Alexis | Roots of Healing: Recovery Beneath the Weeping Cherry Tree
Hi everyone, my name is Alexis Gruszczynski. I’m 37 years old, and I’m proud, grateful, and relieved to say that I am fully recovered from an eating disorder I carried with me for over 20 years.
Getting here wasn’t easy, and looking back, there are so many things I wish I’d known sooner. Insights that might have eased the journey, realizations that finally clicked into place after years of struggle.
Complex and deeply rooted
My eating disorder wasn’t just about food or weight; at its core, I didn’t know how to live. I wish I’d known back then that trying to get back at my parents by starving myself would hurt me far more than them. I wish I’d known that my worth wasn’t tied to my appearance – a heavy expectation in my Greek immigrant family, where, as a first-generation American woman, looking good felt like the only path to value. I wish I’d grasped that the very things I was doing to lose weight were sabotaging my future health, my goals, and even the appearance I was so desperately trying to control.
I wish I’d understood that eating disorders are complex and deeply rooted—but that I’m complex and deeply rooted, too. That the same depth and intensity pulling me down could become my superpower if channeled differently. I wish I’d realized that I was here for something meaningful, that I could use my voice and strength to take up space and transform suffering, instead of perpetuating it through my own self-destruction. If only I’d known what real love meant, perhaps I could have loved myself and others better.
Healing with nature
The turning points came gradually, but significantly. Becoming a mother cracked my world open, helping me see myself in relationship to others in a way I never had before. It ignited a deeper desire to heal, not just for me, but for them. This led me to dedicate myself to studying psychology, driven by a hope to help ease the suffering I see reflected in the world around me, the suffering I knew intimately.
My healing demanded looking inward. I began exploring psychoanalysis on my own, digging into the unconscious parts of myself I’d buried since childhood. Discovering I had a high ACE (Adverse Childhood Experiences) score – an 8 – wasn’t a sentence, but a starting point. It fueled my mission to reclaim my life. Part of this reclamation involved confronting other patterns. After recovering from the eating disorder, I also quit drinking. But it took nearly five more years to truly understand how to nourish myself holistically, mind and body.
It’s a continuous process, especially as I try to model grace and balance for my kids.
So much of this journey has been about returning to the root, literally and figuratively. I found profound healing by getting closer to the Earth – growing my own food, grinding my grains, composting my scraps. This quiet work in my garden, watching plants and animals, taught me a deep respect for the cycles of life and filled me in ways I’m still understanding. Maybe it’s the sun, the oxygen, the stillness – but it connects me to something fundamental.
Nature even offered powerful metaphors. Years ago, thinking it would hide my frail body, I had breast augmentation. Around that same time, I bought a weeping cherry tree, specifically grafted to weep, looking every bit as fragile as I felt inside. For a long time, it just existed, barely growing, certainly not producing fruit – much like I felt stuck. Then, suddenly, strong, upright sprouts burst from the original rootstock, pushing right through the delicate, drooping branches. Everyone told me to cut them off, to preserve the ‘weeping’ aesthetic. I did, but they kept returning – bold, beautiful, and insistent in their own direction.
Watching this tree became a powerful reflection. I started to feel my implants were making me sick, perhaps tangled up with the years of disordered eating. It felt like this external addition wasn’t truly me and was hindering my well-being. Seeing the tree fight to express its true nature gave me clarity. I had the implants removed.
Around that same time, the tree’s transformation accelerated. Those original rootstock branches shot up over three feet, vital and strong. Meanwhile, the grafted weeping parts on one side withered and died off, leaving the other side looking weak and out of place. And then, cherries appeared – tiny, bright promises, but only on the strong, authentic growth. The metaphor clicked into place. I realized I needed to cut off the remaining weeping branches entirely. People told me the tree was still beautiful with them, a poignant mix they said, but I knew they were draining vital energy from its core, holding back its true potential – just like clinging to parts of my old life, the need to appear a certain way, was holding me back from thriving.
