I drank it.

Hot.

And whoever helped inspire that, I could kiss you. SO YUMMY.

(Ed's ass is pretty bruised right now. Not that I really feel bad for the SOB.)

I couldn't help but think about eating disorder recovery when I read this article: Diabetes? Some beat it, but are they cured?

Some people with Type 2 Diabetes are able to control their blood sugar through the euphemistic "lifestyle changes," namely eating "healthier,"* losing weight, and exercising, to the point that they no longer need medication.

"For right now, we're not saying they're cured, but the bottom line is ... good glucose control, less infections," said Sue McLaughlin, president of health care and education for the American Diabetes Association. The organization has no estimate of how many people fall into that category...

Doctors caution that, for some diabetics, lowering blood sugar may be only temporary. Stress, weight gain and other factors can push it back to unhealthy levels.

"Blood sugars can come down to normal. Then the issue is how long does that last?" said Dr. Sue Kirkman, vice president of clinical affairs for the diabetes association. "Sometimes people start putting weight back on and their blood sugars come back up."

In other cases, patients are diagnosed so late that blood sugar levels can't be brought back to normal, even with weight loss, she said. As the disease progresses, even those who made diet and lifestyle changes might eventually have to go on medications.


That's one reason Wagner and some other diabetics who've managed their disease through diet and exercise are also reluctant to consider themselves "cured."

"American culture, our environment, is not conducive to having good health," said Wagner. She believes diabetes will always be lurking in the background, waiting for her to slip.

And, though it sounds a little ominous, I think an eating disorder will always be waiting for me to slip. I don't believe recovery is all doom and gloom, but I'd be really stupid to forget that I am and will always be vulnerable to an eating disorder. American culture isn't conducive to eating disorder recovery, either, which only adds to the need to remain vigilant.

Here's the thing: we don't know how many people recover from an eating disorder only to fall back down the rabbit hole decades later. We know relapse is common and recovery can be a long and difficult road. We know that malnutrition is almost always the first step both in the initial descent into an ED and into relapse. We know that normalizing eating habits goes a long way in treating ED thinking. But we don't know about "cures," if there is one, if there will ever be one.

For me to stay healthy, I can't brag about how little sleep I'm getting or how stressed I am. These things make me nutty, which tends to lead to food restriction. Food restriction leads to overexercise and overexercise leads to stress fractures and The Boot. I can't go on a diet and expect a positive outcome. I can't be carefree about food and eating- I need to make sure I'm eating enough of EVERY different food group and that I'm getting enough fats and proteins.

In spite of this, I do believe that it's possible to go on and life a happy and fulfilling life. I don't think I will be dealing with food phobias and urges to exercise myself half to death forever. I tell myself it could be worse. I have people to support me on this journey, to get my back when Ed starts calling again.

*A "healthy diet" isn't one specific thing, hence the quotation marks.

So many times, the choices given to us by our eating disordered thoughts are false choices. A recent post from the blog The Happiness Project really illustrated how common these thoughts are, and how Ed can make it seem like these two options are the only possible outcome, when in truth, they're not.

For instance:

I'd rather have a crappy life with ED than a crappy life without it.
Now, without recovery, I can virtually guarantee that life will be crappy. And while recovery may seem crappy at first, it's the only shot you've got. What about the possibility that your life will turn out "okay"? Or at least less crappy than if you stayed with ED?

If I don't exercise, I will go crazy.
These are not the only two options: you can do something else. I've found coloring to be a good stress reliever. You can learn how to tolerate those unpleasant feelings. After all, if everyone who didn't exercise went crazy, we'd have quite a different population in the psych units!

I never eat cookies because I will eat the whole box.
I've been there. When I was first normalizing my eating after falling into more bulimic habits, I found that, indeed, keeping large quantities of binge foods around the house was a really bad idea. But now I can keep these foods around and eat fairly normal servings. It's not an either/or question. A happy medium exists. It takes time to figure this out, but it's definitely possible.

Blogger Gretchen Rubin writes:

I think false choices are tempting for a couple of reasons. First, instead of facing a bewildering array of options, you limit yourself to a few simple possibilities. Also, the way you set up the options usually makes it obvious that one choice is the high-minded, reasonable, laudable choice, and one is not.

