recovery is or isn’t stand in your way of being able to authentically share your story.
28:27 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I love that. Now, how do you determine who’s like a safe person to go to? Like let’s pretend this is Mallary. Many years ago, when you weren’t openly writing essays right and publishing a book, how would you have determined? Like, how did you know, for example, that your future husband was a safe person to speak to about this?
28:47 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
So with him. I needed to take some time to get to know him, but pretty soon and pretty early on knew that he was someone I could trust because he made me feel loved. I never had to question does he like me, does he want to be with me? It was just something that he always communicated to me, that he enjoyed being with me, that he wanted to spend time with me, that he cared for me.
29:13
I think previously I’d been in just sort of these kind of semi relationships, if you will. I don’t even know if I’d call them relationships, but with people who wouldn’t call me back or just who made me question whether or not I could actually even trust them or be open with them and with my husband that just never was the case. So I knew very early on that he was someone who was probably going to stick around, even if I told him some pretty hard truths. And so I think for me it always takes time. Nowadays I’m much more open about sharing my story because I’m writing a book about it and it’s going to be out in the world soon.
29:50
But previously it would take me time to get to know someone and to really sort of see are they capable or are they willing to have difficult conversations? There were always people who I knew were just kind of more interested in surface level conversations or small talk, and in those cases I never felt truly comfortable sharing my story with them. But if they were someone who could sort of open up about themselves, then it made me feel like I could do that more. So the first date that I had with my now husband, he talked about how his dad had died in a motorcycle accident when he was 14. That then enabled me to talk about losing my own mom, and so right off the bat it felt like, okay, he’s willing to go there. And so I think so often when we hear other people sharing their own stories of vulnerability, it can then empower us to do the same and to recognize that, okay, this is someone who we can hopefully trust our story with.
30:47 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
I love that. Thank you for sharing that, because I think it’s so important. You know, sometimes we think that just because someone has a label that they’re safe, like oh, I’m going to go tell my mom and it turns out that, you know, maybe someone’s mother may be a really judgmental person and maybe that’s not the safest person. And so I love that looking for someone who models that vulnerability, models that safety for us, so that we know that we can go to them with those tough things. And you know, it’s also the beauty of support groups, right, there’s support groups for lots of different things, whether you have an eating disorder or whether you’re struggling with addiction, and sometimes those might be the spaces you know, if we don’t have anyone in our personal lives. So I really appreciate that. So, mallary, just a couple quick wrap up questions. So someone listening to today’s call, if they are in a middle place right now so maybe they’re not in a crisis, but they’re not necessarily feeling like they are, you know, quote unquote recovered right, what would you say to them?
31:47 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
Yeah, so I would say that it is possible to keep moving forward in your recovery. I think one thing that sometimes happens in the middle place is that people feel like they are stuck and they think, well, I’m just going to be sort of in this middle, kind of meandering around trying to find my way for the rest of my life. And the reality is some of us may always sort of be in this middle place, and I don’t think it’s a bad place to be. I think it’s sort of a spectrum, but along those lines it’s a spectrum that allows a lot of room for growth. And so I would say that when you think about kind of where you’re at in the middle place, it’s always good to think about aiming for more recovery. That’s something that’s been really helpful for me.
32:32
So more recovery may mean 5% more recovery one day.
32:33
Maybe it means 20% more recovery another day.
32:35
Right, sometimes it can be hard to quantify, but maybe it’s sort of resisting the urge to climb stairs, for instance, if you have difficulty with obsessive exercise, right, making that choice is contributing to more recovery. Or maybe it’s kind of listening to your hunger cues and saying, okay, I know I’m hungry, now my body is telling me I need food, so I’m going to make the choice to eat. That is making a choice in service of more recovery. And so I think sometimes this notion of full recovery can be really stifling and can kind of cause people to feel like they’re stuck because they don’t know really how to achieve that fullest expression of recovery, and doing so feels insurmountable. And so I think it’s really helpful to just be able to manage expectations and say I’m just going to aim for more recovery right, and keep trying to move forward and tell people about some of those small victories right, with someone who you trust, because I think being able to talk about the slips but also those small victories and service of more recovery can also be really helpful.
33:39 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
Absolutely. And you know, even with folks, um, those of us recovering, say, from alcohol addiction, like I haven’t had a drink in almost five years, I still don’t call myself recovered, I don’t. I don’t like to feel like I finished, like I crossed the finish line, cause then it’s like and then what right, we crossed this hypothetical finish line. Then what do we do with the rest of our lives, right, so do we just go into like a fixed mindset and stop growing and stop evolving? That to me also sounds really boring and dull, Like I’d rather just kind of live in a space of knowing that I’m never going to be perfect and know that there’s always something to improve.
