This is the last in the "roadblocks to recovery" series- I have gotten tremendous feedback from you all, and I'm just tickled that everyone seemed to get a lot out of it. It almost makes me wish I had more roadblocks so I could keep blogging this series!

Almost.

The ED is familiar

I wrote yesterday that an eating disorder can make life simpler, but even complex things can become relatively simple if you practice long enough. More than simple, however, the anorexia is familiar. I no longer remember what it was like to eat without fear or counting calories. I don't remember what life was like before my exercise routines (they replaced study routines, which I guess just goes to show you how much I like routines). Until my most recent job, I had forgotten what it was like to bring a lunch to work, to pause for a snack, to allow myself to be seen eating. Early in my eating disorder, I remember telling myself that I needed to bring a lunch with me, but I could never remember to take it with me. Even now, it feels odd to take a lunch to work, to be seen with tangible evidence that I actually eat.

It's change. Recovery is something new and something different. And if you crave the familiar and routine like me, then you'll know what I mean when I say that I avoid even good change because it's change! The ED was predictable. I knew what to say and do. I had my day planned out down to the minute. It was comfortable and familiar.

An eating disorder is NOT a habit, but some ED behaviors can become habitual--the flipping of a box to look at the "Nutrition Facts" information, for instance. Or the perpetual hopping on and off of a scale to make sure you got the "right" weight. Or, as I mentioned above, not eating lunch. I went through a period where all I would eat was finger food- nothing that required a utensil. After several weeks of this, I ate dinner at my parents house and I remember picking up a fork and it taking a minute to remember what the hell I was supposed to do with such a thing.

An ED is hell, but it's a familiar hell. It's a hell I know how to cope with. It's a hell that has some amount of rhyme and reason and (dare I say it?) functionality to it. Being hungry doesn't bother me much because I'm used to it. I used to freak out during re-feeding because I wasn't used to feeling full and it completely freaked me out. What is that feeling? What is wrong with me? How can I make it go away?

Recovery is new and shiny and really rather strange. It often takes me a long time to see if I'll like something or not, and I'm not always 100% gung-ho positive about this recovery thing. I know the alternatives suck even more, and so I'm sticking with it. Who would have thought that one day, I would think that not wanting to throw myself under a bus would feel almost wrong? Who would have thought that one day, I would be enough in control of my anxiety that I could sit and watch a movie from start to finish and that this would feel weird? But this is recovery. It's not all of recovery, but it's part of it.

I'm still trying to come to terms with the fact that change isn't necessarily bad, and that I have the mental and emotional capacity to cope with whatever comes my way.

I hope you all enjoyed this series- I'm going to add these posts to my "Pages" list up top for easy reference.

Life is enormously complicated. There are interpersonal relationships (friends, family, co-workers, etc) and there are any number of variables that we flat-out don't have any control over. Although I don't think an ED is "about" control, control is a theme in many eating disorders, and mine was no exception.

I don't get nostalgic for the good ol' days of AN much anymore, but when I do, it's usually because life has gotten complicated and I miss the AN simplicity. Which brings me to my next roadblock to recovery:

An ED Makes Life Simpler

When I am in the midst of my eating disorder, I care about three things and three things only: how much I ate, how much I exercised, and how much I weigh. I might not have any clue how I'm going to tackle the next big project at work, but it's all good- I'm losing weight. I might be getting really nervous about how I'm going to pay all my bills, but it's all good- I'm exercising a lot. Ta-da! It's simple. As long as I can have an iron control over what I (don't) eat, then life becomes tremendously simple because nothing else matters.

Of course, the fact that starvation makes your brain fixate on OMG FOOD only makes the simplicity more pronounced. Because literally, the only thing you can think about is food. Even when I needed to think of something else, I couldn't. My life was all about food and how to avoid it. Granted, the mental and emotional gymnastics I had to perform to make sure I avoided food was far from simple. I tried to anticipate any and every circumstance that might possibly disrupt my planned food or my exercise routine. Nonetheless, these mental gymnastics were far simpler than life in general. I learned to deny, isolate, lie, and hide to maintain my disorder and the seeming simplicity it brought.

