I was watching a Bones rerun the other day, and there was an interesting dialogue between the main character, Temperance Brennan (aka "Bones"), and one of the night guards where she works.  I tried to find the exact diaglogue, but it didn't seem to be online, so I'm going to have to summarize here:

The guard told Bones about a study in which a group of men wore special glasses that made the world appear that it was upside down. After three days, the world was right-side up again. When the men took their glasses off, the world once again appeared upside down. Again after three days, their brains caught up and the world appeared as it should have.

It reminded me a lot of recovery.

I got so used to seeing the world with the ED filter on.  Food was bad, scary, and needed to be avoided.  I isolated myself from others.  I lied and cheated.   How I saw the world depended on my eating disorder.  If I got upset, the ED calmed me.  It was a pretty dysfunctional system to be sure, but I eventually got used to it.

When I started recovery, the glasses were uncerimoniously yanked off.  The world just felt "wrong."  Without the ED buffer, I was terrified of everything.  I couldn't get over how bizarre it felt to actually sit down to a meal. To eat in a restaurant. To order something off a menu besides a garden salad with no dressing.  When things went pear-shaped and the eating disorder was gone, I had no idea what to do.

My world was upside down.

The problem is that the world can stay upside down for a really long time, even longer than you or I might think it "should."  Nor is there always anything we can necessarily do that will make life right itself any faster.  Simply, it takes time for our brains to adjust.  Not only does ED recovery mean that our brains have to renourish themselves, but we also have to lay down new pathways that atrophied during illness or never formed in the first place.

I wonder what the men in the study (if the study was even real or went down like it did in the dialogue) thought during those days after they took of their glasses. Did they wish for them back?  Would putting the glasses on again have made the world look right-side up again?  How would this affect the length of time for the mens' perceptions to normalize?

Our brains are wonderfully plastic.  If you want to know exactly how plastic the brain is, read the book The Brain That Changes Itself.  But just as my brain learned to be afraid of food, it can unlearn that.  Or at least, it can learn to challenge those fears even if an initial jolt remains. In the Bones study, the mens' brains eventually figured it out.  Up is up.  It took time, lots of time.  I have no doubt plenty of them tripped and fell.  Again, that's part of how we learn.  Food isn't scary.  It's necessary.  It just is.  Life doesn't need to be avoided.  Keep the glasses off and the brain will learn.

After a long, busy, and rather stressful day yesterday, I settled down to (yet another) House rerun.  This episode (Season 7, Episode 12) wasn't necessarily one of my favorites, but as I watched, I realized that it does contain one of my favorite scenes.

The setup (briefly): the patient of the week is a waitress (Nadia) with a perfect memory, and House's team of doctors are trying to figure out if and how this fits in with her other symptoms. They eventually diagnose her with perfect memory as a form of OCD secondary to a genetic condition.  Right after they give her the diagnosis, one of the doctors (Chase) goes in to talk to her.  The following dialogue ensues:

Chase: You said you didn't have a choice to be the way you are. Now you do. [He pulls out a small bottle of SSRIs.] They've been effective in treating OCD.
Nadia: You mean, lose my memory?
Chase: Not entirely; it would just be more like everybody else's.
Nadia: My memory is the only thing that has ever made me special.
Chase: If you want to be special then it means being alone. [He leaves the pills on her tray and walks out.]

It's a feeling I know all too well--realizing that thing you felt made you special was both an illness and wrecking the rest of my life. This realization was rather sobering.

When I'm in the midst of the eating disorder, it's all too easy to forget that starving isn't a sign that I'm really special. It's just a sign that I'm sick.  Only I didn't always understand this. After all, one of the most maddening and frustrating symptoms of anorexia is the fact that when you're in the midst of it, it's even harder to understand that this "specialness" you feel--the only thing you can find to be proud of, the only way you know to make sense of the world--isn't really all that special.  It's the byproduct of a diagnosis.

Having that "one special thing" pulled out from under me shook me to the core.  Then, of course, I told myself that, diagnosis be damned, my ED behaviors made me special.  After all, click on any "health" section and you will be inundated with stories about how to lose weight.  I was good at eating less and exercising more, and the precise reason why didn't matter all that much.

Except that hiding behind a diagnosis is no way to live a life. You'd think it would be a fairly easy, straightforward decision: life without anorexia and a chance at happiness and relationships OR anorexia, loneliness, and death.   But the illusion of specialness is a powerful thing. If I wasn't starving myself, then what? I felt that I would be nothing, a nobody. Even as the disease wrecked everything in my life, I hesitated to make meaningful changes because I feared what would happen to me without the only thing I thought made me special.

I'm still trying to figure that out.

I was watching reruns of House the other day, when this little snippet of dialogue caught my attention:

Emotionally, you may be you want to run away. But in my experience, if you're staring at a pitbull in some guy's backyard, you're better off staying right where you are. Face the problem. That way, it can't bite you in the ass.

I generally try to run away from my problems.  You could look at my exercise issues as a literal attempt at that.  I've been known to deal with upticks in ED thoughts and behaviors by simply hoping they'll go away.  They didn't.  The hilarious part is that is that is really shocks me when that doesn't work.

The quote really reminded me of what recovery is about: learning how to face those pitbulls head-on. The ED allowed me to mentally run away from all of the crap in my life that I just didn't want to deal with.  Much of it was related to anxiety and depression, but plenty of it was just life.  I kept running away and kept getting bit in the ass.  My solution wasn't to turn around and face it, but to try and run even faster.

Again, it didn't work.  Again, I was shocked.