34:11
You know, I think of I recently did a book study on James Clear’s Atomic Habits with folks over at the Lucky it’s Club, and you know like he talks about the idea of 1% better right, whatever that looks like. Because obviously, how do you even quantify 1% really in these conversations? But you know, just a little decision here and there that aims to do better than where you were, just a little decision here and there that aims to do better than where you were, um, that’s still progress to be celebrated over perfection, and so I, I really appreciate that. Um so, with that, what does freedom look like for you today? Like what? What’s that life like?
34:45 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
So freedom for me is not being defined by my eating disorder.
34:50
I remember very distinctly when I was younger and I moved from saying I have anorexia to I am anorexic, and I remember just thinking that I was completely defined by my eating disorder and it was how I saw the world and it really took over my life to the point where I just stopped socializing with people, I stopped reading, I stopped writing, I stopped doing all the things that I loved to do and really felt like I was utterly consumed by my disorder.
35:19
And now, as I think about where I’m at in life as a professor and author and mother and wife, I think about all the different parts of my identity and I recognize that the eating disorder is still part of that identity. Right, if I think about my identity and I recognize that the eating disorder is still part of that identity, right? If I think about my identity as a pie, the eating disorder is still a slice, but it’s not the whole pie. There’s so many other parts of my life and parts of who I am that are worthy of celebration and so I really try to focus my efforts on the other pieces of the pie, recognizing that the eating disorder may always still be there, but it no longer defines who I am and it no longer is what makes me feel special or worthy or accepted and loved, and so for me that has been really freeing to just be able to recognize that I am so much more than my disorder, and that was never something that I could see when I was really in the throes of anorexia.
36:18 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
That resonates so much, you know, I think about the endless conversations that can happen in the alcohol recovery space, like, am I an alcoholic or, you know, am I a person in recovery?
36:29
And really, obviously, at the end of the day, everyone has to pick the term that resonates with them. But I personally choose not to call myself an alcoholic If I I don’t participate in 12-step programs. But if I were to go to a 12-step meeting and be a guest in a meeting, sure I’ll kind of follow what everyone does and I’ll say hi, I’m Jessica, I’m an alcoholic, but outside of those spaces I just don’t. I’m Jessica, right, because again, I really am way more than what alcohol ever did to me at the end of the day, right, like, yeah, huge part of my story, huge part of like who I’ve become, but I’m way more than just that. So I completely resonate with the whole not defining ourselves by our struggles, like our struggles make us stronger, but they don’t totally define who we are by any means. Well, mallary, can you tell us a little bit about your book when it’s coming out, how folks can pre-order it, so anyone listening can kind of get caught up on your book?
37:25 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
Yes, of course. So Slip comes out on August 5th, but it is available for pre-order and so you can pre-order it on Amazon’s website, on Barnes Noble’s website, your local bookstore’s website Target has it. Then on August 5th you’ll get it in the mail. A lot of people like that instant gratification of waiting until the book’s actually out, but pre-orders really help authors and they help to just determine a book’s early success. If you’re planning to order it, just pre-order it, and that would mean a whole lot. And yeah, I’ve been working on different iterations of this book for more than half my life, so it feels really surreal to just know it’s going to be out in the world. And, yeah, I hope everybody checks it out.
38:06 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
That’s so exciting. Congratulations. Are you doing any tours Like is? Is there? Where can people follow you like if they want to see what?
38:14 – Mallary Tenore Tarplay (Guest)
you’re up to. Yes, so I will be having a book tour. I’m going to be going to different cities around the country and I will be posting them on my weekly Substack newsletter. So that’s just my first name, which is m-a-l-l-a-r-ysubstackcom, and then also on Instagram, and that’s just my full name, mallary Tenore Tarpley. But I’ll definitely be posting it there and I would love for some of your listeners to come to the events.
38:39 – Jessica Dueñas (Host)
That’s awesome. Well, Mallary, it has been a huge, huge pleasure having you. Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing a bit of your story. I hope everyone will jump on and pre-order, as pre-ordering is really helpful for authors. Pre-order Slip coming out August 5th and please go follow Mallary. Thanks you all so much for listening. Thank you, Mallary, for the interview. Thanks so much for having me.
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