Life's Pleasures Quote by Carre Otis

Otis lands a blunt truth that recovery culture still struggles to metabolize: society loves clean breaks. With drugs and alcohol, abstinence supplies a simple narrative arc, a boundary you can point to, a day count you can celebrate. Eating disorders don’t offer that closure. Food isn’t the enemy you can exile; it’s the daily negotiation you must survive. Her line punctures the myth that willpower plus avoidance equals healing, and it reframes “treatment length” as a structural problem, not a personal failure.

The subtext is about invisibility and credibility. Addiction is increasingly legible in mainstream culture: rehab, relapse, sobriety. Eating disorders are often treated as vanity, a phase, or a niche women’s issue, even as they carry lethal stakes. By comparing the two, Otis insists on parity of seriousness while explaining why the usual recovery script doesn’t fit. You have to do exposure therapy with the trigger itself, multiple times a day, in public, while everyone else is moralizing your plate.

Context matters here: Otis isn’t speaking as a clinician but as someone who moved through an industry built on surveillance of bodies and appetite. Modeling professionalizes disordered behaviors, then rewards you for disguising the cost. Her plain language reads like a corrective to that world’s euphemisms - and a warning that for many people, the “after” of recovery isn’t a finish line, it’s maintenance.