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.

Although this article was more geared towards parents, I think it really helped me understand a lot better about what the hell was going on in my head during the worst of the eating disorder.

An excerpt:

An interesting area of research known as “theory of mind” posits that your child’s brain really does change as his or her weight dips below the starvation level. Theory of mind researchers are studying the eating disordered person’s ability to read facial expressions to intuit mental states, sometimes solely by looking at the eyes of the person they are with. They’re finding that this ability falls victim to starvation, just as does the body’s ability to maintain strong bones, keep warm, or grow lustrous, healthy-looking hair. A starving person has difficulty attributing emotions, beliefs, and desires to themselves and to others. Without this ability, it can be hard to function smoothly in the social world.



...One test the researchers used showed both people with anorexia and recovered patients film clips of social interactions between people. Test subjects had to scrutinize facial expressions, body language, conversation and context to read complicated emotions such as desire, embarrassment and hostility. When a teen with anorexia looks into her worried, and frustrated parents’ eyes, can she recognize the emotions written on their faces, and compare it to feelings she has experienced herself? Researchers noted clear deficits in this area among anorexics. The test was able to distinguish those currently suffering from anorexia and those who had recovered. So the good news is that this weakness in processing emotion seems to get better with recovery.


Ulrike Schmidt and colleagues are now readying a paper for the International Journal of Eating Disorders that looks at theory of mind in relation to bulimia. In her tests, Schmidt and her colleagues examine study subjects and the ability to attribute mental states to others and ourselves, which they call “mentalizing.” Interestingly, when a group of patients with bulimia were given this test, they were better able to recognize negative emotion than the control group. Schmidt and colleagues have detected enough of a “distinct socio-cognitive profile” among bulimic patients (translation: they do read and process emotions differently) to merit further research.

The fact that patients with anorexia who have recovered seem to regain their ability to recognize and attribute emotions to others, Banker notes, indicates that this phenomenon could well be a temporary lapse into autism-like cognitive behavior. “When someone’s in a state of starvation that kind of empathic, or higher-relational function shuts down,” she notes, news she hopes will “reduce the personal hurt” that comes with the territory of helping a loved one battle anorexia.

Basically, when I am in the grips of the eating disorder, my "self" shuts down.  It's like my own self is too difficult, too expensive for my starving brain to maintain. And so it goes to ground. Hibernates.

When it does come back, it's like your hand or foot waking up after falling asleep--pain and pins and needles. That this phase is likely necessary doesn't make it any easier. What also doesn't make it easier is when you realize just how long you've been absent. When it suddenly hits you that all your similarly-aged friends are married and having babies and you're still not quite figuring out this whole thing the world likes to call "dating."*

It makes me want to get a t-shirt that says "Excuse me, but my brain was on a prolonged leave of absence."

The irony is that my life looked pretty normal. Graduate degrees, jobs, things like that. It didn't look like I was missing out on a whole lot. But I realize that I never really went through the process of making friends and meeting people for almost a decade. Add in the fact that my natural skills at these tops out at "total suckitude," and it's not hard to see how you find yourself at 30, rather adrift in the world.

Even more ironic is that the eating disorder can start to seem like a good solution. If I shrink my world back down, I'll go back to being oblivious about what I'm missing. Not a bad solution, at least in the short term. Until you realize that going back will mean that even more time has passed and you are further and further behind where you want to be in life.

I think this is the "mourning" the therapists tell you about. You don't just mourn the loss of the eating disorder, you mostly mourn the loss of everything that went along with it. The illness keeps you charmingly oblivious to, well, everything, and only as you come out do you realize what you've been missing.

*Honestly, what keeps my sanity is looking at mating rituals in the animal kingdom. I can put them into context that way. Clearly, I'm a nerd...

Alongside the truism that knowledge is power lives the fact that ignorance is bliss. Especially when it comes to knowing the truth about ourselves.

I ran across a blog post that discussed why people avoid the truth about themselves. A recent study in the Review of General Psychology identified three main reasons (as distilled by the PsyBlog folks):

1. It may demand a change in beliefs. Loads of evidence suggests people tend to seek information that confirms their beliefs rather than disproves them.
2. It may require us to take undesired actions. Telling the doctor about those weird symptoms means you might have to undergo painful testing. Sometimes it seems like it's better not to know.
3. It may cause unpleasant emotions.

I think this phenomenon really captures why it's so hard to begin recovery. You have to face the truth that you're sick, that you don't control your eating disorder, and that you're going to have to begin the very unpleasant process of actually stopping behaviors. It's a monumental task.

Recovery means accepting some very unpleasant truths, and it's not something I always feel up to. The problem is that ignoring the truth doesn't make it any less true.