But although false choices can be comforting, they can leave you feeling trapped, and they can blind you to other choices you might make. “Either I can be financially secure, or I can have a job I enjoy.” “I have to decide whether to marry this person now or to accept the fact that I’m never going to have a family.”

A lot of these false choices strike me as a form of black and white thinking, and many times, life can be lived in the middle. ED thinking makes it seem like these are the only two options--and that the eating disordered option is the correct answer!

What are some false choices you've found yourself facing? Did you ever find that you had more options than you were aware of?

I love analogies and metaphors. Love 'em. So when I saw a post titled "How depression is like the X Files" on the World of Psychology blog, I was kind of intrigued.

Before I get too much further, let me add a full disclaimer: I have never seen The X Files. It doesn't seem that interesting to me, and my innate skepticism keeps the whole "aliens are amongst us!" part of the plot from getting me hooked. But even I understood this post and found the metaphor quite wonderful.

Blogger Erika Krull writes:

They [Mulder and Scully and co.] can’t tell anybody, they don’t know who to trust, and whoever they do tell surely will think they are crazy. Really, who would ever believe that the informant who is trying to feed the agents helpful information really has the scar from a metal chip in his neck because he’s an alien hybrid? Even though all the viewers and the key cast members know all about this threat, the agents never seem to know who they can trust. They live in a world of worry, peril, secrecy, and confusion.

Ta-da. There’s my connection. I have often said to myself that my depression felt like an alien had taken over my brain, though the takeover wasn’t complete because I still knew that I was me. I was just disabled enough to have little control but aware enough to realize I wasn’t able to get the alien out by myself.

I needed help. This wasn’t normal; I knew something was different. But what? And how do I describe this? Would anyone believe me? And would I wish I would have kept my mouth shut once I said something? How will this affect my job, my kids, my marriage? I can’t keep going on like this, but I don’t know if I can tell anyone either. Which is more dangerous?

This perfectly describes my experiences with basically any mental illness that I've had (and the list is long, kids. The list is long). For me, though, the "alien takeovers" where I've felt the most bewildered and confused have been with OCD and with anorexia. When I first developed full-blown OCD in middle school/high school, I had mostly obsessions. I was paralyzed by anxiety, and yet I didn't feel I could tell anyone. My fears were either correct, or they were wrong and I was crazy. I knew my obsessions were bizarre- who would believe me? Half the time, I didn't even believe myself! But I was so worried that I could be right that I kept on obsessing, and later added the compulsions.

When I first got sick with anorexia, I didn't realize I was in an "alien takeover" situation. I thought I was fine and dandy- everyone else had those problems. I would imagine that my parents felt an awful lot like Mulder and Scully, trying to convince people that I did, indeed, have a problem. Many other caregivers have probably had this same situation, especially in the first days before the eating disorder becomes patently obvious to anyone who cares to look.

Now that I'm more healthy and more aware, the anorexia is much more frightening. Not always, of course, but I think that fright is healthy. I can perceive when I am starting to loose control a little bit quicker. I am trying to identify which thoughts are from the healthy (or trying-to-be-healthy) Carrie, and which are the voice of Ed. They're not always that different, which is also really frightening. That's probably how I got in trouble with the exercise this past time.

I ultimately have to keep the "aliens" at bay, and learning how to respond when I sense they're trying to take over my brain is probably going to be a key part of that.

When I booted up my computer at work this morning, I had some very interesting pop-ups for a "spyware protection program" that didn't stay removed once I shut them down, which led me to believe that the program itself was spyware. So I called the IT helpdesk (which, contrary to popular stereotype, consists of helpful humans that speak English), who sent a guy to take a look at my computer.

Like I thought/feared, I had a few gremlins on my computer. The guy asked me what websites I had been visiting (I do a lot of Googling, for starters), and if I'd downloaded anything recently. I was afraid that he thought I had been trowling around those sites, the kind for grown-ups only, with women with fake boobs and lots of heavy breathing and such. But I hadn't, and I just said I had no idea and he said most people don't. A lot of times, he said, these little trojan viruses just start downloading when you visit normal websites.

While the program was running, he asked me some other questions, like if I'd noticed any other unusual pop-ups (nope), if I'd been directed to websites I hadn't clicked on (nope), or if my computer had been running slower than usual (I didn't think so).

So, after an hour or so, all of the little nasties were off my computer and I was on my way.

