My brother (he's almost 5 years older than me) had an identity crisis in high school. He used that picture-in-picture feature on the TV and would go from The Real World on MTV and "Emeril" on the Food Network.

This should have been a huge bright red light that there was something seriously wrong with the boy. But, alas, along with other red lights, that one was missed.

At any rate, I'm going through my own identity crisis. It has nothing to do with TV channels, though I have been hooked on the Planet Earth documentary that's been airing on the Discovery Channel.

My identity crisis has to do with learning to live without Ed.

I am used to being "that anorexic chick" or "the girl with the light yogurt in the fridge" or "she who has Diet Coke." Things like that. The one who never ordered fries, who always bought low fat. The girl who both the ER staff and the gym staff knew by sight.

That girl.

Sometimes I wonder if we are the same person.

It's hard for me to grasp the fact that this girl, the one described above, was ill. She was sick. She was suffering from anorexia. Her mind was not wholly hers.

Yet it was. Those memories, those experiences, were mine. I was living them. That was my ankle that was shattered and repaired, in a modern day Humpty-Dumpty experiment. Those were seven years of MY life. I still have trouble learning when it's Ed or when it's just me.

Can it be both? Can it? Or am I deluding myself? What if Ed says "Order a salad," and I think about it, and I feel like a freaking salad? Should I order the salad?

I have simply forgotten how to live in this world without an eating disorder.

My choices were dictated by my fears around food and eating and fat. It became a habit, a routine. Always doing or eating the same thing calmed my fears that I would eat the wrong thing at the wrong time, or weigh the wrong weight, or do the wrong workout. I had to be perfect. I couldn't eat cheesecake because it was called 'fattening.' And I couldn't miss a workout because we were all supposed to exercise for an hour a day. No, only 30 minutes. Or was it 90?

Rules, though annoying, also made me feel safe and secure.*

One of my friends from treatment, E, told me she was extremely sensitive to noise, movement, etc. That the outside world was overwhelming. That was me. I don't like large crowds. Pictures of traders on the New York Stock Exchange encapsulate the absolute worst nightmare for me. As such, my brain relentlessly focuses on one thing to the detriment of all else, known in the psychiatric world as "impaired set-shifting." By not eating, my brain could better deal with the cacophony of input and the anxiety it caused. Why? If it didn't relate to eating, my brain just tossed it in the 'slush' pile. Thing was, the longer I was starving, the increasing number of facts entering my brain had to do with food. So I ate less, increased my rituals, and...well, you get the idea.

Now I have all of this information being flung at me, information I have no idea what to do with. Carrie-as-anorexic knows how to deal with it. But Carrie-as-Carrie doesn't. My eating disorder has made all of my decisions for so many years, that I'm having trouble wresting back control. Ed has rules, strict rules, rules that must be followed. I don't remember how to live without them.

And the prospect of doing so is really wigging me out.

A part of me does want to live without them, the part of me that eats, that laughs, that thinks. There's also a part of me that is still controlled by Ed, a part that says I'm lazy and non-productive and worthless. These two versions of me seem so polarized that I can't think of how (or if I should) try to join them.

'Course, spending all of your free time on the treadmill, reading cookbooks, or sleeping isn't exactly the epitome of productive, either.

I know there's a real me in there. There was a me before the start of the AN (and the depression and the OCD), even if I can't remember it. There will be a me after.

*These were only my rules for myself. Other people's rules were a different creature entirely, though I rarely broke the rules. I might not have always liked them, but I usually went along with things. And if I didn't, I just did my own thing and didn't make a fuss over it.