So yes. I've mentioned in previous posts that TNT talked me into joining an online dating site, and that the wonderful folks at Jezebel interviewed me about it.

Thus far, the dating thing has been a bit of a disappointment. I went on one date, which led no where. Other than that, I have pretty much zero response. Well, there was the one 52-year-old who contacted me with a message that said "UR Pretty. Wanna go out?" Needless to say, it wasn't that hard to turn that particular offer down, even knowing there weren't any waiting in the wings.

I've pulled back a little bit- I still check my account, but I'm not as...how shall we say...enthused as I was at the beginning. I haven't given up entirely, but I'm feeling more than a bit pessimistic about the whole thing. Part of me is relieved because this dating thing is so damn stressful, and not really from an ED standpoint.

What stresses me out the most about dating is the spending money issues. Long before I restricted food, I restricted spending money. This hasn't been all bad--I have money saved up for a down payment on my first place--but it's more of the mindset that's problematic. I feel tremendously guilty for spending money. Some of you have paid witness to my recent Twitter recriminations about $1 in overdue library fines. I remember going to the mall with my friends in high school, and I almost never bought anything. I had two part-time jobs at the time (in total, I worked about 20 hours a week), so it wasn't like I didn't have the money. But I hated the idea of spending money.

My one area of weakness is books. But other than that...

Dating costs money, and that stresses me out. Yes, money is tight because of my recent transition to full-time freelancing, but it's not the math that's stressing me out. It's the idea of spending money, or doing something different, that really freaks me out. I equate spending money with guilt.

Both of my parents were frugal before it was cool to be frugal, and I know that played into it. But neither of my parents seem to have this guilt-ridden relationship with spending. To me, spending money brings up the same kind of guilt as eating used to.

Dating has thus been a very complicated, interesting process. It's brought up way more issues than I even thought it might. From a recovery standpoint, I'm doing okay (well, based on one date I'm doing okay). That's been the least of my concerns, oddly. But we shall see what happens.

Many of the conversations I have with customers in the bakery are repetitive and predictable. Most of this is pretty expected: we have quite a number of items, but not that many. You can only ask for so many things. But part of the repetitive nature of the conversation has to do with people (mainly women) commenting about how fattening everything is, how can I be skinny and work in a bakery?!?, and how what they're buying is for "someone else."

I just want to shake some of them* and say "I don't care. Really. I'm not judging you for buying a sweet treat. I really don't care. What's more, I'm kind of glad you indulge your overpriced sweet tooth because it means I have a job. And it's not my dream job, but I do rather like getting a paycheck."

What these people are really doing is apologizing for buying something "fattening" and "tempting." I have plenty of issues with apologizing, to be sure, but the cultural mea culpa when it comes to eating is something else. I want to say "You are buying food in a grocery store- there's nothing to be ashamed of!"

A woman yesterday bought an eclair and said it was for her husband. She had just started Weight Watchers and wanted to "be good" so she was going to watch him eat it, "with tears running down my cheeks." All I could think was: and I'm the one with the eating disorder? Why must everyone else be so conflicted about something that my treatment team has been telling me for years is a good and necessary part of life?

More than that, it's really boring. I am so incredibly sick of thinking about food and weight and good and bad and should I or shouldn't I. To have these thoughts echoed in the people around me is just annoying. And so I want to say (to them and to me):

It's just food.
Really.
That's all.
You don't have to feel guilty
or ashamed
for eating food you like.
There's nothing wrong.
I'm not judging you.
It's just dessert.
Enjoy it.
And then move on.

*Not the least of which was the old lady who yelled at me for mislabeling the pecan cinnamon rolls as our regular cinnamon rolls. I told her that wasn't pecans on top, just streusel. She said no, it was pecans. I said it was streusel and grabbed several other boxes to show her. She got angrier and angrier, saying No, it's PECANS, until I finally convinced her that it was streusel by showing her the pecan rolls. And she said "Well, how can I see that without my glasses?"

Their eyes might have been watching god, according to Zora Neale Hurston, but my eyes were watching Lisa.* Lisa is one of my co-workers. I work in a moderately large office, although I don't always interact with other people on staff a whole lot. The times when I do tend to be, alas, in the kitchenette.

Some of my co-workers have a dysfunctional relationship with food. It's obvious--to me, anyway. Some appear more outwardly normal. And then there's Lisa.