When I was acutely ill, I wasn't all that worried about the distant future- I rather assumed the eating disorder would kill me. I also had anorexia as my trump card, so as long as I was alive on surviving on minimal food, then the future didn't matter all that much.

Food. Weight. Calories. Exercise. These things are so simple to manage when compared to the complex world of relationships and getting your oil changed, of paying bills and taking care of loved ones. Life requires all of us to juggle many different roles, many different tasks, and many different personas depending on what is required of us at the moment. When a friend asks me over for dinner, I have to determine whether this conflicts with other responsibilities, whether those responsibilities can be cancelled, whether an aging grandparent might also need my help, and how likely it is I will be asked to work late. When an active eating disorder is in that picture, I just decline the dinner invitation because dinner=food=eating. It's an easy decision. Selfish, perhaps, but definitely simple.

Recovery means accepting the full catastrophe of life. It means juggling many different roles and tasks, and it also means that you won't be everything to everyone. It means dealing with people rather than calorie counting manuals. It means--and this is a big one for me--accepting uncertainty and imperfection.

Loneliness is something I have always struggled with. I was never friendless, but I was frequently lonely. Primarily, I felt like I was somehow freakish, and that no one understood me and no one ever would. I was convinced that other people didn't really like me--they merely tolerated me. This, combined with social anxiety, made me feel like the ultimate outsider. It sucked, and I knew it, but more to the point, I didn't think I could do anything about it. I was weird and that was that.

This basically meant that loneliness and I got to be pretty good friends. I usually coped with the feelings by reading (friends made out of words and paper!), by working at school or at other part time jobs, or by telling myself that I loved being by myself. The last one was and is true--if I don't get my "me" time, I start to go nuts. The second I was able to stop having a roommate, I did. I would just as soon live in a roach motel as have a roommate. But, alas, it doesn't mean I don't get lonely.

ED as a loneliness "cure"

Eating disorders are filled with paradoxes and ironies, and the "loneliness factor" is just one of them. My eating disorder made me lonelier than ever- I couldn't stand to be around people because they did odd things like eat and sit down and laugh. Also, friends got in the way of the eating disorder, and so I isolated myself even further. File under: vicious cycle.

Although I was more lonely than ever, my eating disorder made the loneliness feel better. It was good I didn't have friends because then no one would comment on my shrinking frame and empty cupboards. It was good I didn't have friends because then no one would interrupt my exercising or my purging. It was good. It really was.

Back in the summer of 2001, when the AN was picking up steam, I was planning on spending the summer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. However, this was the first time I was really on my own, living in a place where I had no real friends and essentially didn't know anybody. I had spent a semester in college studying in Scotland, but I knew several people from my school who were going at the same time with the same program. Living in a dorm meant that I was kind of thrown in with people. But Atlanta was different. I had my job, yes, but I also had lots of time to myself. I remember worrying about getting lonely, and I also remember my mom expressing her worries about my impending loneliness to me. I told my mom that I would meet people, my cousins were only 30 minutes away, I shared a sublet with another girl. But I distinctly remember thinking that it will be good that I don't have friends because then no one could make me eat.

Thus it was that my eating disorder made loneliness feel less awful. See? All of this alone time was fantastic- I could stare at cookbooks and exercise like a fiend with near impunity. If people were around, I knew my disordered habits would be recognized and I would once again become Carrie the Freak. The irony is that I pushed away the few good friends I did have because I didn't want anyone to get too close. It was so easy to do this in the eating disorder, both because of the nature of the ED itself (you feel compelled to engage in some pretty bizarre behaviors and you also feel compelled to conceal those behaviors from those around you), and because the ED made it easier to let them go. It didn't matter- I had my eating disorder. What more did I need?

