In one of the comments from the other day's post, one of my readers posted the following comment:

You know... I relate to a lot of what you said... but a couple things popped out at me, and it made me wonder if you're remembering the eating disorder in a distortedly positive light? For instance, you said, "Starving made me feel better. Life...didn't." If you really think about it, do you really think starving made you feel better? For me, I know that I thought I preferred to feel starved. I know that I didn't feel as much self-disgust or as much constant anxiety. But I did feel cold, I cried a lot, I had a recording of calorie counts on repeat in my head, and my world was very narrow. That didn't really feel better than life. I just thought it did. And it's easy to explain to other people that you "feel better" in the eating disorder... but you only feel better in the eating disorder when you're still in the eating disorder. But really take a second to pause and try to remember the eating disorder accurately. Did you really feel better in a starved state?

It's true on many levels.

I think it gets to how we remember the eating disorder. Memory is a funny thing- it's not a videorecording of exactly what happened. It's a highly edited version of what happened, and we tend to remember different facets of different events. What got ingrained in my memory was the quick feel-better sensation that restricting and over-exercising gave me.

Which is true, of course. It's a primal feeling. And the relief from anxiety and depression were things that my brain really wanted to hang on to.

What got edited out, however, was all of the nasty stuff that followed. The cold. The despair. The loneliness. Those were later, further down the line, and therefore distanced as consequences of the eating disordered behavior. It's like when doctors and therapists told me that I would die if I didn't start eating. The reason that sort of warning never really worked was that potential death was nebulous and hazy, as well as sometime in the future. The terror about eating was right here, right now, and very, very real. When your brain kicks into fear mode, it's focused on ways to get rid of the fear NOW. Not five minutes from now, not five seconds from now, NOW.

Still, I can make myself remember that the quick fix and anxiety relief always bring less-than-pleasant consequences. That it's all too easy to romanticize anorexia and forget that it really does make you miserable. Anorexia had benefits, yes, but those benefits were very short-term and wore off all too quickly.

I've gotten back on track after my struggles a week or two ago, and it got me thinking about the idea of momentum.The first few days of getting used to eating on a regular schedule were really difficult--stressful and anxiety-provoking. But as these positive behaviors gained momentum, it became much easier. It's still not quite as easy as before I slipped a few weeks ago, but it's getting there.

Recovery behaviors have momentum, and so do ED behaviors. How many of us have done something "just once" and really, truly meant "just this once"? My hand is raised like Hermione's. But behaviors have momentum, and just once becomes just twice becomes a routine.

I picture behavior momentum as a hill: recovery behaviors are going uphill, ED behaviors going downhill. Illustrated as follows:

I'm thinking back to my college physics class (it was a nightmare even for geeky me, so I will try to keep this as short and basic as possible) when we studied acceleration and momentum. A few days ago, I bought one of those jumbo boxes of kitty litter at Costco, and pushed it out to my car in a shopping cart. The parking lot had a slight hill, and I had to really push hard at the cart to get it started up the hill. I was fighting gravity, and I had to accelerate the cart to get it up the hill. This required no small amount of effort, also considering I had other heavy stuff in the cart. But once I got the cart going--once it had a certain amount of momentum--pushing it up the hill wasn't particularly difficult. Turning or stopping were...interesting, but just pushing in a straight line was simple.

It's the same with recovery: once you push through the initial effort, recovery behaviors gain momentum. They get easier. It doesn't take the same amount of effort to do the right thing.

Relapse behaviors are going downhill. It takes much less to get that momentum building. If I had poised my cart at the top of a hill and just given it a nudge, it would have sped off on its own. And stopping a speeding cart would have been much harder the more speed the cart gained. So it goes with an eating disorder. Relapse takes less effort and is harder to stop. It tends to gain momentum much faster than recovery.

For some reason, having that visual image in my head has really helped me. It lets me stop fixating on why recovery is so damn hard and simply focus on pushing the massive box of kitty litter up the hill. It also makes me more cautious when I'm teetering at the top of the hill.  Being close to speeding off is very different from, you know, actually speeding off. In the end, it's all about building the kind of momentum you want in your life.

