I had myself a good brainstorming session yesterday afternoon. I had a few ideas for new writing projects leftover from when I dropped most other things to finish up my book. However, I've done what I can with those, and now I need something else to work on. So I sat down at my desk and started looking at research articles, at magazines, at a strange array of content both online and off.

I started the session utterly stumped as to what I would work on next. Either I had already eliminated the topic as a possibility or someone else had already written about it or there was something else that meant it just wouldn't work. But then I got one idea, and then another, and then it was a flood. I was practically drowning in good ideas.

It led me to better formulate one of my Rules of Life: like begets like. One idea begets another idea. Cleaning one room means I'm more likely to clean another. Practicing recovery behaviors makes me want to do even more recovery-oriented actions. The flipside is also true: engaging in the eating disorder means I want to do more disordered behaviors.

Like begets like.

Some of it is momentum, or even cadence. Life has a rhythm. It's now normal for me to wake up, brew the coffee, and eat breakfast. Eating breakfast today makes me ready to eat breakfast tomorrow. Skipping breakfast today makes me want to skip tomorrow.

Life builds on itself. Today's breakfast not only means that I'm more likely to eat breakfast tomorrow, it means that I'm more likely to want to eat breakfast tomorrow. It's that little ping of dopamine when we do something well. It's the foundation for later actions. Sitting and ruminating about why my life sucked only brought more suckiness into my life. That's all I could see, all I could think about. I didn't have enough space in my brain for anything else.

Not that I don't ruminate and perseverate now (believe me, I do!) but I try to keep it in check. Like begets like.

I'm not saying that if you think happy things then only happy things will happen. I know that's total BS. What I am saying is that the more you do something, the more likely you are to bring similar things into your life. Want to be a painter? Start painting. Want recovery? Start practicing recovery behaviors. This especially works if you want to want recovery. Like everything else, your recovery will build on itself. You've got to start somewhere.

It's called kintsugi. The ancient Japanese art form uses gold to join broken pottery, and was thought to have started when a fifteenth century shogun tried to repair a Chinese teapot. Dissatisfied with the less-than-aesthetic repairs he received, the shogun sought out something more visually pleasing. The result was kintsugi.

Photo by Gerda

The irony is obvious: it makes broken pottery (something generally considered uglier than the "original" object, and is certainly much less useful. A broken teapot doesn't really hold tea.) into something more beautiful than the original.

It's a metaphor I like to think appropriate for recovery. Take the photo above. It was a basic white plate before it was broken. Before I got sick, I was like the plate. I looked normal and functional. But the eating disorder, depression, and anxiety...it broke me. Shattered.  It would have been all too easy just to throw everything away, to say that myself and my life had become broken and useless.

Over the past few years, I have picked up the pieces and attempted to put myself back together. At first, I stood back and didn't know whether to keep the final product because it didn't look like the original. It was flawed. I was flawed. As any perfectionist knows, "flawed" just isn't good enough.

But then I heard of the art of kintsugi, and I realized that flawed can be beautiful in its own way. Maybe, even, more beautiful than the original. Of course it doesn't look identical to what it was before it broke, and perhaps that's kind of the point. I am back together, functional again. Not the same as I was previously, but I have survived. I am my own kintsugi.

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.

It's something I've been noticing lately in my own life: a growing mastery of basic recovery skills. You know, the things other 31-year-olds take for granted, like the regular consumption of breakfast and not exercising myself half to death. In the beginning of recovery, I couldn't do any of these things unless someone was sitting right there and giving me death eyes to make sure I wasn't misbehaving. Preferably with an Ensure for any infractions.

There's nothing to deflate your ego quite like flipping through your friends' wedding and baby pictures on Facebook while realizing that you one even trusts you to, like, you know, eat.

When I first attempted to eat with no real supervision after attempting recovery, it was kind of laughable. I'd start off getting a small, nonfat cappuccino (more air, less milk!) and say I had some massive, calorie-laden drink. Then I'd switch to coffee or tea while simultaneously maintaining I had that beverage. After all, I wanted that drink. I even might have actually intended to order it, on some subconscious level. But faced with the gargantuan menu and the knowledge that there were calorie-free options just waiting for me, I caved to the anxiety. Then, ashamed that I couldn't do something as simple as order a simple snack, especially after promising on my kitty's tail that I would Behave Myself and Actively Choose Recovery, I lied about it.  I justified this by telling myself that I wouldn't cheat again, that next time, I would have the massive calorie-laden drink.