Avoidance is (in my opinion) one of the key ways an ED "works" in our lives.  By channeling all of our energies into our disorder, life starts to melt away.  Everything becomes about finding food or avoiding food or throwing up that food, and the other stresses seem less...stressful.  Because they're secondary.  All of this other crap in our lives are the pitbulls in the quote.  We run away.  They bite us in the ass.  The more we run, the bigger their teeth get.

Not to mention that the ED itself creates its own pitbulls.  I found myself falling further and further into the ED in order to avoid the pile of crap that the ED itself was creating.  It seemed much easier to avoid it with ED behaviors than it did to face the mess of my life and start cleaning up.

Avoidance of anxiety-provoking things brings short-term relief because we're avoiding the anxiety.  Duh.  But the anxiety continues to build and the urge to avoid grows higher and higher.  Facing the anxiety (returning that phone call, accepting your role in a negative situation, eating those scary foods) is harder, short-term.  I also know that I'll feel better knowing I've tackled whatever it is, and not having the task sitting over my head.

One of the hardest parts of recovery is stepping away from the running away.  Between the anorexia and the OCD, I don't remember a time when I didn't avoid life with any number of rituals and avoidance techniques.  So it's all very new to me.  And it's hard.  Really hard.  Avoidance is engrained, and so are the fears of dealing with real-life stuff.  The irony is that, anxiety aside, I'm no scaredy cat.  I like a challenge.  So there's nothing else to say but: bring it.

Thom Rutledge (the co-author of Jenni Schaefer's "Life Without Ed") has some classic bits of wisdom on his Facebook page that he calls "Thom's Nutshells." I was browsing through them just now and came across this gem that really resonated:

You can give up control of your life but still stay in charge of it.  Like the t-shirt says: shit happens.  Benjamin Franklin said the only two certainties in life were death and taxes; he should have added crappy events, too.  But letting go of control and accepting that shit does, indeed, happen, doesn't mean that you just sit back and be passive.  You can still be in charge of how you respond to all the shit that will inevitably happen.

{{This post has made me wonder whether I really should have dropped my philosophy class in college. Though a large motivation was the fact that the professor reminded me of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, and I couldn't look at him without snorting or giggling. Neither of which would have boded well for my grade.}}

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.

I never used to be much of a TV fan.  As a kid, I was always far more interested in books.  Once I moved out of the house, I never had the money for cable.  Since moving back in with my parents a year and a half ago (has it really been that long?!?), I've gotten hooked on the show House.  I bought Seasons 1-5 on DVD--half price in the bargain bin at Barnes and Noble--and will pick up Season 6 for $15 at Target as soon as I'm no longer snowed in.

It's been nice, too, as I've gotten my dad hooked on the show.  Which has been a nice bonding experience for us.  We're too damn similar and have historically butted heads.  But a TV show is a nice opportunity for us to spend time together.

So.  To the actual point of this post.

My dad and I were finishing up Season Two of my House DVDs, and Wilson said this (I totally forget the context--I've seen too many episodes lately):

HIV testing is ninety-nine percent accurate, which means there are some people who test positive, who live with their own impending doom for months or years before finding out everything's okay. Weirdly, most of them don't react with happiness, or even anger. They get depressed, not because they wanted to die, but because they've defined themselves by their disease. Suddenly, what made them 'them' isn't real.

And so it goes with recovery.  Not because the ED wasn't real, but because it's hard to go from defining yourself (or being defined) by an illness or set of behaviors to being out there in the wide, wide world with nothing to anchor you.

The AN gave me a sort-of script to get through life.  My fear of food and eating ruled everything, so I always knew how to respond.  If the situation might involve eating, say no.  If the situation involves exercise, say yes, and then skedaddle before people suggest food.  And so on.  My life was carefully calibrated by these rules.  It was miserable and lonely, but it did provide me with some manner of direction.

I never really thought of myself as "an anorexic," but everything I said or did was filtered through anorexia.  My friends didn't necessarily know about my ED, but they were aware on some level that I didn't eat in public, or I was always at the gym.  Things like that.  My illness was my identity--it was how I defined myself and organized my life.

I wasn't proud of that label.  I never joined websites proclaiming their "Ana Pride!" because I was very ambivalent about the whole thing.  I did view some of the behaviors--how long I could go without eating, how long I could workout--as successes, but they were very much internal things.  It never occurred to me to share them with others.  I also didn't want to see myself as being ill, because that would take the air out of some of the seeming "benefits" of AN.  If I was starving myself because I was sick, then I couldn't use that to feel good about myself.  If I was starving because I had lots of willpower, then, well, that was something.

Recovery means letting that go.  Recovery means cutting the anchor and redefining yourself.  An ED consumes everything in your life--friends, family, free time, hopes, dreams, you name it.  Without ED, it seems, you have nothing.  Where was my script?  Where was my ability to self-soothe?  I'm supposed to leave behind the one thing that made it easier to be me?

Faced with that, it's not surprising that I initially said "Well, hell no!"

As time passed, I began to realize that my fixation with this label, this definition, was killing me.  I felt that the AN did make me me, and yet I didn't like that me anymore.  The one who lied and cheated.  The one who didn't call friends back because it might interfere with my workout schedule.  The one who was snappy and waspish and depressed and never wanted to get out of bed except to make the pilgrimage to either the treadmill or the scale.

I'm still working on redefining myself.  The ED identity isn't totally gone--it was a part of me for such a long time that I can't just forget about it.  I'm trying to make peace with the stage of "figuring it all out."  I would like an answer, but searching and seeking is nonetheless a valid place to be.