This past September, I upgraded my Blackberry to an Android. I love my new phone. The one problem I have is that the battery loses juice really quickly. I Googled the problem, and I found some apps that can shut down the other apps not in use that are slowing down the processor and sucking the battery dry.

{{In fact, my phone just eeped at me that it needs to be plugged in.}}

I was aware, of course, that apps run even when you're not actually using them, but I didn't know how much power they sucked up. On days when I'm not using my phone a lot--it's rare, but it happens!--the apps running in the background don't really pose much of a problem. I just plug in my phone before I go to bed like usual and all is well. Most days, however, I use my phone for pretty much everything, especially since I found a free Sudoku app, which keeps me entertained on my nightly Adventures in Insomnia.

I've been pretty busy with things lately, mostly work and writing stuff. I'm chugging along on my book, I've been freelancing, I've been crocheting, doing the recovery stuff. If I were my phone, I would be in a period of almost constant usage. It makes the ED stuff painfully obvious because there's not much energy leftover.

The danger zone for me is when I'm bored or work is slower. It's when the ED stuff isn't as obvious. The background apps suck the same amount of energy regardless, but it's harder to recognize all the time and energy it's using. The same for the eating disorder. Thoughts and behaviors suck up the same amount of effort whether I'm busy or not. I'm better able to recognize and fight them when I know there's lots of stuff on the line because I know I don't have that extra energy to spare.

Too much spare time isn't my friend. My brain is always working, always thinking. If I'm not thinking about nerdy stuff or yarn stuff or other stuff, then my brain will find other things to think about. Things like food, weight, calories, and exercise. It's hard to balance, since being too busy ratchets up the stress level to the point where I find myself reaching for the volume knob that is the eating disorder to turn down some of the stress.

Like so many things in recovery, it's a balancing act.  But this knowledge is helpful--I know that letting myself get too bored is just as bad as getting too busy. For now, being busy is good for my recovery. Not to distract me from anxiety, depression, and all of that other crap, but to make it painfully obvious just how much the ED takes out of me.

When I went on vacation last week, I knew there was a lot of activities I would want to do.  I spoke with my therapist about being more active than usual, which she said was fine, as long as I ate more to compensate.  So I ate a bit off the meal plan, and all worked out well.

We've discussed this in the past, the idea of eating "extra."  That is, eating outside of scheduled snacks and meals, or eating more food than "required" at those times.  Not surprisingly, this freaks me out.  I've never been a rule-breaker.  The very idea terrifies me.  Part of it is the sense that the rules are the rules, and you don't break the rules.  If I do think a rule is silly, I often am too anxious to go outside the prescribed letter of the law anyway.  I rely on rules (many of them self-imposed, but rules nonetheless) to help me cope with anxiety. Breaking a rule is anxiety-provoking in and of itself.  Breaking an ED rule is even more so.

But my therapist raised a really good point.

It's not "extra" if you're hungry or you've been more active.  That food is necessary.

I've often complained to her about how horrible I feel when I eat food that isn't on my meal plan*.  And almost every time, my therapist said that my weight stayed the same and so my body needed every calorie.  This meant that those "extras" weren't extra at all--they were more like little "necessaries."

Oh.

An extra is eating some dessert because it looks good, even though you've just had dinner and aren't all that hungry.  It's finishing all of your favorite entree at your favorite restaurant because you love it, even though you started feeling full near the end.  That sort of thing.  Eating in response to hunger is never "extra," even though the food may not appear on any piece of paper.

The obvious solution would be a new rule to "eat when hungry."  Except implementing this rule means changing the old rule of "eat what's on the plan," which means facing the anxiety of rule-breaking AND change, neither of which I do well at.  I also mistrust hunger signals and never quite know (unless I'm ready to gnaw on my neighbor's arm) if I'm really hungry or just think I am or if what I think might be hunger means I should eat something or get something to drink or just suck it up.