Repeat ad nauseum.

All during this time, I would have sworn up and down that I could easily handle everything on my own. Easily. "I've got this," I said.  After all, I could publish long feature stories in magazines. Surely I could eat adequately.

Except I couldn't. Each time I tried, I would bite off more than I could chew (is that pun intended? I'm not sure...).  Sometimes, I would be forced to be ready because the insurance company said I was ready, dammit. Others, my treatment team thought I was ready.  And still others, I convinced my treatment team I was ready to take on more responsibility for my own recovery. Each time, the result was the same: it was too much, too soon.  The eating disorder triumphed again.

Ultimately, I began to lack confidence that I could ever feed myself properly again. Maybe I was just one of those few who would struggle forever. Maybe I would never get better.

The problem wasn't me or my (seeming) inability to recover. The problem was the complexity of the task and my available skills to master it. It's like asking a five-year-old to do calculus. I'm sure there are a few Einsteins out there who can, but most of us can't. Not that we won't ever be able to do calculus after we learn addition and subtraction and algebra and infinite sums, just that we can't yet do calculus. We don't consider a kindergartner a mathematical failure if they can't figure out a differential equation. Yet I would be discharged from treatment with a sheet of paper containing a list of foods I was supposed to eat and a pat on the back and have no freaking clue where to go from here.

What I really needed was fewer sheets and more time and practice.  I needed to start way more slowly than most people thought. This grated both my ego and my patience (like I said, nothing like a good career to contrast your epic catastrophes around eating).  So I started with tasks I felt confident about, things like putting milk in my coffee (yes, caffeine is a massive theme in my life) or spending short times unsupervised and not exercising. Then I began to build on that. I could figure out an entire snack or spend a whole afternoon by my lonesome and not lace up my gym shoes.

It took years for me to get where I am now, which is that I can eat independently and not overdo the exercise (though the latter is still the largest struggle for me) even if no one is the wiser. I'm not always perfect, but I can be honest about that, too.  I have mastery over basic recovery skills, whether it's feeding myself or calling a support person.  I'm doing calculus.  It took me a little over 11 years to get there from my 2+2s(kindergarten until junior year of high school), but then I ended up a math minor in college. The successes, whether in recovery, math, or even figuring out how to program your DVR, snowball. They build upon themselves. That's what things tend to do, whether successes or failures.

It took me a long, long time to be able to slow down and take recovery one step at a time. To stop feeling that I "should" be able to do something because everyone else could and it sounded easy, ergo, I should be able to do it.  It's still hard for me to admit that I couldn't do these things, and not always for lack of effort. I can't juggle or do those silly Magic Eye things, either, despite a plethora of people who do have those capabilities. I've accepted that, more or less.  It is what it is.

I guess, in the end, recovery is a process. A long, hard, difficult, pain-in-the-ass process. But I tackled it one step at a time, and I did, eventually, get there.

Over the last few weeks, I've started taking a Zumba class at my local community center. Several of my friends had said that they enjoyed Zumba, and I thought it would be fun to try. So I went. It's really fun, actually, despite the fact that I look like I'm re-enacting that scene in Date Night when Tina Fey and Steve Carrell do the robot dance when in fact I'm really doing the cha-cha.

Gracefulness has never been my strong point.  I can follow along. I can keep up.  But I'm not very skilled at the intricacies of the movies. I'm just...not.

So I'm following the instructor* and trying to figure out exactly what she's doing with her fancy footwork, and I kept getting frustrated for my first two classes. I couldn't get my feet and legs to move that fast. So I just hopped and trotted and jumped in combinations that I hoped resembled what the teacher was doing, and then soon enough we would be back to a section that involved walking or the grapevine, and I was all good.

When I went the other day, I finally figured out what my problem was.  I was making the moves way more complicated than they really were.  The instructor wasn't actually stepping, just sort of shifting her weight from foot to foot. And there weren't three little jumps, just two, and so on. I was getting angry and frustrated at my inability to keep up with all of the steps, when in actuality, I was keeping up. I was just overcomplicating things rather dramatically.

