Some days, I think recovery can go shove it. The process sucks. It's expensive, time-consuming, and it makes me really, really cranky. Like, you know, it's doing right now.

On other days--days when I feel more positive, well-rested, and can take the long view--I can see that recovery, naturally, doesn't totally suck.  Especially on days like today when I'm crotchety and short-tempered, I need to read things like what my friend says about how recovery is a gift:

1. When we stop letting our eating disorders determine our self worth and begin to focus on health, it’s easier to make time for ourselves – no longer over-committing to others or trying to find meaning simply in what we mean to others.
2. Recovery allows us to re-set our priorities. Rather than believing that the only thing that matters is losing x pounds, or running some arbitrary distance, or. . . recovery allows us to see that there are friends who love us, healthy goals to achieve, and life that needs to be lived.
3. Recovery gives us the opportunity to talk out long-buried issues and to grow from our past rather than always living in it.
4. Recovery can teach us life skills. Whether it’s saying no to that one last thing, speaking up when we need support, using yoga/meditation/journaling to gain perspective, or something else altogether, identifying the simple steps needed to get through an anxiety attack, an evening with a large group of people, a moment, an hour, a week, or a year, the process of recovery enables us to draw on a variety of techniques and skills that – sometimes, at least – it seems like others don’t draw on.
5. Recovery allows us the opportunity to construct life on our terms, and to see that there are times when we’re not going to have control – and that those things are okay.
6. Recovery lets us learn more about the parts of ourselves that we’ve buried – and often, while this can be related to pain, it’s the strengths that we’ve given over that we’re able to reclaim.

My life has been more than a little chaotic and stressful lately. This explains a lot of why I haven't been blogging quite as much over the past week- by the time I actually sit down at my computer to blog, I'm often too tired to put a sentence together.  I'm taking some pretty big steps in my life, and it's draining me.

So what am I doing?

Yesterday afternoon, I put an offer on a condo.  It's about 15 minutes from my parent's house.  I had a really cool townhouse all picked out, but I crunched the numbers and realized that finances would be way the hell too tight for comfort.  So I reluctantly abandoned that townhouse and found something quite a bit cheaper.  Here are some pictures of the inside (I'm not showing the outside for privacy reasons- if you want to see, send me an email and I'll send you a photo):

The issue of dating and relationships keeps coming up in therapy for me, and to be honest it's rather relevant. I still don't have any friends down here, outside of the people I work with. And although many of my coworkers are nice and fun while at work, they're not exactly the kind of people I see myself being good friends with (ie, I don't do the beer and marijuana thing for entertainment).

So the fact that I've been living here for about 9 months and still haven't met anyone--romantic or otherwise--spurred TNT into pushing me into trying a variety of options, like signing up for a bellydance class through community ed and, yes, thinking about dating.

Seeing as my dilemma is that I don't even have the foggiest clue of where to meet someone because I don't know anyone and I do NOT do the bar scene, the logical next step (according to TNT) was doing a dating website. Thankfully, my older brother has taken the first step in that regards as he met his wife online, though it wasn't a dating website. I did it once before and the experience wasn't the best, although I was aware enough at the time that it had nothing to do with the guys and everything to do with the fact that I was deep in the ED. And pretty much unilaterally refusing to do anything with food made me a pretty awful date.*

My assignment this week was to sign up for a dating site.** I'm not going to say which one (if you're really curious, you can email me!) for privacy reasons, nor is my profile up yet. I started filling it out, and one of the categories is what you're looking for and why you're here. I said because I was new to the area, etc, and I also figured that writing "My therapist is making me" wouldn't exactly be an encouragement to people. Or at least, the people I potentially want to attract.

This brings up a whole host of issues, the biggest of which is the fact that I don't understand why anyone would date me anyway. It's this core self-belief that, basically, I suck. I know I'm not stupid, I know I'm not totally inept at writing, but the only thing I ever felt confidence in was my ability to be anorexic. Now that my anorexia is in the past tense and I consider my illness (mostly) in remission, I'm back to the old "I suck" mantras.

TNT wanted me to start dating to basically tell the "I suck" mantras to go, well, suck it. That I'm never going to believe that I'm a datable person until I start dating.

So here goes.

*This didn't, however, stop me from going even deeper into the ED because the problem was (obviously!) I needed to weigh less for someone to be attracted to me.

**Actually, it was my assignment last week, but I put it off because of a freelance editing job from hell. Facebook friends, you know what I'm talking about.