Quite a quandry.

*I'm guessing right now that I'm going to get comments saying I should ditch the meal plan.  The problem is that I would likely undereat without the guidelines. My instincts on what I "need" to eat aren't the greatest. A meal plan can be a double-edged sword, but I think the positives outweigh the negatives at this point.

In the book I was reading the other day (that I blogged about here), there was another quote from a cancer patient about how she coped with all of her treatments.

She said that cancer had become "her new normal."

I related a lot to that.  Recovery has to become my new normal.  For so long, the eating disorder was "normal."  Even if I could see that my behaviors were bizarre (eating cottage cheese, curd by curd, with a fork), they were normal to me.  The hours of exercise? They were just what I did. And it's hard to know exactly how crappy you feel when you don't have anything to compare it to--at least, not that you remember.  The eating disorder is crazy-making, it's bizarre, but it was also completely and utterly normal.

Much of the work I'm doing now is making recovery my new normal.  Breaking those old ED habits and making recovery stuff seem the normal, natural thing to do.

It's hard, when you look at recovery every from a practical standpoint.  The endless appointments: signing in, sitting in offices, reading ancient issues of Time Magazine.  Then there are the other food issues, like eating five or six times a day, grocery shopping, meal planning, cooking.  There's also finding ways to fill your time that you used to spend exercising (or binge eating and purging).

You start to look normal, and maybe even start to act somewhat normal.  Not that this is bad, but it doesn't mean that your ED is gone.  It doesn't mean that the ED is gone or even feels like a piece of history.  The ED feels normal and "standard" for a long time, even after the behaviors are long gone. It's much easier for the brain to "learn" ED behaviors than unlearn them. Fear is a strong learning mechanism, and it helps the ED stuff become engrained in our brains. Recovery behaviors don't have that strong fear driving them, and so it takes much, much longer for them to become as solid as the ED was.

Over time, recovery is starting to become my new normal. Not that I don't reserve the right to piss and moan about cooking and food prep, or about the anxiety about not having my food rituals. Part of what makes recovery get easier is that you simply get used to it.  The hard part is getting used to it, but the good thing about the brain is that it can get used to anything.  It adjusted to ED and it will adjust to recovery.

I wish I had one of these videos for my recovery:



You know, being able to speed up time and watch things unfold, rather than just waiting around for infinitesimal changes that no one notices, not even yourself?  Changes are easier to see when you're watching someone's recovery, especially from farther away and with lots of time in between measurements. But living recovery--watching it up close and personal, day in and day out--means that it rarely feels like things are changing, even if they are.  Hence the desire for the time-lapse video.

I guess the good thing is that an oak tree doesn't have the awareness to navel gaze and wonder why the hell it takes so long to get from an acorn to a giant of the forest (or a suburban front lawn).

I was sorting through some of the links I had bookmarked on my Twitter page this morning, trying to use the current lag in work to get some other stuff done.  Like looking at random web pages I had one marked as "potentially useful."

Which is how I found this blog post from PsychCentral on creativity and work. The blogger quotes author Elizabeth Glibert:

Always, at the end of the day, the important thing is only and always that: Get back to work. This is a path for the courageous and the faithful. You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.

It has a lot to do with writing and the creative life, yes.  But it also has a lot to do with recovery.

Many of us start down the road to recovery (if not dragged there, kicking and screaming) mostly because we want to feel better.  The ED is making us miserable.  This isn't to say we're especially keen to stop ED behaviors--an eating disorder does have an adaptive function, after all--but we generally get sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Which makes for a rude awakening when we realize just how miserable recovery is.  It's why many of us find we need the support of a hospital, treatment center, and family/friends.  Recovery is making us even more miserable than the ED (as if that were even possible!), so clearly our goal of feeling better was misguided.  So we piss and moan, something I'm rather expert at.

Get back to work.

I love writing, yes, but the process isn't always pleasant. I regularly sit down in front of my computer feeling like my brains have turned to spaghetti and I have totally forgotten how to put a simple sentence together.  The only solution is to start writing. Get back to work. 