Of course, recovery has meant coming face to face with those feelings of loneliness. Although I'm probably less lonely now that I was in the depths of my eating disorder (as measured my interaction with friends and family), it feels worse because I don't have the ED to "justify" my loneliness. There's nothing to take away the sting and burn of wanting to catch a movie with someone and having no one to ask. At most I can tell myself that it's fine I don't have many friends because at least then I can fit in a much-needed nap when I need to! I know the eating disorder doesn't make me any less lonely, it just makes the lonely hurt less. It's so easy for me to slip back in old habits when left to my own devices--in part because they are almost habitual after all these years, and in part because I need people to help drag me out of my eating disorder. The times I have done better in recovery are those times when I have made the effort to be social and reach out. I don't know which way the relationship works, but I know that being more social and doing better in recovery are linked.

Recovery has also meant a shift in how I perceive myself. As much as I'm an introvert and love my solitude, I've had to accept that I'm also a people person. I need social interaction just as much as I need a quiet sanctuary to escape from the said social interaction. Figuring out what to do about my loneliness is another matter entirely. One of my tasks from my therapist this week is to identify some groups or classes that I can attend which might interest me. Common interests go a long way in helping people make new friends.

I realize that even people with no eating disorders can suffer profound loneliness, and it would be silly for me to expect that recovery would mean I would never be lonely again (though wouldn't that be nice!). But I do still miss how easily the eating disorder was able to remove the sting and burn of loneliness and just how much it hurts.

I have massive anxiety issues. It was never overtly obvious when I was younger--my anxiety appeared more as irritability (my parents referred to me as "Grumpy Bear" from the Care Bears) and a nasty temper than out-and-out anxiety. Even through high school (and the appearance of a clinical anxiety disorder), I always thought I was more crotchety than anxious. It turns out that my irritability directly reflects my anxiety--when I'm super anxious, the world just grates at me and every little thing ticks me off.

I'm getting better at understanding just how much anxiety pervades my life. That's a start. But what I still struggle with is actually coping with the anxiety. Which brings me to my next roadblock to recovery:

Anorexia as an anxiety lessener

When I was in college and my AN just emerging (no one, least of all me, had a clue what was going on), I was also struggling with a resurgence of OCD and other assorted anxiety issues. By this time, I was seeing a therapist for depression/anxiety, and had recently started an SSRI. However, I still had plenty of freak-outs and moments of complete panic. So my MD gave me a small prescription of Xanax (a benzodiazapine) to help with these moments. There was a problem, however. The pills worked and help calm me down enough to be rational, but they also zonked me out, which left me no more functional than I was before.

Not surprisingly, as the AN kicked in to higher and higher levels, I found that not eating did a rather fine job of taking the edge off the anxiety. It didn't leave me quasi-comatose, and I got to feel like I was "accomplishing" something (ie, losing weight, eating "right," exercising, etc).

Even during my last relapse, I was aware that I should probably start eating more, that eventually my return to AN wasn't going to end well for me. I found myself frozen for a number of reasons, not the least of it was fear of weight gain and fear of change. But one of the biggest reasons I didn't want to start eating again was that I knew the anxiety kickback was going to be awful, and I just couldn't face it. With the ED, I didn't have to agonize over what to eat, or what to say or do (as long as it involved not eating and enough time to exercise, I was just fine). The added fact was that anorexia served as my trump card, which dulled the anxiety about everything else. Because even if everything else went to pot, at least I could be anorexic, right?

Recovering from anorexia meant giving up all that. It meant giving up my "virtual valium" and my go-to anxiety coping skill. Recovery hasn't, alas, diminished my anxiety any. I'm still just as bad as I ever was, only now it seems worse because I know the feeling is anxiety and not just me being, well, me. I have probably tried everything imaginable to help with the anxiety, from yoga to meditation to stress balls. I need an arsenal because not all coping skills are appropriate for all situations--I would look pretty stupid doing downward dog in the middle of the bakery. Ditto for crocheting a scarf. But I can use deep breathing techniques and I can remind myself that I have good problem solving skills. I can stash a stress ball or some Silly Putty in my purse or pocket. And I think learning to accept the inevitable anxiety will help me go a long way in decreasing the distress it causes me. At this point in my life, my anxiety isn't going anywhere. My mind tends to come up with ridiculous alternatives, and I'm not all that good at shutting down my brain. That's just the way it is, and I can accept that in a "Boy aren't I screwed" sort of way, or I can accept it in a "Anxiety hasn't killed me yet, so I can manage" sort of way.