Why am I blogging about this? Because it reminds me of ED. Aside from the fact that I am the Metaphor Queen (does this allow me to use the royal "we"?), I think there's more than a shred of truth to this, especially if you think of eating disordered thoughts as little memes.

Most people run across those ED thoughts initially through everyday life: school, sports, magazines, relatives, friends, you name it. Those little virus-y thoughts just sort of download themselves along with the bazillions of other things entering our brains. Some people have super-duper virus protection for ED viruses, and others don't. Sometimes, a person needs several viruses gunking up their brains simultaneously for a problem to develop. For others, just one little spyware program will do.

And the signs aren't always obvious at first. I mean, if a virus causes your computer to run just a bit slower, how is one to notice that? The same with an ED. You might just be more careful about not eating too much fat or sodium or cholesterol. In and of itself, that's not immediately life-threatening, although red flags would be shooting up in my brain. Yet all of this obsessing about food makes your brain run just a bit slower. It takes you more and more time to respond to normal, daily tasks.

Then there are those little pop-ups. In ED-land, those pop-ups tend to contain images of skinny people and/or food, with your daily calorie and exercise totals, and with text telling you such things as "I'm fat! I'm stupid! I'm lazy!" One or two of these means you click on the "X" in the upper right hand corner and go on with your day. But ED pop-ups keep on comin'.

The big difference between real viruses and ED viruses is that you can always reformat your hard drive. You can't do that to your brain. You basically have to leave the operating software* in tact and try and fix your laptop with all of the programs still running. The IT guy didn't do that with my computer, which may explain while my tech problems were fixed within an hour but it's been nine years and my brain is still effed up. ED memes still dominate my thinking, but not quite as much as they used to.

I just need some better anti-virus software.

And if you have any real computer spyware, here is the program I used to get rid of everything: Spybot Search and Destroy. It's more frequently updated than most anti-virus programs, and it's free. The IT guy says he recommends it to everyone. It does, however, take up to an hour to scan your hard drive, and then you have to reboot your computer and do it all again. But it will get everything.

*I'm not saying your brain is just like a computer, because it's not. But I am willing to say that your neurons and such are like computer hardware, while the connections between them are like software.

In a book I was reading (about which I will blog more about later), a therapist talked about having to play "mind sheriff" with some of her more difficult patients, imposing order on the chaotic Wild Wild West that was their thoughts.

Remember that scene in Jurassic Park where the velociraptors were flinging themselves madly against the electric fence? The raptors (who gave my 13-year-old self nightmares for months) were testing the fence, seeing if they could take the shock, seeing if there was any tiny section of the fence without electricity. I forgot exactly what happened, but the raptors did find a weakness and took over the island until the smart dino guys saved the day.

An eating disorder is a velociraptor: mean, predatory, stubborn, cunning, and ultimately predictable. And recovery is building a fence to keep Ed out.

No fence is perfect- Ed will test everything and anything you build to find a weakness. That's just his modus operandi. If he finds a weakness, he will exploit it.

My main weakness in recovery (at first) was being told that I had to choose to build the fence, to wire it properly. I was deathly ill and certainly not up to fence-building. Only when I was told to recruit others for this job did I start to make progress. Whether it was my parents to help me eat, my friends to provide social input and caffeine, or my writing and jewelry making to give me a creative outlet, it all formed a part of the fence.

My lasting job has been to maintain the fence, to find the tiny weak spots not visible on the outside, to keep the electricity running.

Ed's no dummy, of course. Just like the raptors, Ed keeps throwing himself against the fence. Where is the weakness?

In psychology, this is known as an extinction burst. Rats who got a "reward" (usually a food pellet) when pushing a lever, would whack that poor lever half to death when the reward was stopped. This was the extinction burst.

In recovery, this can look like extreme distress as weight is gained, as substituting other self-destructive behaviors when an ED behavior is thwarted. Why? It is when the eating disorder is the most threatened.

I still maintain my Ed-proof fence on my own. I almost have to. However, I have support. I have my treatment team to talk to, people to monitor my weight, and my parents to keep me real. I know Ed will always be there, waiting for fence repairs to go untended, or the electricity to go out. But for now, he knows the fence stands and occasionally goes away and sulks.

Recovery is...