Nor does recovery always seem intuitive or natural or even always more pleasant than the eating disorder. I've fantasized about "taking a break" from recovery or trying to get people to understand just how hard recovery is.  But easy isn't the point, nor is other's recognition.  The hard work of recovery doesn't stop with a pat on the back or even a trip and fall.

At the end of the day, there's only one thing left for us to do: get back to work.

I spent the last few days visiting my relatives in a different state. Aside from the fact that they're generally completely barmy, I survived the visit.  As my parents and I were driving home this morning, my dad was programming the GPS to bring us back home. It should have been relatively straightforward--after all, we knew where home was, and all we needed to do was actually get there.

The problems started when all three of the route options sent us straight through Washington DC at rush hour.  If you've never had to navigate DC traffic during rush hour, let me summarize the basic idea: avoid it at all costs.  So how to get around DC?  We knew there was a way around, but what exactly was that route and how did we get there?

In the end, my dad and I figured out a compromise: we'd follow the GPS for a bit and then pull over and try and figure out an alternate way around DC.  Which worked--kind of.  Until we lost the road that we were supposed to be following and we start driving through the backroads of Maryland and Virginia.  Okay, not so much.  From passing the freeway exit countless times, I knew of a road that was larger (and less nausea-inducing) than the one we were on, and one of the towns where it passed through.  So we plugged the town in, and ultimately found our road.

Except that this post isn't about how to use GPS in all sorts of strange ways the directions really didn't tell you about.  It's sort of about recovery.  As we were figuring out our directions, I was thinking that many times in recovery, I had therapists and guidebooks telling me where I needed to go.  Most of the time, they pointed me in the right directions.  But it's easy to find roads on maps; it's another when you know about traffic patterns, possible construction, and other conditions.

There will probably be a time in your recovery (there was in mine) when the conventional wisdom doesn't quite seem to fit your circumstances.  When life throws you a detour and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.  For me, the biggest disruption was recovery itself.  I had to step off the career path I had mapped out from when I was in middle school because the ED was getting in the way, and I was no longer sure that I wanted what I thought I wanted.  Most GPS systems can handle minor detours and help you get back on track. But it's less helpful with major detours, when all of the directions you had are temporarily less than useful. 

This is when you flip off the GPS and its directions for "home" several hundred miles away.  You're still headed home, of course, towards recovery and life and happiness, but by a different route.  Instead of tackling that entire route, you just take the next fifty or so miles.  Get me to a place that's marginally closer to where I want to be so I can re-evaluate the best route.  Then you keep doing this, over and over and over.

I didn't just wake up and "decide" I wanted to be a writer.  It was a slow series of decision, each of which led me closer and closer to the career I wanted.  With recovery, I intended to bull on through, except that I kept running into detours and roadblocks.  I had to get used to that quasi-human voice saying, so maddeningly patiently, "Recalculating..."

I'm not saying to buck your therapist's advice because it's inconvenient.  It's not about finding ineffective (but less painful) ways of getting to where you want to go.  It's about taking life one turn, one road, one decision at a time.  I always thought that doing this would mean I would forget where I was headed.  Not all decisions would bring me closer to my career goals, which might mean that I find myself the opposite of where I wanted to be.  But it's not an either/or thing.

I never really thought about this until I literally had to switch off the GPS and focus on getting to where I needed to be by the best way I knew.  It meant some detours and a lot of motion sickness, but we also avoided the nasty traffic and arrived home at a decent time.

One of my readers shared this quote from Grey's Anatomy in the comments section the other day, and it just rang so true for me that I had to share it here:

After a trauma your body is at its most vulnerable.
Response time is critical so you’re suddenly surrounded by people; doctors, nurses, specialists, technicians.
Surgery is a team sport; everyone pushing for the finish line, putting you back together again.
But surgery is a trauma in and of itself.
And once it’s over the real healing begins.
We call it recovery.