This particular roadblock wasn't on my list of cons to recovery, but I just realized how relevant it was.

(Not) feeling hungry

As I've started my new job, I've noticed that no matter how many hours I go without eating, I don't get hungry. There are any number of factors to that, not the least of which are I'm really busy, I'm around food and so "full by osmosis," and that it's hotter than Hades in the bakery. When I get done with work, my hunger cues return to their post-ED norm. But at work? I don't feel hungry. I just don't.

This makes it really hard to eat my dinner and snack when I'm not even hungry. The ultimate problem is that I feel I have to rationalize my eating. Maybe it's that someone is watching me, or that I want to at least pass for normal at a group luncheon. Or maybe it's that I know I'm going to pass out if I don't eat something quick, even sometimes if my hunger is gnawing at me and I know beyond all reasonable doubt that I need to eat something. But eating when I'm not hungry (and no one is watching me)? I feel so absurdly guilty. I tell myself I don't need this sandwich, this piece of pizza. I don't. I'm not even hungry! Why should I eat?

Why, indeed.

It's easy for me to say things like "An eating disorder may mess up your hunger cues so don't rely entirely on them," but it's another thing entirely to live this statement. Much of my treatment involved schooling me in the theory and practice of intuitive eating. For those who aren't familiar with intuitive eating, the premise goes something like this: eat when you're hungry, stop when you're full. When I was freaking out about weight gain, my dietitian told me that as long as I ate when I was hungry and stopped when I was full, I wouldn't gain weight.

I don't blame her for making this statement (it is both true and useful), but it also didn't account for all of the times when it is time to eat but I'm not hungry. It feels somehow wrong to eat (yes, even after all of this time), and to eat when I'm not hungry seems almost heretical. Before the AN struck, my appetite was just fine. I wasn't a huge eater, but I got hungry rather predictably and all was well. I know that all of these years of having this eating disorder have probably messed that nice little system up. Maybe it will come back, maybe it won't. It's certainly not a reason to throw in the towel and give up. I need to work with my body, as it is right now. And that might mean eating when I'm not hungry or eating at times that I haven't designated as "meal" or "snack."

Part of this, too, is breaking all of those rigid rules I had for so many years about what eating was acceptable and what wasn't. It's hard to trust that my body won't tell me it's hungry when it doesn't need food, and then to hold off on trusting it entirely to tell me when it is hungry. What I need is a system to help me eat when I need to and flexible enough to accommodate everyday life.

So here's a confession that probably won't surprise most people with EDs but most people without EDs will find it baffling: I miss the endorphin highs that come with undereating and overexercising. I miss the psychic lightness that makes me feel disconnected to this life and this world. I do. I miss it.

Of course, to wax nostalgic about the 0.1% of the eating disorder that was physically pleasant would be to completely ignore the other 99.9% that was pure hell. But our brains are good at ignoring such technicalities and the fact remains that I miss those endorphin highs. A lot. I don't miss being so weak I could barely get out of bed, or nearly collapsed after I finally finished exercising. I didn't mind it then, because it was a sign that at least I didn't eat too much. But then there were those fleeting moments when I felt lighter than air, when I had just slogged through another marathon exercise session and felt so freaking good, when I realized I hadn't eaten for Lord only knows how long...those moments I miss.

The endorphin highs aren't a major one of my roadblocks to recovery, but it's part of it, and so I am blogging about it. On average, I feel so much better mentally and physically now that I am in recovery. Yet the problem remains: I still haven't found anything to match those endorphin highs. I remember in my high school health class, we got a handout on "100 Natural Highs" that didn't involve drugs or alcohol. Which was nice and all, but even little ol' innocent me could see that blowing the fuzz off a dandelion was a very different thing than shooting up heroin. It's fairly similar here. I do loves me an afternoon nap, but it's not a replacement for an endorphin high.