It's pretty much a metaphor for my life. I make things way more complicated in my head than they actually are in reality. I'll grant that some of this is what I call the ignorance of the newbie: all the moves look really complicated because I haven't mastered them yet. But often, whether it was when I was still in school or working at the bakery, I had an alarming talent for taking a simple task and making it really difficult. Then I would get stuck in that horrible cycle of berating and blaming myself for an inability to do a simple task, which slowed me down further, which made me hate myself even more.

I need to remind myself that most things aren't all that complicated. They might seem that way at first, but once I get going, I need to remember that things also get easier. That if I can quell my initial panic that I suck and I'm in over my head and I'm never going to be any good and holy crap, do I suck!, then I can see more clearly exactly what I need to do.

Of course, it's much easier to identify these things in a relatively meaningless dance class than in more important things like career and recovery, but I guess it's a start.

*The instructor this week was a sub--it was the male yoga teacher. His style was totally different, although the class was still good. It was, however, a total blow to my minimal self-esteem to see a large, hairy male be far more light and graceful on his feet than me. Sigh.

I was reading a memoir of chronic loneliness (Lonely by Emily White), and she was discussing  the genetic predisposition to loneliness. She described it as having a backseat driver in your life. Emily was still the driver of her life, but she also had a backseat driver (the predisposition to loneliness) who was shouting out directions.

Of course, you usually don't always know that your backseat driver is an arrogant ass who really doesn't care where you're driving. If you're me, you might be confused about where you're going or how to get there. As much as you might dislike the person giving directions, you're simultaneously grateful to have directions. So you follow along.

Sometimes, the backseat driver gaines in power and influence, and all of a sudden he's sitting in the passenger seat. As Emily said, sometimes the backseat driver even grabs ahold of the wheel from you and is driving the damn car.

The ultimate goal of treatment is to wrest control back from the backseat driver  You might not always be able to toss the SOB out of the car, but you can turn up the radio to drown out his directions. Or you can work to push him back to the backseat, and ultimately to the trunk.

Genetic predispositions work this way. They rarely start out by suddenly grabbing the wheel away from you. Rather, they creep up in importance and influence. We do, ultimately, remain the driver of our lives, but as anyone who has followed GPS directions only to end up at the wrong place knows all too well, bad directions can lead to a very different road traveled.

Our predispositions towards eating disorders or anxiety or bad boyfriends tend to nudge us. They change what environments we're likely to seek out, and our environments can provide new backseat drivers (or new directions for the existing ones). They can be annoying passengers in our lives, but there's also not a lot we can do about them. We're often stuck with them for the ride.

The goal is to diminish their influence. Most backseat drivers I know don't change no matter how many times you tell them to shut their traps. It's much easier to deal with them effectively once you know that they're a) a backseat driver and b) know that their sense of direction really sucks.

Of course, throwing your backseat driver in the trunk can leave you directionless. This makes the asshole in the trunk all the more appealing. It's much more appealing (and less anxiety-provoking) to have someone in control and telling you where to go than for you to be driving the streets of a neighborhood you don't know in the dark. Directions--any directions--seem ridiculously helpful.

Maybe they are, but I have to keep reminding myself that the backseat driver never asked where I wanted to go. He's not interested in that. He just wants to drive. So I can't necessarily get to where I want to go by listening to the jerk.

I also have to remember that the wannabe driver is going to be trying to give directions for a good long time, and that he might figure out how to get out of the trunk and back into the car at some point. I have to be ready for that. I have to get my own directions and be confident in that. I also need a killer playlist for my iPod so I can drown out his racket.

Perhaps I've taken the metaphor farther than it was meant to go. But I think it explains a lot about remission and recovery in EDs. Lock the bastard in the trunk and drive secure. Also be prepared for him to bust out and try to drive your car again. Remember this, however: you are the driver. You get to pick where you want to go. All sorts of things are going to give you a nudge in one way or another. But you're always the driver.

When I had a few minutes in between things at the conference I was at this past weekend, I tried to fit some fun reading in. So I was reading a non-fiction book about cancer (I'm a dork, this is proof) that was really fascinating, and I came across a passage that really struck me.

First, a bit of background.

Cancer drugs typically kill a fixed percentage of cancer cells.  To make the math easier, let's just make it 90%.  If your initial tumor had 1000 cells in it (most tumors are much, much bigger, but again, the math is easier this way), after one chemo treatment, you would be left with 100 cells.  Another round, 10 cells.  Yet another round, 1 cell.  Finally, a fourth round to obliterate that last bit of cancer.  It takes the same amount of drug in each round.