• Visiting a friend for the weekend without bringing a list of what you will and won't eat.
• Buying a muff-cake (muffin-cupcake) at the store because it looked yummy, eating 3/4 of it, and finishing the rest later. With a cup of milk.
• Looking at your butt in the mirror and freaking out and thinking ewwwww. And then getting the hell on with your day.
• Finding recipes to cook and then eat, rather than cook and drool over or cook for someone else.
• Deciding you would rather snuggle with your cat on the couch than workout. You feel guilty and then? Get the hell on with your day.
• Drinking copious amounts of coffee WITH breakfast rather than FOR breakfast.
• Letting yourself take Advil when you need it, rather than waiting for meals/snacks because you need to eat food so the pills don't dissolve your stomach.
• Evaluating your health in terms of what you can do and how you feel rather than what you weigh or what you eat.
• Messing up, freaking out, feeling guilty, and getting the hell on with your day.
• Staying up late and reading, just because.
• Going to bed early, just because.
• Never perfect, but better than the eating disorder.

Dear Carrie,

I'm writing this letter to you for when you are hearing Ed's voice. Loud. Very loud. I know that every fiber of your being and every neuron in your brain is fighting your desire to read this note and renew your commitment to recovery, so even if you get no further in this note, you are being very very strong.

Ed tells you so many false and unkind things- that you are fat and worthless and lazy. That you will never accomplish anything so you may as well be the best as starving and exercising. That being thin is the only thing you can ever achieve. You know this isn't true. You have kept up a blog for almost a year and a half. You have a kitty to love and who loves you back. Even if you accomplish nothing else in your life, you have this.

You could, of course, go back to your eating disorder. There's not really a whole lot stopping you. But where will that get you? Will you be any happier? Any more fulfilled? Any more you? Anorexia is not unique; it makes you sick, not special. Even if you don't like what you see in the mirror, remember that you never did. Remember the cost of going back to the eating disorder, and not just in cost of treatment. The cost to yourself, your body, your spirit. Your friends and family.

You may always feel some level of anxiety and depression. I can't predict the future, but it's certainly possible. Anorexia does make them fade- but only temporarily. They come back. You can figure out a way to get through whatever it is. As surprising as it seems, you have people who care about you and who are there to help.

Recovery is on the other side of this hell. You just have to keep going through the hell to get there.

Love,
Carrie

I got some interesting comments about my post yesterday, and instead of posting a reply in the comments (which would be far too long for a comment, unless of course you're Mary. /********) I'm doing it here.


I know that my ideas on eating disorders are somewhat outside the mainstream- if indeed there is a mainstream about views on eating disorders. I am a scientist both by training and orientation. I read studies, I read news reports, occasionally I read People magazine if left in a doctor's waiting room for too long. And while I mostly set my views with the science if there is a dispute or lack of other evidence, I think there is still an element of truth in all areas.


A sufferer's experience is important. Screw the fact that it might not be scientific. What a person sees and thinks and feels is crucial to understanding what this disorder really is.


Do I think a bad home life causes an eating disorder? No. Could it contribute? Yep. Maybe it is what pushes some people who have the genetic background into an eating disorder. Maybe parents who are critical of their children's weight have their own body image issues. Maybe they're just shitty parents.


But it's not a cause.


Both my parents probably came from what most people would call an unsupportive home environment. Some of it, I would call abusive. If that caused eating disorders, more people would have them. A totally effective home environment is a rare thing. My parents were far from perfect. Very few people are encouraged to emote freely.

Environment is still important. Eating disorders are not single gene disorders. For some diseases (a very select few), a single mutation in a single gene is enough for you to become ill. Diseases like cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia- these are single gene disorders. Most other diseases- diabetes, depression, asthma- are controlled by multiple genes AND need significant environmental influence. You need some sort of environmental trigger in order to get anorexia or bulimia. That trigger could be teasing. It could be abuse. It could be starting a diet. Any number of things. Emotions and brain chemistry are intimately related. Stress changes neurochemistry. So does dieting.

I don't want to say completely, utterly that insight is not important. Because it is. Just not at first (or at least that it's minimally important). Therapy isn't very useful for a starving brain. Therapy can facilitate the cessation of behaviors, it can help you learn how to ride out the distress and emotional waves that come with eating. My friend in treatment called it "urge surfing." Therapy can help reassure you that you're not the first person to have felt these things and that it WILL get better.

