It's cold and rainy and windy out- my apartment building is creaking and groaning.

I need a cup of hot tea to make this right.

I'm kind of getting (kind of) how powerful yesterday's realization was. I feel skillful- I knew what I had to do and I did it. This is not to say that I felt good or happy or stuff like that. Just...skillful.

As far as I've come in recovery, when Ed starts yelling like that, I usually give in. I don't know how to tolerate the anxiety that comes with eating when every fiber of my being is telling me to not eat. This is so conflicting, because on the one hand, I realize that it's somehow wrong (as in contrary, not wrong in a moral sense) to skip meals and snacks, and yet it seems wrong to actually eat.

And I don't know how to explain this to people.

This is why I still have my old meal plan stuck to my fridge. I know what I need to eat. It's right there on the paper.

Another one of my motivators is my New Zealand trip. Obviously, there's the trip itself, but that's not always enough. What adds to that, though, is how much I've paid for the trip. I'm, how shall we say, frugal (cheap, stingy- take your pick) and I do NOT want to waste all of this money. There are several ways the money could be wasted: I could get too sick to go or I would still go but be completely and utterly miserable and obsessing about food. Which seems to be the more egregious sin in my book.

The mentality of "I'm going to enjoy this bloody trip whether I want to or not!" is kind of odd, but it does work.

Letting myself hate eating also helps. That I can eat even though I don't want to. Even though my brain is telling me not to, that I'll become obese and die a miserable death only after living a miserable life. Guess what? These feelings won't kill me*. The eating disorder will.

There are still days when I'm not all gung-ho about recovery, even days when I'd rather go back to starving and purging and overexercise. It's real. Those feelings are still very, very real. And my turning point was that I could still have those feelings and still do what I needed to do in order to recover.

This is sounding far more chipper than I intended it. I don't want to be a downer, and didn't intend for this post to be depressing in the slightest. Things aren't perfect. But I do feel better about what went down last night.

That's it.

*Yeah, I know. It's easy to say this now when I'm not in front of a plate of fatty food. But it's still good to remind myself.