Recovery is NOT a team sport.
It’s a solitary distance run.
It’s long, and it’s exhausting, and it’s lonely as hell.


The length of your recovery is determined by the extent of your injuries.
And it’s not always successful.
No matter how hard we work at it, some wounds might never fully heal.
You might have to adjust to a whole new way of living.
Things may have changed too radically to ever go back to what they were.
You might not even recognize yourself.
It’s like you haven’t recovered anything at all.
You’re a whole new person…
With a whole new life.

Yes, this.
Many people speak of the link between trauma and eating disorders, but it's much less often that people speak of an eating disorder as a trauma in and of itself.  Sure, it might not be traumatic in the same way as being raped is, but it's still traumatic.  An eating disorder destroys your life, it destroys your sense of self.  Recovery forces you to face your wounds.  To stare down that is which the most painful.  This isn't something you survive unchanged.

There's not a lot I can recover from my pre-ED life because I don't have much left.  I'm not so much recovering as recreating a life.  You can't unchange things, no matter how hard you try.  But a new life is waiting out there, too.  It's hard to find the balance between allowing myself to mourn what is lost but also save my energy for finding out what else is out there.  I do worry that it will be more of the same and my life will wind up as some sort of collossal disaster.  In the meantime, though, there's trauma and recovery.

Some days, I just think that it would be nice if life only threw one or two things at me at a time. These days, I feel like my life is one never-ending game of Whack-a-Mole. During the day, I'm chasing down writing stuff. Lately, given my publishing drought, I've been working a lot in the evenings as well. I have my recovery stuff to juggle, the book stuff I really need to get working on, a crochet shrug to take with me to the AED conference this week, stuff around the house, you name it. It leaves me desperately wanting a nap!

These are times when it's hard to stay on track, not because you start valuing recovery any less, but because you're just so damn tired. I know, though, that skimping out on recovery stuff now will lead to more work in the future. Not a good thing. So you stick with it, even though you just want to nap for the next, oh I don't know, hundred or so years.

My old psychiatrist had a sign in his office that said "This too shall pass. Now would be nice."

I think of that sign in times like these. When I know that what I'm going through is likely temporary, that I'm just tired and annoyed. I know that this won't last forever and revovery will get easier and my book will get written, and written well. I just want to know the outcome now. Easier said than done, right?

Sometimes, I just think I need to whine a bit. I feel very guilty doing so, since so many people have a harder life and harder recovery than I do. So what do I have to complain about? But my life is my life, and my crap is my crap. It's my blog and I'll whine if I want to.

Maybe I need to hold on to the fact that I can make it through this. Even if it doesn't always get easier, I can handle it. I know what to do. I know how to reach out for help. I know how to endure, to get stuff done, and to come out okay in the end.

Recovery, they say, is more like a marathon than a sprint. And like any endurance event, half the battle isn't physical, but rather mental.

I had some extra yogurt pretzels last night.  Five of them.  They were leftover from Christmas, so they were in the shape of little trees and had candy cane crumbs on them.

It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

But then I freaked.  I had already fulfilled my meal plan for the day.  Now I had something "extra."  This was scary not just because of the additional calories, but because I was breaking one of my "rules" (i.e., Thou shalt not eat more than is required on thy hallowed meal plan).

I mentioned it on Twitter because I'm like that, and I got some wonderful support.

One of my friends says that her nutritionist tells her to "say yes amidst the resistance."

I seriously love that phrase.

It's hard for me to confront my own internal resistance because it is just so damn strong.  At the root of that resistance is anxiety.  Recovering from an eating disorder means that I have to confront issues in basically every aspect of my life.  Many of those issues have to do with food, and many of them don't.  To overcome all of them--to overcome any of them--I had to say yes despite the resistance.  I had to say yes to butter.  To days off from exercise.  To going out with friends.  To ordering off a menu.  To spending money.  To relaxing.  All of these created tremendous inner conflict.

To change or not to change, that is the question.

