Wanting to recover from an eating disorder is one thing. Doing the actual work is another.

But then there's the emptiness left behind, that gaping hole of what used to be, those what ifs, which continue to haunt me. I have made a tentative peace with the "what if" questions that never seem to cease in my head. What if I had never decided to lose weight? What if I hadn't gotten help when I did? What if I had remained well enough to submit my Rhodes Scholar application my senior year in college? What if? What if? What if? My past is what it is, and I am where I am. Maybe I would have been a Rhodes Scholar. Hell if I know. But I do know that I am also the author of two books, and hopefully about to embark on a career as a writer, a prospect of dubious likelihood for Carrie, Rhodes Scholar.

There is the other emptiness, that sense of what is and what will be. Going home to an (almost) empty apartment, day after day. The slow evolution of the question of "Do I eat?" into "What do I need to eat?" and finally into, "What do I want to eat?" The vast expanses of time spread in front of me, time that used to be spent exercising, counting calories, or reading recipes. Time that Ed tries to lure me into spending with him, usually doing one of the above three activities.

It's a lonely, hard road, and though people walk it with me, they can never walk it for me. Nor should they. We each have our own paths in life, paths we think are easier or more difficult than our own. Whether that's true or not is a matter of debate. The one thing that isn't a debate is that, however the chips may have fallen, I am right here, right now, and I can always choose to go somewhere different, to change my own trajectory. I do it each time I fix myself a meal or a snack, each time I am honest with my family and my treatment team.

I don't know what my life will be without ED. I just don't. I'm still forging it, still finding out each and every day what freedom will bring.