“Not One More” is not just a phrase. It is something I live inside of. It is a commitment that lives in my body, my recovery, and my relationships.
As someone who holds multiple identities and has been in long-term recovery from an eating disorder, those words carry weight. I have lost friends to their eating disorders and to addiction. I have lost family and relationships because of my recovery. Choosing authenticity has required me to let go of belief systems that once felt safe and versions of myself that were shaped by survival rather than truth. Recovery has asked me to grieve what I thought my life would look like and to make room for what it actually is.
Living honestly has not been free. But it has been necessary.
There are many meanings of “Not One More” that I carry with me. I am fighting for them. I am recovering for them. I am holding them quietly in my soul as I continue to navigate a world that often does not know how to hold people in recovery with care or dignity. As a queer, Latino person in recovery from disordered eating, I have learned how deeply systems can fail to reflect lived experience. Recovery has required me not only to change behaviors, but to challenge deep beliefs about worth, safety, and belonging that were never designed with people like me in mind.
After more than fourteen years in recovery, my understanding of my eating disorder has changed. I no longer see it as a problem to fix or a moral failing to correct. I see it now as a lifeline. When disconnecting from my body and my needs felt like the only way to survive, my eating disorder became a language. It spoke when I could not. It signaled fear, grief, danger, and injustice. It was connected to sacred parts of me that were trying to stay alive in the only way they knew how. To hide.
These truths do not excuse the harm of the disorder, rather they allow me to approach my recovery with compassion instead of punishment.
For many years, shame followed me closely. Shame told me I had missed out on my life. Shame told me this illness was to blame for every loss, every fear, every insecurity. Shame suggested that recovery should look cleaner, faster, more grateful. I carried the belief that if things had gone differently, if we had been stronger or healthier or less complicated, maybe fewer people would have been lost. Maybe our lives would have turned out differently.
What recovery has taught me is this. It could not have been different. We did not fail. In many ways the world had failed us.
That realization was not a surrender. It was a release. Letting go of the idea that the past could have been rewritten allowed me to stop haunting myself with imagined versions of a life that never existed. It allowed me to be present with the one I am building now.
Today, “Not One More” means something deeply personal. It means not allowing one more moment of my recovery to be ruled by self-hatred disguised as motivation. It means refusing to shame myself into healing. It means no longer apologizing for being sick or for recovering or for the parts of myself that are complex, tender, and sometimes uncomfortable. Recovery has revealed beauty in places I once avoided and I will not diminish that to make others more comfortable.
“Not One More” means choosing compassion over punishment and truth over silence. It means advocating for a world where recovery is not something people must earn through suffering, but something they are allowed to claim through care, dignity, and connection. It means honoring those we have lost by continuing to show up for those who are still here, still trying, still surviving.
This is what “Not One More” means to me. And it is a promise I intend to keep.
Eric Dorsa (they/them) is a nationally recognized LGBTQ+ mental health advocate and activist, dedicated to advancing equity and inclusion within mental health and recovery spaces. Combining their lived experience with professional advocacy, Eric works to create meaningful change and amplify the voices of marginalized communities. As the creator and lead organizer of the Out Loud Pride Summit, Eric collaborates with the Eating Recovery Center to offer an innovative virtual Continuing Education (CE) program that centers LGBTQ+ perspectives in mental health care. Drawing from personal experiences of overcoming Eating Disorders, Substance Use Disorder, and trauma, Eric provides insight and inspiration to professionals and peers alike. Their work encourages systems of care to embrace authenticity, connection, and inclusivity as foundational principles of systemic change.