Doctors use hormone markers to monitor treatment progress in some cancers. As the tumor shrinks, so does the amount of hormone in the blood.  Back in the 1960s, scientists worked to reduce those hormone levels, but they never pushed to eliminate them entirely.  Either they didn't think it was possible, or they didn't think it was that important.  When one doctor did continue dosing his patient with toxic drugs to remove all traces of hormone, he was sacked from his job.

This brings me to the passage I want to quote:

But the story had a final plot twist. As Li had predicted, with several additional doses of methotrexate, the hormone level that he had so compulsively trailed did finally vanish to zero. His patients finished their additional cycles of chemotherapy. Then, slowly, a pattern began to emerge. While the patients who had stopped the drug early inevitably relapsed with cancer, the patients treated on Li's protocol remained free of disease--even months after the methotrexate had been stopped.

Li had stumbled on a deep and fundamental principle of onvology: cancer needed to be systematically treated long after every visible sign of it had vanished. The hcg level--the hormone secreted by choriocarcinoma--had turned out to be its real fingerprint, its marker. In the decades that followed, trial after trial would prove this principle. But in 1960, oncology was not yet ready for this proposal. Not until several years later did it strike the board that had fired Li so hastily that the patients he had treated with the prolonged maintenance strategy would never relapse. This strategy--which cost Min Chiu Li his job--resulted in the first chemotherapeutic cure of cancer in adults.

{emphasis mine}

I'm pretty sure most readers wouldn't have been struck by the parallels to eating disorders, but I was.  Most people think that once all visible signs of the eating disorder are resolved (weight is normalized, binge eating and purging have stopped, etc) then you can stop treatment.  The eating disorder is gone, right?  You can't see it any longer.  How can it be there?

But if the thoughts and urges are still there, if the fears and compulsions are still there, then the eating disorder is not gone.  You have to keep chipping away until everything gets down to zero.  That's how you get to full remission--not by stopping at "good enough" and "almost back to normal."  True, it's not possible for all cancers, and it isn't yet possible for all eating disorders, nor can we say for certain that someone with an ED will never relapse, but that's no reason not to try.

One of the things I'm struggling with a bit right now is balancing how far I've come with how far I still need to go.  Thinking about how much more work still needs to be done is rather overwhelming--but that doesn't change the fact that it's ultimately still rather necessary.

I read an interesting blog post on Psychology Today titled How to Become a Great Finisher.

Some interesting bits of the post:

Koo and Fishbach's studies consistently show that when we are pursuing a goal and consider how far we've already come, we feel a premature sense of accomplishment and begin to slack off. For instance, in one study, college students studying for an exam in an important course were significantly more motivated to study after being told that they had 52% of the material left to cover, compared to being told that they had already completed 48%.


When we focus on progress made, we're also more likely to try to achieve a sense of "balance" by making progress on other important goals. This is classic Good Starter behavior - lots of pots on the stove, but nothing is ever ready to eat.


If, instead, we focus on how far we have left to go (to-go thinking), motivation is not only sustained, it's heightened. Fundamentally, this has to do with the way our brains are wired. We are tuned in (below our awareness) to the presence of a discrepancy between where we are now and where we want to be. When your brain detects a discrepancy, it reacts by throwing resources at it: attention, effort, deeper processing of information, and willpower.


In fact, it's the discrepancy that signals that an action is needed - to-date thinking masks that signal. You might feel good about the ground you've covered, but you probably won't cover much more.

I don't think the author is saying that a feeling of accomplishment is bad, but it can be premature. I've met many people who tell me how much more they're eating than before, or how much less they're purging. Which is all well and good (it really is), but when you're still regularly undereating or purging or engaging in any other ED behavior, there's still a massive problem. Yes, you've made progress and give yourself a pat on the back, but (and this is the hard part) don't stop there!

When you're doing something as intense and lengthy and grueling as ED recovery, it's easy to want a break and get complacent.  Taking a little time to breathe and regroup is one thing (my friend Charlotte reminds me, and everyone else, to breathe regularly); but you also can't stop forging ahead. 

A metaphor I love came from the preface to Laura Collins' Eating With Your Anorexic. Psychologist James Lock writes that recovery is like climbing a sand hill: if you stop, or don't get all the way to the top, then you'll slide back down to the bottom.  Although acknowledging how much progress you've made is wonderful, it's also important to consider what's still left to be done.