She's almost like a breath of fresh air. It sounds cheesy, and maybe it is, but that's really how I feel when I'm in the kitchen with her. The most revolutionary thing about her? She never apologizes for eating. Or makes any excuses. None of this "I shouldn't but I'm gonna," or laments of how much she'll pay for this at the gym, or saying she was "good" yesterday so why not?

She'll just look at the tray of whatever someone brought in, say something like "That looks good," take it, and leave. Or just look, think for a second, and leave. No drama. No Second Book of Lamentations. No calorie counting abacus going clickety-clack in her brain.

Mostly what astonishes me about Lisa is her coffee. She goes to Starbucks pretty much everyday, and she gets a latte, extra hot. After she finishes her latte, she makes a mocha using supplies in the kitchenette, namely hot cocoa mix, a packet of Splenda, two coffee pouches,** and two little tubs of flavored coffee creamer. Not the plain Mini Moos, but the actual flavored kind.

This boggles my mind. Absolutely boggles my mind. The hot cocoa mix has calories, and ditto for the coffee creamer. And yet there she is, drinking them nearly every day. Drinking them and enjoying them, as they were meant to be enjoyed.

When I make my coffee, I use the actual coffee pouch, some sweetener, and I hesitate at the box of Mini Moos. I know each little tub has 10 calories (it's printed on the box they come in), and I sit there and think through everything I have eaten or have planned to eat and try and determine if those 10 calories will make a difference. I do the mental gymnastics of calorie counting: will this little tub of creamer push me over the line into "too much"? Will it make my totals come out to a "not nice" number? Am I being greedy? Gluttonous? Is this stupid little tub of creamer just simply too much?

Yes, sez my brain. Yes it is. So I go without.

Rationally, this makes no sense and I think I even understand on some level that this makes no sense. That when you're moderately hypermetabolic, 10 calories is like pissing on a forest fire. It's nothing. And that my body doesn't "count" calories in the way that my brain does, that my ATP synthase enzymes don't really give a crap about the OCD hocus pocus that makes my anxiety just a teensy bit better.

Except eating disorders aren't rational. And I fear saying yes far more than I fear saying no. I fear the process of deciding and having to live with my decision even more. I'd rather deny myself than deal with the invariable guilt that comes from opening the creamer and putting it in my coffee. I'd rather deal with regret than live with guilt.

Why guilt over coffee creamer? Maybe the answer is as simple as I have an eating disorder and it's part of the territory. Maybe it's as complicated as wanting in a culture that systematically denies your appetites, or finding it easier to say no than yes.

To Lisa, it's just coffee creamer. And that's why I stand back and just drink it in, hoping that her spirit will rub off on me, just a little bit.

*Not her real name. And not any of my other co-workers' names, either. I just felt weird using her first initial throughout the entire post, so I made up a name.

**We have a Flavia machine that brews individual cups. It's a bit of an environmental disaster, but seeing as no one can remember to refill the water cooler, I'm not thinking a communal coffee pot would be successful.

My body has been freakishly tired lately, and last night I did something very unusual for me: I went to bed early. I was in bed at 10:30, and asleep by 11. Not only that, I didn't wake up until 10:15 this morning. I slept right through the night. Well, Aria woke me up once climbing all over my pillows and such, but otherwise, I slept right through the night.

And to top it all off, I took another nap this afternoon for about an hour and a half.

Even though a part of me knows I needed the rest, most of me feels pretty guilty. My apartment needs to be picked up. I have another tasks that should be accomplished one of these days. Instead, I slept.

Yes, I know, I will probably be more efficient at these tasks now that I am rested. I get that. But I also get that this is not rational, so rationalizing things with me probably isn't going to be all that effective. Like my old high school history teacher said: if you didn't reason your way into it, I can't reason you out of it.

I have had issues with sleep way before my food issues cropped up. One of my college friends called it, jokingly, "sleep anorexia," and I think there's some truth to that. The deliberate lack of sleep was due, in that case as well, to OCD. I was compulsively studying.

It sounds odd, right? I had all As for the semester (as always- I've never once gotten a B+. You'll know if I do because the world will stop and you will hear a sound something akin to Edvard Munch's "The Scream."), but I was absolutely petrified that there would be a question on a test that I wouldn't be able to answer. So I studied for hours each day. I had to log over 40 hours a week. Yes, I kept track. This was also independent of class and lab time (over 20 hours) and a part time job (over 20 hours). I color coded my notes, copying them out perfectly. One mistake and I had to chuck the page and start over. I memorized chunks of my biochem textbook. For a calc exam, I had to re-do every homework problem until I could do it--you guessed it!--perfectly.