Coming Home
That experience with the tree crystallized a shift in my perspective – learning to see value not in forced perfection, but in authentic, lived-in history. It’s a feeling I find echoed when I think about what makes a space feel like home, and ultimately, how we come home to ourselves, to our bodies. It reminds me of this poem I wrote reflecting on this topic:
Coming Home
I’d like to have one more chance,
To come home and see these wall cracks
and that corner dirt
in a new light.
And simply leave them there.
I see their story now –
I see the beauty in their marks.
I greet daily the spindling spider,
dwindling in the light…
…soaking up the lingering spirits we call our own.
We are comrades now,
admiring the art illuminated by the sunrays
that touch our walls,
work around those cracks,
admiring the lines
left here by loving fingers
of a generation that simply understood.
They let things go,
they lived in their home
in a way that shows it was lived-in.
I’m coming home
so you can see the lines on my body,
the crevices in my face,
the cracks from my smile.
I’m coming home now.
To live here
and live here well.
This acceptance, seeing the beauty in the lines and cracks – whether on walls or on our own faces – became fundamental to my healing. It connects deeply to examining systems of power, and learning when to take a stand while remaining flexible. Recovery is about this constant need for balance – sometimes that means creating something beautiful and magical from scratch in the kitchen, and sometimes it means grabbing something on the go.
Shifting focus to understanding
I realized I’d spent so long relying on external things to feel okay, to feel happy: what others thought, what the scale said – it was exhausting, and it never filled me up. Then, it slowly dawned on me: the joy that feels real, the kind that sticks, maybe the kind we’re supposed to have, wasn’t ‘out there’ at all. It was waiting right here, inside me and around me, in the everyday. My hyper-focus on that one thing: my body, my food…it had been like blinders, shrinking my whole world and distorting what I truly wanted from life. Learning to be mindful, to be present and pay attention, that started changing things. It wasn’t about forcing happiness, but about noticing the quiet strength, the resilience, that was already there under the surface. And it was that growing sense of inner stability that helped me understand something crucial about fear: you can’t run from it. You have to face it head on. Because truly, no fear anyone else could impose on me was ever as damaging, as terrifying, as the harm I was doing to myself.
If I had used all the time and energy I spent worrying about how people saw me, perhaps I could have become the doctor I always dreamed of being. But now, I’m here, channeling that energy differently. As part of my psychology studies, I’m assembling everything I’ve learned (everything I wish I’d known) into guides. My first guide, Mind, Body, and Life Connected, covers foundational concepts from a psycho-bio-social perspective on how the mind, body, and world interact. The second, Beyond Compliance: An Agency-Focused Path to Holistic Recovery, focuses on eating disorders, aiming to empower those in recovery with options and compassionate support, because while much of the work is solitary, the tools don’t have to be.
My personal journey, the gaps I encountered and the insights gained from connecting with others, has also inspired a formal research project that looks beyond symptom relief to foster genuine, sustainable healing in eating-disorder recovery.
Specifically, I’m looking to better understand:
- How finding genuine agency and making empowered choices about food and movement impacts healing.
- The fascinating connection between these choices, our sense of motivation and enjoyment, and how our brain’s reward pathways might shift during recovery (addressing that feeling of being ‘stuck’ or unable to feel pleasure, sometimes called anhedonia).
- How past experiences, especially trauma (like those contributing to my own ACE score), shape our sense of control and trust in our bodies.
- The powerful role of cultural backgrounds and family dynamics.
- How imbalances of power, in life or even treatment, relate to feeling truly in charge of one’s own recovery path.
My hope is that by bringing these pieces together – the psychological, the neurobiological, the cultural, the trauma-informed perspective – we can contribute to developing more holistic and effective support systems.
Just the beginning
This just scratches the surface of a long journey, but I share it hoping it helps someone else feel seen, understood, and a little less alone. My hope is that the guides and research project above are the beginning of a broader contribution to the field, one that helps redefine recovery not only as the absence of symptoms, but as the presence of empowerment, connection, and a full, meaningful life. And perhaps, together, through sharing our stories and experiences, we can help pave a clearer, more empowered path for others.