That's where it gets tricky.  I compare how I'm doing in recovery now to when I was at my sickest, and I just want to say "But look at how much work I've done! Look at how much better I'm doing! Can't I just stop here?"  The problem is that stopping "here" ultimately means a slide backward, and beginning that slog all over again. 

Like so many things in recovery, the answer isn't an either/or question.  It's figuring out to celebrate progress made while balancing that with continuing forward motion.  That being said, I can barely figure out how to walk and chew gum, so we'll see how this multitasking goes...

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.

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.

Recovery, it is said, is more like a marathon than a sprint.  It's long.  It's grueling.  And you have to pace yourself. 

I got thinking about this metaphor today, and I remembered something my old boss (who had run several marathons in the past) used to say.  He said the "obvious" halfway point of a marathon, which is just over 26 miles, is at mile marker 13.  After that, technically, you're on the down slide. 

My old boss said that any marathon runner will tell you that the race isn't half over at mile 13.  No, at mile 13.2, you're still at the beginning.  Many runners don't consider themselves beyond the halfway point until they hit mile 20.  My boss? His "halfway point" was mile 25.

Mathematically, passing mile 25 of a 26.2 mile race is far beyond halfway.  It's not that my boss had math difficulties.  Rather, those last 1.2 miles seemed just as long as the first 25.

Which reminds me a lot of recovery.  It's sort of like you're trudging along, and you look at the mile markers, and you feel like you should be further along.  You think "I'm nearing the end. I must be nearing the end."  But there's always three, seven, ten more miles.  How in the heck are you going to endure for that much longer?

The last bits of recovery seem to take the longest, and sometimes you just have to buckle down and endure.  Those last 1.2 miles--the seeming endgame of recovery--feel as long and as intense as the first 25.  And it's hard for people from the outside to understand this.  Outsiders are measuring distance through math: half of a marathon is 13.1 miles.  Period.  But when you're actually in it, those kinds of calculations don't really capture the emotional experience.

I don't think I'm exactly at mile 25 yet.  But it does help me better understand why recovery can seem to take so damn long, when you feel it should be over by now.

I was discussing life and recovery with Dr. H today, and somehow the idea came up that recovery was a lot like the childhood game Chutes and Ladders.  It seems that it's much easier to slide back down than it is to climb your way up.  What's more, it seems that there are far more chutes than ladders, and the chutes seem to take you bad much further than the ladders propel you forward.

"I remember getting so close to the final square as a kid," I told Dr. H, "and then I hit that stupid slide that took me back to the very beginning."

So it seems with recovery.  My recent struggles have made me feel (however incorrectly) that I'm back at the beginning again.

Then Dr. H said, "That horrible slide takes you back, but never to Square One. You're never back at the very beginning. At the worst, I think you end up on the second square. But never the very first one."

Translation: you have always learned something along the journey, however much you may feel you have failed completely.  Realizing you're at the end of a slide and have lost ground is disheartening, but you've never lost every last inch.

And ED slips can be often like a trip down a playground slide. Exilharating at times, but then the ride comes to an end, and you hit the ground with a thud.

Of course, the entire point of a slide is to climb up and go down.  The point of recovery is to not slide back down.  That being said, I think we all do at some point or another.  We slide a bit--maybe not all the way back down to the asphalt, but standing at the top of the slide can seem rather alluring.  We think we can catch ourselves before we hit the ground.  Sometimes we can, and sometimes we can't.

Not to mention that climbing back up a slide isn't the easiest of tasks. Just ask these kittens.



Remember: no matter how much you slide, you're never back to Square One, not really.

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. 

Although I did see Dr. H this afternoon--Keurig time!!--and she did share a wonderful metaphor with me, I can't remember exactly what she said.  One of my friends I chatted with online the other night did, however, have a great analogy.

We were talking about how recovery could be so painfully obvious at times.  I know I need to eat.  This isn't a mystery.  I know I need to eat regularly, too.  But the interesting thing is that recovery isn't as straightforward as "just" eating.  I wish I could sit down to my daily three meals and two snacks each day with no chatter in my head and with no internal resistance.  It has gotten easier, yes.  Recovery remains a fight.