I was a miserable anxious mess.

Lots of people pride themselves on being the most stressed, or being able to go with the least sleep. There's an appeal there, a sort of I-have-more-guts-than-you kind of thing. A willpower kind of thing.

Now, I don't want a job that will force me to work long hours. Partly, I don't want to give up my routine, I don't want to have to eat out all the time because I'm never home to cook, and I don't want to be too busy to exercise like I do. I also do my freelance writing and blogging and Etsy stuff in the evenings, so maybe it really isn't all that different. But all of that work has just lost its appeal. For all of the 11 years of education I've had since middle school, I worked myself to the bone.

Yet I can't shake those last vestiges of that thinking- the idea that I need to be productive, that I'm lazy if I let myself sleep. I don't know if there's a solution. I think I need to simply be more like Aria, who I can guarantee doesn't feel guilty for eating OR sleeping!

Being a part of the Eating Disorders Lobby Day was incredibly empowering. "Fun" is not perhaps the right word for it; "worthwhile" certainly is. However, I was left with some nagging little feelings that took me a while to sort out.

Lobby Day made me feel incredibly guilty.

That I was doing well enough in recovery to go.

That I ate two little bags of chips with my sandwich on the way home.

That my mom was able and willing and happy to come with me.

Part of the frustrations of eating disorders--both for those who have them and those who love people with eating disorders--is an inability to realize you're sick. It's different than denial, if in subtle but significant ways. The point is this: I still don't think I was that sick. I've written two books about my experiences, and I still don't think I was really sick. I have plenty of bouts of irrationality, but I am able to sort through those with a fair amount of skill and get on with things (even if I end up insisting that I am right but going along with the so obviously wrong beliefs of everyone else will get me what I want).

However, eight years and two books later, it doesn't register that I was sick. I know I looked thinner, but I didn't think I was, you know, skinny. Certainly not emaciated. And certainly not in danger of dying from starvation and cardiac abnormalities. I was told this, many times, by family, friends, and medical professionals. To me, they were the delusional ones. I rarely saw myself as fat, but there was NOTHING WRONG WITH MY WEIGHT, thank you very much. Or my eating habits.

I still don't believe them. Which means that acknowledging my recovery makes me feel very guilty.

Why? I wasn't sick enough to "deserve" it. I didn't suffer enough. Or long enough. Or lose enough weight. How dare I be happy if I didn't have it bad to begin with? I was a faker, a charlatan, a fraud.

Why, I ask myself, did I survive and enter recovery when so many other people didn't. People like Anna and Andrea, who died as a result of their eating disorders. People like Kathleen who struggled for 18 years. People who were tube fed or on life support.

I no longer think of these as status symbols; I'm not jealous of those who were sicker than I. They only reason I wish I were them is that I feel it would make recovery easier to accept if I was actually, really truly sick. Which given the nature of eating disorders means that no matter how ill I had gotten, I still wouldn't have seen it.

So why did I make it out of this upside-down, topsy turvy world of anorexia? I know I owe some of it to the hard work I did in recovery. I also know that I owe even more to the fact that my mom decided to stop sitting around the watching me starve. I had a great treatment team. I could (mostly) afford the treatments that insurance refused to pay for. Yet still the guilt remains.

Why was I lucky enough to have these things so easily at my disposal? Why me? Why me and not them? Maybe it was dumb luck, cosmic karma of the strangest kind. Who knows.

I want to see myself as having been ill. In a sense, that knowledge feels it will set my mind at ease, that I will be able to let go of the unease I feel when I discuss my illness and recovery. I've been known to make my story sound worse than it really is, not because I want sympathy but because I want to convince myself (and others!) that I really was sick. That I have a right to be here with everyone else in recovery.

The other supreme irony is that no one else in this "club" really gives a damn.

I was in Boston over the weekend for a conference (a bit of a last-minute deal), and my last day there, I woke up feeling utterly terrible. In fact, terrible doesn't even come close to describing it. That I had a 7-hour train ride back home didn't make things seem any better.

The past few days have been terrible. Aches and pains, hacking cough, stuffy nose, and exhaustion. Take yesterday. I woke up at 10 am, slept from 12:30 to 3pm, then again from 5pm to 7:15pm, and was back asleep at 10pm. I was, however, up bright and early this morning at 7:45.

I'm feeling much better than yesterday, which means the moral of the story is that when your body tells you to rest, you really should try and listen. I actually laid on the couch most of Monday afternoon, watching DVDs and crap TV because my cough was too bad to sleep. Even thinking about exercising has been too exhausting to consider, and probably will be for the next week or so.