And like you said, A, insight has a place in learning when to use your skills. I know final exam time is a major trigger for me. I know I need to make sure to take time for myself and destress during that time. That's insight. But for me, insight as to why I developed anorexia hasn't proven useful. I don't know why, I don't need to know why.

I just need to know how NOT to fall back down the rabbit hole.

"For you have suffered enough
And warred with yourself,
It's time that you won..."

I know that recovery isn't a straight line. It would be nice, but I know it's not.

On the other hand, recovery is still a line- a path of some sort. Meandering and unpaved, but nonetheless, a path. The optimist in me says that even my mistakes are part of that path. I'm learning! I'm getting there!

Maybe that is true. But it's not the making of the mistakes that is the useful part, since anyone can wander. Getting distracted in the forest is easy. However, the good part is in finding your way back to the path.

When I'm hiking in the woods (a girly, sissy kind of hiking, but one where boots are indeed involved, along with a gallon baggie of trail mix and two large bottles of water), I like climbing uphill. Looking down frankly scares the crap out of me. That, and it's murder on my knees. Recovery is a lot of climbing downhill. I want to go up. It's natural to go up. People don't generally climb down mountains, they go up them.

But when you're a recovering anorexic in a culture of whacked-out dieters, you are going downhill while everyone else is going up. The scales, calorie counters, diet pills, workout machines, buy one get one free gym memberships- those are like me climbing uphill. Losing weight and starving is oddly natural for me. When I get stressed, my appetite evaporates, and the cycle begins. To get out of that cycle, I have to do the unnatural. I have to eat. A lot. Especially food (like super premium ice cream) that is generally frowned upon in most of the rest of society.

So while everyone else is looking to get to the pinnacle of diet mania, I am going to the bottom, where the air is better, the plants are bigger, and yeah, the hiking sucks.

The moral of the metaphor? I started climbing uphill these past few weeks.

The end of semester rush was brutal, and I felt it. Some of it was a genuine lack of hunger, some of it was the semi-deliberate starvation neutralization of hunger. Between those two things, I was off and running (hiking?). My weight dropped- not by much, but enough. Enough to make me much more batty and almost enamored of that hike.

The distance between me and the path I knew I should be on started to freak me out a bit. It feels like vertigo, where the distance between my mental state and the rest of reality drifted back and forth, and I was left with a vaguely nauseous feeling.

I have started hiking back downhill in the past few days. My knees hurt, but the plant life is much better.

Oh, and Harriet? I totally beat you at the ice cream game. Ben and Jerry's Cinnamon Roll has (check it out) 290 cal per half cup. Ed, however, is the ultimate loser.

My task this week, per my therapist CCL (the Crazy Cat Lady- I'm one, too, so this is said with no judgement), is to get mad at the eating disorder.

I have no problems getting mad at myself- which, in fact, goes quite a long way in explaining why I have an eating disorder. I expect to much of myself blah blah blah, and then I feel bad because I can never fulfill these ridiculous expectations.

Unless, of course, it's about losing weight. Or eating less or exercising more- whatever. The problem is that if achieving this weight loss was so easy, then it really wasn't an accomplishment. So I had to lose more weight.

Enter Ed, stage left.

Even after all of these years- going on year 8 right about now- I have never actually gotten pissed off at anorexia. Most of that time, I wasn't even aware of an entity known as "anorexia." It was ME. I was the problem. But once I realized that I had an illness, I still never got mad at the eating disorder. I feel helpless, much of the time. The voice seems bigger than life, and I struggle with doing recovery-oriented things when the voice kicks in big time.

I am mad that I have an eating disorder. Partly, I'm embarrassed. I feel dumb, I feel vain, I feel...well I don't know exactly how I feel. I'm mad I couldn't stop it, I'm mad that I sought treatment when I clearly could have lost more weight. All of these things.

But mad at the eating disorder itself? Not really.

CCL says to look at the things that I've lost because of the anorexia. Like any sort of semblance of normality. Money for treatment. Friends. Time- good God, the time!

I feel a little bit sad, but not one drop of anger. Mostly numbness.

What am I supposed to do about it?

I know the anger is supposed to help me fight Ed even harder, give him the total boot from my life.

I just can't feel that anger.