Not all internal resistance is bad.  I feel resistance when I think about purging now, which is something that was not always there.  But when challenging our fears, we have to accept the resistance.  Move with it.  Move through it.

One of the ubiquitous recovery quotes I was always given was this by Eleanor Roosevelt: "Do one thing everyday that scares you."

I'll confess, I've received this quote so many times, it seems a bit cliche.  That doesn't mean it's not true.  Saying yes amidst resistance is the same as doing something that scares you.

Feel the resistance.  Understand it.  Identify it.  And then let it go...

But yesterday I was adjusting my shoe in the bedroom when my eyes fell upon two sets of magazine holders.  On my bookshelf.  Across from my bed.  Literally at eye level.

I reached in
and plucked out
my map.

Just like that.

I was so expecting the map to be somewhere tucked away--after all, I had been looking for it for so long.  It couldn't be somewhere obvious.  It had to be in a box or a bin, buried under some useless knick knacks. 

Instead it was hidden in plain sight.
We just need to open our eyes and take a look. 

I haven't not wanted recovery in a very long time, but I think it's also important to reaffirm to myself exactly why I do want recovery.

I generally don't like making broad, sweeping statements about recovery.  Recovery ends up being about different things to different people, and we each have our own road to travel on the way to wellness.

But (and there's always a but) some people just get it so damn right that I think maybe broad, sweeping statements really aren't all that bad.

A mom on Around the Dinner Table posted this in response to learning about another person's relapsing daughter:

Whatever medication and therapies are offered your d, you can play an active part yourself in

• teaching her that she has an illness where she will always be vulnerable to going down this path under stress
• helping her to understand this, but teaching her that she must never choose this path in response to stress
• helping her to create a future with possibilities beyond the pain she is feeling just now
• reminding her how much she is loved (which I know you do all the time)

Yes, this.  If you could strip recovery down to the bone (I'm pretty sure that pun was unintentional), clear away all the extras and figure out just the basics, this would be it.  Much of the hard work of recovery is in learning our own vulnerabilities and demons.  Not just learning what they are, but what makes them come out of the locked closets in which we place them, and how to shoo them back in.

It's been tremendously humbling to begin to accept that I will never be invulnerable to anorexia, not completely.  But now that I'm learning to accept this, I can focus my energies on clearing out the wreckage from my eating disorder.

On my way to see TNT and go to group, I was listening to a podcast from last year's DarwinFest at Arizona State University (2009 was the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species").  The next talk on my playlist was by Nina Jablonski on the evolution of skin pigmentation.

Dr. Jablonski spent a portion of the talk discussing how UV radiation damages the skin, and the different responses animals have evolved.  She said that certain types of UV radiation were pretty much universally bad; they had no real positive effects on life.

And yet, Dr. Jablonski said, UV radiation was an "enormously creative force" in the evolution of life on Earth.  UV radiation created DNA mutations, which are the raw material of natural selection and evolution.  Without mutations, we'd all still be pond scum.

And all I could think was: this is such a great description and metaphor for eating disorders.  EDs are tremendously destructive.  I know some people say that they are grateful to their eating disorder, that it helped them cope with life when nothing else did. Although I understand and sympathize with the sentiment, it's not something in my own personal experience. 

That being said, here I am.  The destructiveness of my eating disorder has been a creative force.  It's resulted in two books and this blog.  More indirectly, it's led to my career as a writer.  It's brought me to where I am today.  As much as I whine about my life, as much as I hate it at times, I am where I am, and it's really not all that bad.  Okay, true, my current life is nowhere near the one that I thought I would be living.  At the same time, I'm working to accept that where I am is just freaking fine.

UV radiation is tremendously destructive, and yet from this destruction has sprung an amazing array of plants, animals, fungi, protists, and microbes. And so it goes with the eating disorder and my life.  Enormous destruction has led to enormous creativity.

Recovery needs to continue whether we want it to or not.  And I'm not just talking about those moments when it seems like losing a few pounds is, quite possibly, the best idea you've had all year.  The moments I'm talking about are when it all seems to suck, when you wonder why in the hell you even bother, when you know that giving into the ED will make you feel at least a little bit better.