Emily said that her therapist told her that the difficulties are a lot like the difference between knowing how to drive and still needing GPS.  Knowing how to eat properly, knowing how to follow a meal plan (if that's what you do), knowing you need to eat is one thing.  Actually figuring out how to live a healthy life without an eating disorder is something else entirely.

I can drive a car.  Maybe not with any sort of special talent, but I know how to drive.  But if you told me I needed to drive to San Francisco, I would need to use my GPS--or at least a map.  The problem isn't that I don't know how to drive there (make sure the car has gas, push firmly on the long skinny pedal, ta da!), the problem is figuring out how to get there.  Knowing how to drive doesn't mean you don't need GPS.

So it goes with recovery.  Knowing what I need to do in order to get better doesn't mean that I don't need directions in how to get there.  Telling someone with an eating disorder to eat is like telling someone who is lost to drive.  Obviously eating and driving are part of the solution.  But there also needs to be more of a how-to involved.  Everyone takes their own path, just like some people avoid highways and others avoid bridges and tunnels.

Needing a recovery GPS--getting lost, realizing where you want to be but not having a damn clue how to get there--is pretty normal.  Most people have a GPS in their car or on their phone.  It doesn't replace learning how to drive, but many have found that little bit of extra guidance crucial.

So Dr. H (and her fantabulous Keurig!) loves metaphors.  Yet another reason we get along really well.  We were discussing my upcoming move, and she said:

"Your parents have really been like your training wheels, providing extra support and stability for you. And this move is kind of like taking off those training wheels. It's both scary and exciting."

It's 100% true.

I didn't have my dad take the training wheels off my bike until just before my 8th birthday.  He took them off once before, when I was about 5 or 6.  I remember starting to coast down our steep-ish driveway, gradually picking up speed on my training wheel-free bike.  I went to try and brake at the bottom, and I couldn't.  The brakes work, I just panicked.  And so I kept on coasting down the lawn and finally into the swing set.

I survived this escapade with only a few bruises, but I also had my dad put my training wheels back on my bike.  It was too soon, I was too scared, and I just couldn't do it.

It took until my friends were always racing around on their bikes to push me into taking those damn training wheels off.  As it turns out, my biking skills were just fine.  It was my confidence that needed some nudging.

And now, too, that is the case.  I know how to eat.  I'm not an idiot.  I do, however, have trouble believing that I can do it, that I can get better.  I'm not trying to convince myself that everything is fine, and I have nothing to worry about.  It's just that my self-doubts have often gotten the better of me in the past.  Maybe I did need those literal training wheels for several extra years.  I know I definitely needed these more metaphorical training wheels for the past 1.5+ years.

I also know that keeping these training wheels on for longer isn't going to make me any more ready to strike out on my own.  You can't really learn how to ride a bike until you take off those training wheels. 

There are safeguards, certainly.  I'm not moving to the moon.  I have a plan, I have a therapist, I have a lot on the line.  I'm motivated.  It's exciting and terrifying, all at once.

I had another session with Dr. H this afternoon (and another chance to play with her Keurig!) and we were discussing any number of things.  She asked me how my week went in the most wonderful way.

Think of your week like a rose, she said. There are thorns, there are buds, and there are blossoms.

Roses have thorns.  So does recovery. There's no way around it.  Thorns are the difficulties, the things that don't go as planned, the slips and the slides.  The horrible, awful, no good, very bad days.  You don't have to like the thorns, but you do have to learn how to avoid them--or at least live with them. 

Like I'm guessing some of my readers do, I have conflicts about struggles.  I don't like struggling.  But I also don't like admitting when I'm struggling.  I also also know that talking about my struggles is the path to getting them to stop.

File under: hard place and rock, between a.

I told Dr. H that I feel either I "have to" be a perfect anorexic or a perfect recovering person.  I can get the awful, unproductive mentality of "I already screwed up, so why bother?"  {{Why, hello, black and white thinking.  Nice to see you.}} Or I'm so embarrassed and ashamed of what happened that I cover it up.  Screwing up somehow means that I'm a disappointment. Neither of which is conducive towards recovery.

Which is when Dr. H told me about the rose metaphor.  If roses have thorns, so does recovery.  You're the only one who expects you to be perfect, she told me.  Which is true.  But then, I've always been the main force pressuring myself, so that's not news.  Nor does it tell me how to stop pressuring myself. 