Humans have a particular blind spot for identifying their own foibles. Remember, though, that it's our own cars that have blind spots, and not anyone else's.  We can avoid the truth by creating our own alternate universe. Most of the time, the differences are really subtle. We're not that late, at least, not very much, or at least not when it's really important.  Doesn't everyone have odd eating habits?  There are plenty of people who weigh less than me that are doing just fine.  But as the ED progresses, the alternate universe begins to look more and more like the Twilight Zone. Everyone else can eat this food without gaining weight, but I can't. Chap Stick might have calories, so I can't use it.  I can't stop exercising or I'll gain 20 pounds.

If we really stopped to ask ourselves about how normal our routines really were and what would happen if they suddenly changed, we would have to face the truth that our eating disorder was far more problematic than we would like to believe.  Add in a healthy dose of anosognosia (a literal inability to understand that we're ill), and our brains can spin a web of lies and half-truths for years.

Recovery means admitting that we've been living a lie. It means facing those fears of food and dissolving those routines and rituals that have kept our sanity intact.  It means entering a world of the unknown.

It's much easier to just avoid the truth, put our heads in the sand like ostriches and just ignore everything.

The truth catches up to us, eventually.  It dogs our steps.  It scares us senseless.

Here's the thing that truth doesn't tell you: facing it head-on and chin up isn't as scary as we think it will be.  It's unpleasant, but stripping the lies from our lives (the lies we tell others, yes, but also those lies we tell ourselves) gives us a chance to face life on its own terms. It shows us that we are much stronger than we think we are.

I finally feel I have a moment to breathe.  I've been so busy the past few weeks that I really haven't gotten to just sit back and take a breath.  The upside is that I really do love my job, and so extra work isn't always a bad thing.  But I've been generally feeling stressed and utterly exhausted.  I usually wake up in the morning and feel ready to head right back to bed.

The ongoing insomnia isn't helping anything, either.

Still, I'm exhausted. 

I know I need to regroup for a bit, in order to face the next round of work, and the next round of recovery work.  I've written before that my work is a huge motivator for me in recovery.  For one, it gives my brain something to think about besides weight and calories.  And my identity is very tied up in what I do, so it gives me something positive with which to affiliate myself.

Because of this, and the fact that I work from home, makes it very easy to overwork myself.  Overwork isn't really any better than overexercise, and I'm psychologically and behaviorally prone to both. The other factor is financial--I had a couple of slow months earlier this year, and I can't afford more of that.  So I have anxiety driving me both to keep up financially and also to prove myself as a legitimate science writer.

I have plenty I need to do tomorrow, but I am also making a conscious effort not to overdo it.  To relax with TV show reruns in the evening and crochet, or read, or play with my cat.

So, yes.  Breathing.  Breathing is good.  I can't work if I burn out, and so working less now will let me do more later.

At least, that's what I'm telling myself.

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.

When I was in college, I remember sitting in church and listening to a sermon where we were exhorted to take Sunday (or any other day of the week) and not do any schoolwork, nothing, and instead devode the day to prayer and worship.  I almost burst out laughing--not so much because I couldn't imagine spending an entire day focused on religious activities (and I was much more religious then than I am now), but because I couldn't imagine a 24-hour period in which I didn't do any studying or homework.

I've always sucked at taking time off.  When I was in 8th grade, I skipped most of my brother's high school graduation party to study.  In fact, I brought books to the graduation itself.  In high school, I studied for exams on Christmas (the exams were about a month later).  I rarely went out on the weekends in college because, again, studies came first.  Clearly, I have issues.

But the past few weeks, I've been basically banging my head against the wall at work. I've been sending out story ideas, only to be rejected over and over and over.  I know it's not personal, but it is rather discouraging and frustrating as hell. Since I was sleeping more, it seemed that all I did was eat, work, and sleep.  I think much of my fatigue was old-fashioned burnout.  Don't get me wrong- I still love what I do.  On Friday, though, I had simply had it. {{I did get two smaller stories on Friday afternoon, so all is well on that front.}}

No, my weekend wasn't quite that serene.

So I took the weekend off.  Okay, I did a little work.  But just a few hours, probably half on my Psychology Today blog (a new post will appear tomorrow morning or whenever I hear back from the author of a study) and half on the FEAST Conference Planning.  Other than that, I hung out with J, watched TV, crocheted, and read (At Home by Bill Bryson, if you're curious).  It was unusual.  It was also nice.  I was far more apprehensive of how my little prefrontal cortex would handle the change than I was about actually taking time off.