Those moments.

Sometimes, when I have these days or weeks, I get at least a small amount of pride when I can look back on the day and realize I did not indulge my ED obsessions and compulsions.  At least, I think, at least that went well. Everything else might be in the toilet, but I held strong to my recovery.

Yesterday was not one of those moments.  I was compliant with my treatment plan.  I ate every last exchange I had to (though not a crumb more).  It wasn't going to go down as a Hall of Fame Good Day, and I was okay with that.  Yet despite doing everything I could in recovery, I didn't get that small surge of pride when I realized I had held tight to recovery and life and HOPE.

Nope.  I realized:

This
F*cking
Sucks

I knew a run or a marathon exercise session would take the edge off the stress.  Or that going to the drugstore to buy some pills might alleviate some of the negativity and anxiety.  I knew that, and I also knew that what little relief they brought would be temporary at best.  That all too soon, I would be back to the stress and funky moods, only now I would have to contemplate telling TNT when I saw her next Monday.  There was nothing more to do than stay with those crappy feelings and hope that they would pass.

It took most of today for them to pass, but they did.  I'm still not gung-ho about life and ready to skip off into the sunset with my unicorns and glitter.  But for almost 48 hours, my recovery simply boiled down to going through the motions.  There was no joy at overcoming my illness or enjoying a nice meal out.  There was no pride in knowing that at least I clung to health.  There was just the daily slog of three meals, two snacks.  Almost as soon as I had finished one meal, it seemed like it was time to start thinking about the next.  Food was the last thing on my mind.

I realized: it doesn't seem fair for recovery to suck this much.


Much of my bad mood was steadied by the realization that it really isn't fair.  That good recovery means you feel like shit and you go through the motions and you don't give a crap about health or any of that.  But it means you don't stop trying, and you don't let the negativity win.

(Thanks to Z for the post that helped inspire this.)

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.

Actually, maybe the "again" bit is a mistake because I don't actually remember ever liking my life before. Not that I was a ball of misery who hated everything (well, not all the time anyway), but I wasn't content, not even marginally so.

Truth be told, I still have massive anxiety issues. I didn't get nearly as much done last week as I needed to because I was freaking out about a gazillion things. I still worry a lot about my writing career, but I'm not really that worried about being able to do that. These first few weeks have shown me that this is a very viable career path for me. Whether I'll be able to get a mortgage is a different story--and one of the reasons I was freaking out--but if writing means moving into an apartment instead of a townhouse, so be it.

But right now, I'm actually feeling okay. Not great, but good. I'm sitting outside, in the sunshine, working on my writing, drinking coffee, listening to Dar Williams, and I'm realizing: I'm gonna be okay. Things are going to be just fine. Maybe not right away, and they probably aren't always going to be okay, but for now, they're okay.

It's quiet moments like this when I think that there is a life after an eating disorder. It doesn't come quick or even all that surely, but it does come. I'm not fully recovered, no. I still struggle greatly with eating "off plan" and with wanting to overexercise and all that other stuff. I'm not fixed or cured or "all better."

For now, though, I'm just going to sit back and enjoy the moment (and hope my editors get back to me!)

The shoe thing over the past few days has been something very different for me- buying something not 100% practical, buying something period, listening to my "wants" as well as my "needs," things like that. This is not something I'm used to doing. I've never been a "oh-what-the-hell" kind of person. I don't throw caution to the wind, and I don't like taking risks.

Recovery has asked me to live life very differently than what I am used to, not just during the AN but also to how I was before my illness. I'm not becoming a totally different person, no. But I am trying to approach life a little differently than I have in the past.

Before, I was all work, no play. Not that I wasn't known to try and read at least a few minutes before bedtime, but I didn't relax unless all of my work (studying, chores, etc) was done. It was never done. I still struggle with just relaxing, although I am getting better at it. I took the day off today. I had writing that I probably should have been doing, but I put in an extra-long day yesterday to get enough of my stuff done that I could finish up by tomorrow's deadline. My parents and I spent the day at a local theme park, something we've talked about doing since we moved down here but we never quite found the right time with the right weather. Today seemed to present all of those opportunities, so we went.