This makes me feel quite guilty. That I'm lazy. That being sick is no excuse for "getting off my game." I've gotten more rational and realisitic lately to understand that 100% of my usual wasn't going to happen while falling over with the flu. Yet I have reading for class tomorrow (a whole book!) that's 300 pages long, and I'm only 100 pages into it. This is also for the professor who yelled at me for coming to class yesterday because I was sick, so go figure.

My diet for the past week (when you combine the traveling and the illness) has consisted largely of take out. Yes, again, the guilt. For spending the money. For being too lazy to cook. For eating crap. I know it's what I need to do. I know this very well. I just wish I could make peace with it.

I have to go back to the health clinic in an hour for a re-check. They were really concerned about my lung capacity, which was 2/3 of normal. I'm feeling much better than before, but the cough is still nasty. My abs feel like they've been smacked with a baseball bat. Kind of in this fashion:



We shall see what turns up.

I'm having a very dichotomous day. Parts of it were really good- someone bought one of my pieces of jewelry (you know who you are, and it's in the mail!), and parts of it have left me simply quiet and confused.

I'm hormonal right now. More hormonal than usual. I know it's PMS, but when I scarf down half a bag of chips (the salty cravings are a dead giveaway, by the way. Usually it's chocolate and gummi bears. I never said it made sense.), I feel horribly, wretchedly guilty. Fat.

My jeans feel tighter. I don't think they can be, but they feel tighter. Why couldn't I binge on...I don't know...lettuce. Carrots. Celery. Something more virtuous.

It goes without saying that chips are bad and evil.

I want to "be strong." To "get with the program." To go back to those days when I was thin and strong and people wanted to be just like me. Look like me. When they always commented on how tiny I was.

Now I just feel so ordinary. Like any other of the billions of women out there craving things during PMS. I feel that people are watching me, watching my body, passing judgement. Thighs? Too large. Hips? Too curvy. Stomach? Not flat enough. Just me, just parts of me that can never quite add up.

I wish I didn't hunger for things. I don't want to want things, but I don't know how NOT to.

I am incredibly frustrated. Why did I eat those things if I knew they would make me feel like crap?

Because, oh, right- I was hungry.

That hungry? Hungry enough? Full? Too full?

Better be too hungry than too full.

That is a maxim with which I am all too familiar. I hear Ed in my head telling me "Tomorrow you will be virtuous. Tomorrow I will help you be strong."

Foods have become equivalent with morality. If you eat only salads, you're "good." Chocolate is a sin, an indulgence, something you should feel guilty about. No one ever says "Lettuce- that secret indulgence." They say that about chocolate, though. It makes me feel weak for eating those things, weak for wanting those things.

I guess Oscar Wilde said it best: I can resist everything except temptation.

I don't want to judge myself based on a post-dinner nosh. Yet I do. I feel the world judging me. I know most of the world rightly doesn't give a shit. But other people- they admire anorexia. Wow. Imagine someone so strong she doesn't even eat her own birthday cake. Someone so strong she nearly starves to death. Someone so strong even the people at the gym think she's a devoted fitness nut.

I'm not that dense- it's like admiring someone's figure after they had chemo and lost all this weight (and hair!). Nice going there, buddy. I know there are good things to be had in recovery and that I am finding them. But there's also this part I'm giving up. The part of delusional self-confidence. My thinness trump card. My life might be shit, but hey, I'm thin. Say whatever you want about me, I'm thin. I eat less, I exercise more, I'm thinner than you. Eating means that all of those anxieties (am I good enough, perfect enough?) come flying back in my face. I want to feel at peace with myself. I don't need to look in the mirror and think "yay." But it'd be nice to look in the mirror and at least not want to cry. Or look in the mirror at all.

It's hard for me to admit this, when I have a new book on eating disorders coming out in July. And it's a self-help book to boot. What a role model I am, huh? I know I wasn't expected to be perfect when I signed the contract. That was not one of the little paragraph whatsits that was in there. I can go and speak in front of audiences and give them reassurances and actually mean it. I'm very rarely completely full of shit. But then there are the darker moments like these when I begin to realize the monumental task I have undertaken, and begin to wonder whether I can really make it. It would be easier to stop here. Say, "good enough," and move on. I don't think I want that, and so I push forward.

As long as you keep putting one foot in front of the other, you'll eventually get somewhere.

(Thanks, E, for that thought.)