I think: maybe if I had something to compare it to. Like compare "now" to sometime before the eating disorder, to when a trip down the cereal aisle wouldn't leave me gibbering in fear. When a can of soup was a can of soup, and not a treacherous Nutrition Facts label with calories and carbs, fat grams and sodium.

I remember that these things existed, these cans of soups and journeys down Aisle Nine, but I don't remember what they were. I don't remember that feeling. It has simply...vanished. Should I be mad that simple things like this are fraught with difficulties? Probably. But I'm not. I just shrug my shoulders and try to get on with things.

Is this bad? I feel somehow defective that I can't get more emotionality behind my feelings about my eating disorder. I know I am still scared of it. I know that much.

I can almost totally cut myself off from my feelings, even when I'm not neck-deep in behaviors. I can function at a surface level. But it's almost as if I lock a part of myself away, insulate it from the almost certain deluge of feelings that will overtake me. This means that, almost inevitably, I lock away the happy feelings, but that hasn't been much of a big deal in the past, you know, decade or so.

My advisor said that if I hadn't told her about the eating disorder in the writing samples I submitted to the program, she never would have guessed. I know that's a good thing, but I still didn't know quite how to take it.

So. This getting-mad-at-the-eating-disorder-thing. How do I go about doing it? I can easily do it on the behalf of others, because their suffering is so obviously greater than my own (I know, I know- this makes no sense, but it's true. So there.). I almost feel I've earned the pain and suffering. Kind of like "girls who play with fire are going to get burned." I've gotten burned, and it hurts, and I don't deny it. But I feel- just a little bit- like I kind of asked for it.

We'll see how long I let those last 3 or 4 sentences up.

Hitting publish.

Okay, so apparently I'm a little slow on the uptake here, but my blog was featured on Isabelle Mori's recent Carnival of Eating Disorders.

Read the entire post here.

My dear friend Faith is also featured.

Happy reading!

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.

This week was incredibly difficult. I was very stressed, not sleeping much, and just generally cracking up a bit. I held it all together pretty well, considering. No one freaked out and asked if I was dying, if I was mental, if I needed a vacation in a straight jacket. Except for one teeny tiny, itsy bitsy thing:

I, uh, wasn't eating very well.

Oops.

I'll preface the next part with: I am getting back on track. I hauled out my old meal plan and have been following that. I want to cut corners. I don't need an extra fruit with that, and if I don't, then I won't have anything to put the peanut butter on. Gee, doesn't that suck.

It's this line of thinking that got me into this pickle in the first place.

There were warning signs, and if I were smart, I would have noticed them. Actually, I was kind of aware of them. I just didn't think they were worth doing anything about. The thoughts were the same old, same old (you're fat, gross, ugly, lazy. You eat crap. You need to exercise more. I think ya'll know the drill). But this time, it was accompanied by a specific plan of action. As in, "Tomorrow I'm going to eat X calories less. The calories that I eat will be a nice, round number* This will feel better."

It sounds like the old "control" issue, and it is, just not in the way that you think. I'm not trying to control my food when I fall deep into the anorexia. I'm trying to control my FEARS of the food. The fears are so intense that I'll develop any number of ways (read: rituals) to decrease those fears, to neutralize them. Which is the exact definition of OCD.

Which is what I see the eating disorder as: another iteration of the OCD.

I knew I was on dangerous ground as the past two weeks progressed. I'm not dumb. I could read the writing on the wall. I had just convinced myself that I could handle this. That I could afford to lose a few pounds.

Denial. I was not so far into denial that I was in Sudan or anything, but still. Definitely swimming.

What I didn't realize was the depth of the waters I had gotten myself into. Not until I started to swim out.

Not denial.

I had grossly underestimated the strength of the eating disorder. You'd think I would have learned, after almost 8 years. You really think I would have learned. But I haven't. At least not well enough. Could this be my last learning experience? Perhaps. Hopefully my last learning experience of this kind, but I don't my last one. I got cocky, I think. I thought I was strong enough to beat him as his own game. And maybe I could have...except once I got close, he would have changed the rules.

Ed is a merciless bastard. He will drown me without a second thought. I will be another body for him, a tally mark on the wall, a statistic. And then he'll move on.

I can get him out of my life, but I can't beat him at his own game. I don't know that it matters, whether or not I can beat him at his own game. Frankly, I don't think I want to play anymore. So he can sit and pout for as long as he wants. I don't need to prove anything to him.