Like Brie, I've found the weight gain process to be the simplest part of recovery (not the easiest, but the most straightforward. My RD told me what I needed to eat, and I got enough support in order to eat and gain weight). It was hellish and unpleasant and phenomenally anxiety-provoking, but it was relatively straightforward.

It's the part of recovery where I have to relearn how to relate to the world that I find so difficult. I've slogged through the worst of the really emotional stuff, but what I really want is someone telling me exactly what I need to do in order to live my life in a non-disordered way. Am I avoiding people or do I really just value lots of alone time? Is my rigidity helping or harming? Am I gravitating towards salads because I'm craving greens and roughage or is that the ED "helping" me with my decision making?

The answers aren't clear cut, and they don't stay the same. Sometimes I do really feel like a nice big salad, and other times I just order it because it feels "safe." So I can't just check a question off my list and move on. I have to go back and re-evaluate. And often, in order to evaluate my feelings, I have to do something different, see how that feels, and check back in with myself. It's laborious and not all that fun. In fact, it's rather exhausting.

But this something different is enabling me to live life again and, heaven help me, have a little fun along the way.

As the economy began it's nausea-inducing nosedive at the end of 2008, many US banks and insurance companies were loaned money by the government because they were "too big to fail."

This week, as I have been on my own and trying to bull my way through piles of writing and work, I have been hearing the siren call of AN. I wasn't looking for the call, I wasn't seeing it out. But with my routine shaken up a bit with my parents out of town and then visiting my friend for the weekend, I got off track. And sleeping through breakfast yesterday meant that I felt pulled to skip breakfast this morning. Surely it won't make a difference, will it? And lunch. Who really needs lunch, anyway. Think of all of the writing I could get done.

I did eat breakfast, and lunch, but not nearly enough. I knew this should have been a big red flag--a red light sign in my relapse prevention plan--but I felt strangely not bothered by this. I wasn't particularly hungry, and eating seemed like such a damned inconvenience.

Apparently, I was bothered by this at least somewhat because I mentioned it to TNT at our session today. Not in the on-my-way-out-the-door, at least I can assuage my guilt about lying sort of way (admit it--you've done it, too!), but in a way where I actually sought out feedback about what was happening. We discussed what I needed to do to get back on track (eat a meal plan compliant dinner and evening snack, both of which I did) and then plan out my meals for tomorrow.

We also discussed where I was in recovery, about my blossoming writing career and all that I want to do professionally. About the fact that I really, really want to get my own place and pick out paint colors. About how I want to travel to the Galapagos and Australia. I have a fighting chance at a real life now.

Like the banks that were too big to fail, I have too much to lose now.

Before, all of these wishes and dreams were so nebulous and ephemeral that I could shrug off their loss. I mean, I'm not going to own a Mercedes, either, and I'm not exactly bothered by that. But now, my dreams and my life are so much closer. They're realer (if that's a word). I'm making them happen, right now. I can't continue to make them happen when I am deep into ED. I won't be researching how bacteria can smell, I will be looking up calories in food and determining how much I need to exercise and staring at recipes all day long.

My last relapse brought me face to face with the stark reality that I couldn't have what I wanted in life and also have my eating disorder. I had to choose.

And I chose life.
I chose life and I didn't look back.
At least, I haven't looked back very often.

TNT told me I had worked my ass off to get where I am in recovery (I turned around, looked down, and said, "No, I didn't. My ass is sadly still there."). There's the reality that I always have another relapse in me, but I don't know if I have another recovery.

So I ate.
And hated myself.
And then forgave myself.

Eating can be an inconvenience, but relapse is a bigger one for me right now. I have stories to write and condos to find and places to go and dreams to fulfill. My ED is not part of this--it never was.