Part of me thinks I should just stop looking for a replacement. That maybe the problem is my need for the endorphin high rather than the inability to find that high in a non-self-destructive way. Maybe, too, the giddiness of the highs were exaggerated by the fact that they existed against a backdrop of misery.

Over the past few months, I've been revisiting some of the foods I used to eat as a kid and had fantasized about for years, fantasies fueled partly by starvation and partly by nostalgia. (Bear with me- this has relevance to what I'm talking about, I promise!) So I've started sampling some of those foods again, treats I see in the grocery store or hear maligned in the media. Some of them are as good as I remember (Swiss Cake Rolls, anyone?) but many of them really aren't. For the most part, I haven't rated these foods as gross/icky/otherwise inedible, but the attraction just isn't there anymore. I pass these items, think "That's nice," and don't think about it much anymore.

Perhaps one day I'll think the same way about the starvation and exercise highs. (See- I told you the above paragraph was relevant!) I'll be able to look at those highs and think "That was nice while it lasted, but my tastes have changed, thanks."

This is another post in my Roadblocks to Recovery series. It's closely related to yesterday's roadblock (ED as a trump card) but also different enough that I think it's worth its own post.

Without ED, I will just be "average"

My height is average. My weight is average (I'm small but solid). These things are fine, and I can (mostly) deal with it. Well, the first part of it. But heaven help me if I ever feel average.

Like so many things that happened with my eating disorder, much of this thinking process started with my academic life, long before I showed any signs of ED. I had to be "The Best." I wasn't a narcissist by any stretch of the imagination, but I had this competitive spirit. The darker side of that competitive spirit is that if I wasn't "The Best," then I sucked at whatever it was, and I may as well go home. My mom always said that only one person could be the best, and I remember plaintively wailing to her on more than one occasion, "So why can't it be ME?"

A few examples: in grad school, I had two exams in my immunology class. On the first exam, I scored at roughly the class average, which before the curve was around a 71% (this was 3 years ago, and I still remember it!). I was horrified and almost devastated--I had a therapy session afterwards and I sobbed about it and my poor therapist just handed me tissues. I was determined not to repeat this on the last exam, so I studied for weeks. All I could think of were the other people in my class who had surely done better than I. It never occurred to me that an equal number had done worse. For the several days before the exam, I barely slept and I was physically ill from the anxiety. My goal wasn't just to do better (which would have been a marginally decent goal), but to break the curve. Which I did. I was exhausted and burned out, but I did it. And I felt okay about myself, at least for a short while.

Even recently, I was playing Dominoes with my parents and some of their friends, and I was just so keyed up while we were playing. Even though I loved everyone there (I refer to these people as "Aunt" and "Uncle") and I know they didn't give a hoot about who won, I was terribly afraid that I wasn't going to win. I didn't. I got second place and I still walked away disappointed because I was utterly convinced that only some strange luck had saved me from last place. I didn't win, and that was all that mattered. It's why I don't like keeping score at mini-golf or bowling or even Pictionary. Because I rarely win, and so I frequently end up hating myself (yes, over not winning a game of Pictionary).

It goes something like this: my drive to win isn't so much from the joy of winning. My drive is from a fear of failure. This drive is essentially perfectionism, distilled to its essence. Of course, my eating disorder wasn't just extreme perfectionism- I wasn't "Starving for Perfection" or "Dying to be Thin." But the two are tremendously and inextricably linked.

The anorexia made me feel special, somehow. It made me feel like I was "The Best" when I was starving and over-exercising and losing weight. If I found out that anyone had eaten less than me that day (food poisoning, their own eating disorder), my brain flew into a tizzy and I felt compelled to exercise off every extra calorie or purge what was left in my system. Eating more than someone meant I wasn't "The Best," and if I wasn't "The Best," I was just average. My abnormally low weight played a role, too. Although I never fully bought into the (wrong) cultural idea that thin people are inherently "better" than those who are heavier, I was rather aware of this idea and it played a role in my ED. If I was the "thinnest," then I was "The Best." If I gained weight, I was only average, and average, as I've said before, is not something my perfectionistic brain likes to contemplate.

