I realize this is a good thing, being busy with lots of other things that have nothing to do with my eating disorder. I filed three stories in the past 24 hours, which was a measure of vague insanity. Tomorrow is my day off after working through the weekend, and then about 12 hours each on Monday and Tuesday.

What were the stories? You can see two of them online:

Cheating yeast help group (you may have to register to see this story, but it's free!)

Social network predicts flu spread

In the last story, I got to use the words "trendspotting," "hipster," and "fashionista," which has to make this piece one of the coolest things I've ever written. And definitely the coolest thing I've ever written with an 18 hour turnaround time.

It felt good to be so busy with my science writer-y life. To have confidence that I am not only capable of writing stories but capable at making a living writing stories. I knew I could write about science. I knew I loved to write about science. But I didn't know if I could do this writing well enough to make it my career.

With every frantic email to editors and every story possibility that I evaluate, I'm realizing that I do actually have the chops to do freelance writing for a living. It's hard work. Harder in some ways than I really thought it would be. But when world-famous scientists give you their cell phone number for an interview, or you get to use the word "hipster" in your story, or your editor thanks you for convincing him to run your piece after he initially turned it down, it is all worth it.

Days like these past few days are when I know anorexia has beat a steady retreat. I still have the always-present body dysmorphia, the sky-high anxiety (am talking to my psychiatrist about this next week), the not-always-so-stable moods. I still sometimes think about how much better I would feel if I could exercise the jitters out for, oh, several hours a day.

But that would bite into my writing time. A malnourished brain can't be juggling phone calls and questions and scribbled Post-It notes. It can't fact check. The anorexic thoughts may still be present, but they are no longer welcome. They finally feel like they originate from that diseased part of my brain. Which they always did, it's just that I was unable to recognize it. Or maybe my entire brain was diseased and ill with AN so that there was no way to distinguish my own thoughts and my AN thoughts.

It's odd because recovery usually happens so slowly that you almost don't even notice it, but these slow changes add up. And then you look around and realize that life looks completely different.