This must have been the weekend for big news: I'm also going to be an aunt! Holy crap, peeps!

There is also, however, this sense of distance from me and the rest of the world. Life has a strange way of happening to me, rather than me happening to life. The strange, strange world of anorexia recovery (or, for that matter, the strange, strange world of anorexia itself) has a way of separating you from the events going on around you.

My brother and his wife are expecting their first child. I am moving home until I go to school in the fall.

There's a bizarre discord there. Yes, I know in many ways I am more mature than my brother, even though he's almost five years older than I am. I also have way the hell more hair, though way the hell more gray hair as well. Win some, lose some, I suppose.

I'm not trying to compare lives here, even though that's sort of inevitable. We are where we are in life, blah blah blah. While that's true, it's also true that I feel quite odd moving back in with my parents just as my brother is expecting his first child. He's going to have- holy crap!- a family. I have...a cat.

My kitty is lovely, and I wouldn't trade her for anything. I also love my parents.

But at the end of the day, I go to sleep in my girlhood room (all 9 feet by 9 feet of it) by myself. Okay, myself and a stuffed animal. I can never shake that loneliness, that sense of drifting and floating, suspended above the life around me. That lack of connection was what really pushed me over the edge into the abyss of depression this past December. The anorexia had so isolated me from everything, that I'm having a hard time catching up.

I hate feeling all "oh, pity me" and I absolutely HATE being pitied. I have a good life, all things considered. Part of me would like to swap some parts out, but that's not the way it works, and I can deal with that. Life is a chain reaction. If I never would have gotten so depressed, I never would have had my parents drop off a book written by a graduate of the Johns Hopkins program. I never would have gotten to the point of being so disgusted with my present existence that I was willing to take a leap into the unknown.

I don't have a whole lot of belief in fate. Or destiny. People have too much of a tendency to wind up where they're going. Was I destined to be a writer? Hell if I know. But once I started down this path, once I first saw my name in print, there was no turning back. I could still choose to do something else in my life besides write. I could, but I don't know that I'd want to. Maybe I'll find something more interesting, maybe I won't.

I just need to accept that my life is going to look waaaaaayyyy different than my brother's. We are so completely different, so why would I expect us to be the same?