Recovery, of course, meant eating more and gaining weight. It meant extracting myself from my idiotic mind games surrounding academics and food and weight. And this is where it gets tough. Because this mindset is so ingrained and it seems rather rational in the moment. The underlying issue, if you really dig deep enough, goes back to really low self-esteem. Why else would I need a trump card or so deeply fear being average if I really thought I was a good enough person? It's hard for me to accept that "average" is just fine, because I fear that if I'm not "The Best," then I'm nothing. I know that what makes me special isn't my being "The Best" at not eating or losing weight, and that I'm still special even if I'm average in every way. I just need to figure out how I can value myself being average and letting go.

One of my therapy assignments this week was to write a pro/con list for fully recovering from my eating disorder. The idea of identifying the "cons" wasn't so much to figure out whether I should bother recovering, but more to identify the roadblocks I was likely to encounter on my way to recovery. I had quite a few cons, and it occurred to me that by addressing these issues head-on, I would probably have a better chance at recovery. So if recovery were a road, then these issues would be my roadblocks.

I thought that it would be an interesting or at least useful idea to address each of these roadblocks in its own post. This was also motivated by the fact that lumping everything together would make a novel-length post. I figured I would start out with the most significant of these roadblocks, which is:

Anorexia as my trump card

What in the hell do I mean by that? It goes something like this: I was good at losing weight and, even more importantly, I knew it. No one needed to tell me this. I'm aware that I'm smart and that I'm vaguely musical, but I'm only aware of these things because people have told me. It's not an internal state. So when I realized on my own that I was good at losing weight, it was the first time I remember feeling confident in any of my abilities (short of guzzling coffee at breakneck speeds). It was also the first time when I approached a task with an attitude of "Yeah, I can do this!"

The irony is, of course, that anorexia was a massive wrecking ball in my life and made me doubt my other abilities even more. But I was still good at losing weight. I was still good at eating less than anyone else. I was still good at exercising more. There was that. So the eating disorder essentially undermined all of my confidence in myself except where it came to my weight loss skills. I was Carrie the Weight Loss Wonder Goddess.

It's probably not surprising to learn that I began to use my anorexia as a way to feel better when something went wrong in my life. Get a bad grade on an exam? At least I only ate X calories. Get turned down on a job interview? It's okay- I've lost X pounds since the interview. F*ck the job. Get criticized by my boss/a friend/a family member? Whatever. I exercised for X hours and all is well with the world. No matter how badly I screwed up, no matter the disasters that might happen, whatever, at least I knew I had the anorexia. And the anorexia propped up what little was left of my shattered and broken self esteem. In other words, the anorexia functioned as my trump card--it made everything else much less relevant.

Now I'm left questioning and wondering- what the heck am I going to do without my trump card? How am I going to make things suck less?

One obvious answer would be to learn how to deal with the suckiness.

Another obvious answer would be to shore up my pitiful self-esteem such that bad things happening didn't mean that there was something wrong with me, that I was a bad person, or that I was doomed forever.

The thing is--I miss my trump card. I miss not knowing that feeling better is only a skipped meal away. I miss the self-confidence (however shallow and transient) that came with knowing at least I was good at something. Just one thing. It was my escape hatch, as there's no better way to escape from life than to be so starved you don't really know what's going on. It was my parachute, my Plan B. I've long since rid myself of the quasi-romantic notions that anorexia was wonderful and it helped my life and that it was all it was cracked up to be. Because it wasn't. Not by a long shot. But it was still there.

And I guess it still is there. It hasn't disappeared. I still know I'm "good" at it. It's just hard as I see through the lies and delusions of anorexia and have yet to find something to replace it.

Tomorrow's post is:
Roadblocks to Recovery: On Average