As a card-carrying perfectionist (and the card must be replaced if the card gets dirty or bent), I have often viewed life as a competition. There is The Best, and there is everyone else. My lifelong goal has been to be The Best at whatever it was--not out of a healthy sense of competition, but more because I viewed myself as a failure if I wasn't The Best. My constant striving was fueled by a desire to stop hating myself and finally feel like I could measure up to everyone else.

The anorexia only amplified this thinking process. Losing weight, conquering my need for food, rest, sleep, and affection, was the way I found to "win" the competition. Anorexia made me feel special. It was my trump card. Giving up my eating disorder meant giving up this one way I had of feeling special, of being The Best. As long as I ate less, weighed less, and exercised more, then at least I could be The Best at that. Right? Too bad this contest is so tremendously self-destructive.

Although I've learned in the past few years that this is a very distorted and disordered way of thinking--a way of thinking that preceded the eating disorder by decades--it's still very much there and very much present. Reading my college's alumni magazine is an exercise in self-loathing. The accomplishments of my classmates make me almost feel ill when I look at my life. Now, I can't even say "Well, at least I'm eating less then they are!" Because I'm almost certainly not.

My metabolism has once again gone through the roof. It calmed down somewhat during my Europe trip and yet again with my stomach bug, but now that I'm back in my work routine at the bakery, my metabolic rate has gone into overdrive. It seems I am hungry all the time. Adding an Ensure Plus each day is starting to seem like a good idea (it's quick, easy, and convenient). All of this means I am eating more than anyone I know.

This brings me right back to the contest, and how I defined being The Best for so long as eating the least. Now, I seem to be The Worst, which is pretty much a living hell for someone who has perfectionism. I feel like a failure because I cannot seem to resist my hunger and I feel like I should. I don't want to restrict as much as I just don't want to eat more than my minimum meal plan. Of course, eating less than what my body needs is restricting, but I never said an eating disorder was logical.

I don't always want to feel I need to participate in the contest--after all, Lily Allen said that whoever wins the rat race is still a rat--but I don't know how else to feel okay with myself without these concrete measures. I have no sense of myself except in relation to others. I only know I'm smart because people tell me I'm smart, not because I have an innate sense of my intelligence. It goes along with my body dysmorphia, and how I'm always comparing my size to others', in large part because I really don't have a sense of what size I am and what my body looks like. I can't do that with my life, either. I always have this profound sense of inadequacy, and this was mediated, temporarily, by the eating disorder. It quelled the anxieties of not measuring up, of not being good enough.

I know that I need to stop defining myself in relation to others. And not just any "others," but those who have achieved the most and done the most and make me feel like utter crap when I think about what my life is and what it has done. I know I need to compare me to, well, ME and to hell with everyone else. I'm following my dream to be a writer, which I know darn well isn't going to put me on a financial par with most of my classmates (although I've never been much worried about the financial yardstick, thankfully). I'm starting from scratch and busting my buns, and I need to start giving myself credit for overcoming a difficult and lethal illness.

The question is: how? How and where do I start?

The concept of "free will" that is so discussed in philosophical circles naturally involves one thing: choice. If we have a free will, then we can choose. Every choice, however, has its consequences, both good and bad. There is quite a difference, though, in ponying up to the results of your actions and blaming yourself for the outcome.

It might come as a shock to some of you that I'm not the shy retiring type. I typically don't find myself wallowing in blame and self-pity when something goes wrong. The one exception is regarding projects at work and school. I also know people who are like that 24/7, their little Atlas shoulders holding up the world.

I got thinking (always a dangerous pastime for me) about why, exactly, someone would find themselves trapped in a pattern of always blaming themselves for everything. Though I do understand that there are childhood links to behavior, I also think the issue of self-blame goes far deeper. It's not about blame, it's about control. If I feel I am responsible for something- even if it's my fault if it goes wrong- I have a sense of control over the issue.

I'm a backseat driver. It takes every fiber of my being to keep my bloody mouth shut when someone else is driving. Sometimes, it is that my friends are frightfully incompetent behind the wheel of a car. Mostly, though, it's that my annoying comments and suggestions are a way for me to feel more in control of where the vehicle is headed, short of seizing the steering wheel from the driver. That's why terrorism is so scary: there's not a whole lot you can do. Emergency preparedness is as much about allaying fear as it is about actually preparing.

So, if it's your fault that your father died of cancer, then you can have the feeling that you could have done something about it, that you could have had some control. Most New Year's resolutions are centered around control: get more organized, quit smoking, lose weight. Controlling your life better.

I could deliver a long lecture about the futility of self-hatred and blame, but that's not what I'm getting at. This isn't to say that you shouldn't take responsibility for your actions- far from it. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that humans naturally want a feeling of control in their lives, an ability to chose and deliberately effect their lives. And blaming yourself does give you that feeling, in a roundabout sort of way.