*One of my OCD things is my obsession with the number 5. I had these rules where I could only eat things with "nice" numbers of calories. A 100 calorie yogurt was actually better than a 90 calorie one. Unless I was having 1/2 cup of Fiber One, which was 60 calories, and that with the yogurt would be 150 calories, which was a nice number. I also had to eat a certain amount of fiber each day, and only a tiny bit of salt. There were numbers for each of these- also numbers I deemed "nice," and all of this had to be done within a "nice" number of calories. The calorie amount was actually enough to maintain my weight. But I still ended up malnourished because there was about 2 combinations of foods that I could eat in order to follow all of my rules.

**Now that I write this out, I'm realizing just how whacked this really was.

*** I still have issues with the number 5 and "nice" numbers of calories. Even if I don't add them up, I like those "nice" numbers.

I'm having this rather odd experience of doing well and actually kind of maybe feeling it. I can go out with friends. I'm still neurotic about food, but I can and do eat enough to maintain my weight.

At the same time, it's still a tremendous battle. There are many days when I don't want to eat, when I would rather go back to restricting because it's easier and I know what it is. I have these constant thoughts telling me, "You can do this. Really, you can. Do you need that granola bar? That piece of cheese? That extra helping?"

And all I can think to reply is, "Duh- I know I can do this. I've been doing it the past 8 years. It's not rocket science. But I can't. I won't."

I'm left with an enormously crappy feeling at the end of it all. Okay, fine, I ate the food that I needed to. I get that this is a victory. But it feels like a hollow one. The progress is that I can respond to those eating disordered thoughts in a positive and healthy way. I just want those thoughts to go away.

I remember the night before I decided (rather, was told to go) into residential treatment almost 2 years ago now. I lay in bed, shivering and sobbing, "Cure me or kill me. Cure me or kill me. I don't care which, but I don't want this anymore."

No, I'm not desperate, and I do indeed believe in recovery.

I'm just wondering if I'll get there in a meaningful amount of time.

It's like when you're in a car on vacation, stuck in the backseat with your bratty older brother. There's the usual "He's touching me! He's touching...ME!" And Mom makes the bro move his foot a millimeter away from yours but the air conditioner is broken, you're hungry and you really really have to pee. This is when the whining begins: "Are we there yet?"

Are
we
there
yet?

Now? Are we there now?

How...much...long...errrrr?

He's touching me!
She started it!

Are...
we...
there...
yet?

That's the feeling I'm having. Even as a kid, stuck in a car, I knew we would eventually get to where we were going. It was a matter of when. And all I can see around me is the flat cornfields of Iowa- nothing to do, no "I Spy" games to play, just corn. Miles and miles of corn.

I knew there were phases of recovery, I just didn't know one of them was called "Corn."

I think some of it might be the fact that I'm, um, bored. Anorexia is quite boring. You do the same thing, day in and day out. It's comforting, after a fashion, but also boring. A boring I liked, for a while. Recovery also gets quite boring. Having your therapist on speed dial (Steph, you're still there!). Taking your meds twice a day. Paying outrageous bills at the pharmacy. Making sure to eat enough fat. And protein.

It's a task, a chore. Like laundry. Or ironing. (Though, considering how infrequently I iron, maybe it's not like ironing). Or the dishes. I do the dishes at least once a day. And since you can't cook in paper plates or eat cereal off of them,* eventually you have to suck it up and do the freaking dishes. With recovery, it's either get busy living or get busy dying. I can keep up with the dishes now, I know I can do them, that I need to do them, but still they keep piling up.

What else do you do? You run some hot water, grab a sponge, and get to work.

*One of my dear friends in college would put cereal in a big quart sized baggie, pour milk in, and eat it with a plastic spoon as she walked to class. Seriously. I found it quite humorous and impressive.

I have this nagging sense of dread. Doom shall follow. I know it. I can feel it in my bones, deep down inside, my heart tapping nervously in my chest.

Things are, of course, going well.

I am certain this can't and won't last.

I know- things are going to suck at some point in the future. That is the nature of life.

Yet. And yet.

This is an entirely new phenomenon in my life. Events just don't go smoothly. I've had a breakdown upon starting school since I was 11 and starting middle school. Every damn time. So here I am, in my nice little apartment, looking around at the pigeons divebombing the building and waiting like Chicken Little for the sky to start falling.