Nonetheless, thinking of recovery as a complete package--screw ups, missteps, and all--helps relieve some of that pressure.  Part of learning how to do anything involves making mistakes and then learning from them.  Recovery is no different.

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.

Like many people, I have been following the story of the Chilean miners and the rescue. As a writer/storyteller, the saga has been enthralling.

But my friend Charlotte had this to say:

"I spent all day yesterday weeping, watching the Chilean miners coming up. All I could think of was that this was what it must have been like for my d, in the depths of ed, a dark and frightening place. H, other d and I strapped her into her tiny capsule and have heaved and heaved and she is now above ground, learning to take off her sunglasses.

IMHO, you need to strap your d in her capsule and start pulling. Think of bringing her out of the darkness and back into the light. It is a terrifying and claustrophobic journey, but well worth it in the end."

Except with an eating disorder, you're not entirely sure you want to come to the surface. You start to find the darkness comforting, and you find you forget what it's like to be on the surface. The darkness is simple, predictable. You know exactly what to expect. And the longer you are down in the hole, the more frightening it becomes to even think about coming to the surface.

I would climb into the rescue capsule on occasion, but as soon as I started leaving the darkness of my eating disorder, I panicked and climbed back down.

Even though I've been on the surface for some time, I often think about the safety of the darkness. That as much as I'm enjoying being back in the land of the living, I still think about my time down below. I'm not debating going back to the eating disorder--that's not it. It's that the ambivalence about recovery can persist. You ask yourself: Did I do the right thing by coming to the surface? Wouldn't it be easier to stay in a cold, dark hole?

The answer to that last question is definitely yes. But life isn't about easy. Easy is boring. It can be lonely. I'm still adjusting to the sunlight, but I am, in fact, adjusting.

What I started to get at near the end of my Compulsivity never cured anything post was the idea of perspective. I have a million worries and all one million of them are jostling for my attention. It doesn't matter that a few worries are big, legitimate worries (and I'm going to pay all my bills how?) and the rest are just small nagging worries (did I lock my car door/set my alarm clock/empty the litter box?). They all seem equally important and equally dramatic in my mind.

Because they all seem important and dramatic, being compulsive starts to seem like a rational idea. I'm addressing X worries out of Y, so hooray for me!

I've always had problems with perspective. One of my roommates in college looked over at me highlighting my biochemistry textbook at the beginning of the semester, and she said, "You highlight everything. Wouldn't it be easier to just not bother?"

I told her that I was only highlighting everything I thought might be important and that there was some stuff not highlighted--words like "and" and "the" and the obvious transition sentences.

She raised and eyebrow and said, "Girl, you have issues."

The poor girl had no idea...

So yes, perspective. It wasn't that I didn't understand the big picture (I usually did), it was that all of the other information seemed equally important. I couldn't figure out what was important and what wasn't. When I first started writing, I often included either totally irrelevant details or none at all because I just couldn't figure out what the important bits were.

With term papers in undergrad and grad school, I would spend so much time nailing down the world's most inane facts, terrified that Herr Professor would find out I said April 1786 when (silly girl!) I meant May 1786, that my paper's thesis suffered. I understood my subject- that wasn't the problem. But all of the details overwhelmed me because deciding what was important was extremely anxiety provoking.

I've coped with this anxiety in two ways: the above (by going overboard on the details) or by essentially covering my ears with my hands and yelling "LALALALALALALA!" Neither is really all that effective. Both these strategies make for crap writing and a somewhat less-than-effective approach to life.

Intellectually, I can tell the difference. I have a clue that eating 50 extra calories isn't on the same plane as a nuclear apocalypse, but it still feels the same in my brain. I get rather frustrated when by brain won't calm the hell down over such trivialities, just as I got frustrated when working on said term paper. I was pretty sure I was wasting my time on little more than a fool's errand--but I wasn't positive, and so I fretted and worried and wasted my time.

It's interesting to note that I have a problem with actual depth perception. When I'm driving, cars usually look closer than the actually are. It's better than the opposite problem, but still. For that matter, I can't see those stupid Magic Eye thingies no matter how hard I try, how many hints I get, or how long I stare. Something with my vision is just messed up (no, I don't wear or need glasses). I'm not saying this has anything to do with my psychological inability to put things into perspective, but it's an interesting parallel.

Do you have problems putting things into perspective? Share your thoughts in the comments.