I feel like I'm missing something. Something big. Really big.

Could I be relapsing and not know it?

If things start going too well, am I going to get too relaxed and get fat?

Erm. Nice to know that little fear of mine. I don't want to get un-paranoid about food and weight because then I will gain like no tomorrow and wham! wind up fat.

I know this isn't realistic. I know that I wouldn't care if it happened to one of my friends. They'd still be my friend. Then again, I still don't quite know that I'm my own friend, so would it really matter?

So here I sit. Waiting.

I don't get this. I can't enjoy the good times because I'm too busy looking over my shoulder for one of the bad times to come flying at me again. This won't last. Breakdowns in my program are somewhat legendary. Granted, my breakdowns are somewhat more intense than the average person's. I want to tell myself: enjoy this while it lasts. Because it won't.

I think I'm missing something. That I should be worried and terrified about something and I'm not and that means something hugely bad is going to happen.

I'm walking down this dark alley, and it opens into a dimly lit street corner. I can hear the dripdripdrip of the rainwater splashing off the gutter. The screech of far-away tires followed by a wailing siren. My footsteps echo, the loudest thing in earshot. I whip my head around back and forth, eyes darting over each shoulder. The bad guy is there. Somewhere. I grip my car keys tighter and my heart begins to race.

Is the boogieman there? I don't know. It certainly seems that way. Every horror film has a scene like this, where the protagonist should be afraid (very afraid) only they can't see the danger lurking. And just when you think they're safe, the bad guy leaps out and strangles them.

That feeling. The watching and waiting knowing the main character is in danger but you don't know when and where it will strike.

That's how I'm feeling.

Wariness is good. I know Ed rarely gives a whole lot of warning before he begins to worm his way back into my life. I do need to watch out. He's gotten me that way before. I'm not stupid enough to think he's gone entirely. But the constant watching and waiting is getting to me.

And pissing me off.

This anxiety over things, even things that don't exist, has been my downfall in the past. Rationally, I should save my worry for something real. Oprah would say that she's done the excessive worry thing and then she learned that life is short, etc. She has all the answers. I don't get answers like that. My income is also several orders of magnitude less than hers, so there's that.

I'm worried that I'm worried too much about nothing, and simultaneously worried that I'm not worried enough. That I'm missing something.

I wish my mind would just pick. Either I should be worried or I shouldn't. If nothing is going wrong, then why freak out?

Because this is when Ed usually strikes. Only now I'm afraid I will have worn myself out so much that if he does, I might not have the strength and mental fortitude to keep him at bay.

Sometimes I hate my brain.

I've been running around like crazy as the move date bears down. It makes me stressed and tired. Obviously.

I thought I was doing good with preparing for my class. Yes, I have quite a bit done. But I have underestimated how much more has yet to be done. So mild freak out.

Then there's the realization of figuring out what clothes to bring. And other nagging decisions times about 100. Get the oil changed and tires rotated in my car. Get meal ideas in place.

I hate change.

I.
Hate.
It.

While I've gotten a little better at it, I still hate it passionately. I like predictability. Not always sameness (going into work and doing the same thing all day every day sounds like torture), but predictability. I can handle changes in plans, as long as they're announced in advance.

My brain is in la-la land, trying to chase away these thoughts. I know that turning to Ed right now would help. I never slip in a conscious sort of way, as in "I'm feeling stressed, therefore I won't eat because it would help." Rather it's a physiological response to stress, an odd endorphin-type response that sometimes I feel I have no control over.

At first, though, I do. There's a point at which I become too starved and frankly insane and literally can't choose, but I can learn to tell Ed to go sod off. He's always there, though, like the teacher in the Snoopy cartoons going "wah wah wah wah wah" blathering on about nothing but I still know he's there. Waiting. Waiting for any signs of weakness, any slight indication that my guard might be down.

I'm tired of keeping my guard up. Not in the I-want-to-give-up sort of way, but in the this-is-freaking-hard-work sort of way. Wouldn't it be nice to let my guard down? To just sit back and take a couple of breaths? I want to know when I'll get there, if I'll get there.

I do, however, continue to have faith in my recovery. I really do.

But damn wouldn't a break be nice.