Yeah, I paid for it a bit today.  But I also had a vacation, and I really needed that.  I'm trying to remind myself that the break has made me much more productive than I might otherwise have been today, and that extra boost of productivity will extend through the week.  It's a total shift from my usual MO.  Before, when I've taken time off, it's been because I was either too sick or too depressed to give a crap about not getting anything else done.  Although I've had at least one "vacation" this year, it was to AED last month, and there wasn't much down time.

I know I need to be more vigilant about separating my work life from everything else.  It's too easy to let work bleed into other times.  Sometimes it's simply necessary (when I have a deadline or need to do an evening interview because of time zone differences), but it's still an area where I need to get better at.

In Jenni Schaefer's book Life Without Ed, she writes about the two main tactics for combatting ED thoughts:

• Disagree: counter the ED thought that a slice of cake will make you fat with thoughts like Eating cake is normal, one slice of cake won't change my weight, I trust my treatment team and the food plan they gave me.
• Disobey: the ED thought tells you not to eat that cake and you eat that cake, dammit.

All of which are well and good.  My dad always told me I should have been a lawyer since I can argue anyone into the ground.  Arguing against myself is harder because both sides of my brain are equally skilled in coming up with convoluted statements, odd facts, and seemingly incontrovertible bits of logic.

Even when I do win against the ED thoughts, the previous hours-long pissing match between Healthy Carrie and ED Carrie has left me exhausted and more than a little demoralized. It shouldn't be this hard!

Indeed it shouldn't. File under: Pyrrhic victory, definition of.

So I came up with another "D" strategy to deal with the ED thoughts: Disengage.

So when I start bickering with the voice in my head that tells me I shouldn't eat, that I'm going to get fat, that eating means I'm a pathetic failure, I don't argue back.  I just say "Mmmmm..."  When you're trying to make a decision, it's not like your brain instantly comes up with a unanimous agreement.  Different parts of your brain provide different input, and that input isn't all equally important or relevant.  It's sort of like the vaguely rabid people preaching the End Times on the street corner: I know these people are irrational, so I just kind of ignore it.

ED thoughts are similar; it's not worth my time to argue.  Arguments seem to give the thoughts credibility, that they're work an argument.  The problem is that they're not.  So I've been trying to mentally walk away from the ED craziness in my head.  We'll see whether it works, but hopefully it will leave mw with more energy and sanity.

First of all, thank you SO MUCH for the wonderful support.  I have the best readers, bar none, and I will seriously kick anyone's ass who says you aren't.

I've gotten emails and texts from quite a few people who have shared their own struggles. One comment I was particularly struck by was via Twitter (it was a private message, so no need to waste time looking!):

I lost a bit of weight recently and it's started up this annoying talk in my head. I hate how freaking pleased it makes part of me.

It's the last line in particular that really resonated.  It would be so much easier to fight off urges and behaviors if we found them seriously distressing.  The problem is that distressing is not always the word that comes to mind when ED behaviors return.  This summer, I did experience distress at the return of ED stuff, both while I was in Europe and then when my parents were away for a week or so.  Serious distress and only a little weight loss.  I remember being simultaneously puzzled and relieved at the distress--puzzled because it was something totally new, yet relieved that the distress meant I was extra motivated to address these issues.

Eventually, the ED stuff does get distressing.  Things like blue lips, anemia, and utter exhaustion ultimately take their toll.  For me, the notion that I wouldn't be able to keep working up to my usual capacity was a major motivator for me to take action.  For better or worse, my identity is very tied up with my career, and I take any threats to that very seriously.  I realize that I am more than just a writer, but that's also primarily how I think of myself. I don't have the security of disability or sick leave as a freelancer, and so if I can't work, I don't get paid.

Addressing a slip is generally much more stressful for me than the slip itself.  And therein lies the problem.  It's hard to change when you're not feeling any internal pressure to.  Of course, external pressure quickly stepped in and helped me move along, but still.  When I notice my depression increasing, I'm generally pretty motivated to do something about it (assuming I feel there's something that can be helped, but that's another story).  Same for the anxiety.  It's unpleasant.  The ED isn't always the same.  Staying in recovery would be so much easier if falling out of recovery was harder to deal with.

Usually, a mild relapse initially makes me feel better.  Hence the problem.

I think I need to start accepting that minor relapses aren't going to cause me any sort of distress and that I need to stop expecting distress to happen and relying on it to take action.  It's totally counter intuitive, but not much about EDs makes logical sense.  Why wouldn't a recurrence of a potentially deadly illness not stress me out?  I dunno.  Here's what I need to get through my thick skull: just because I'm not freaked out doesn't mean that it's not a big deal.


If that came naturally, my life would be so much easier, I think.

For the past 6+ months, I've been steadily chipping away at this freelance writer thing.  I'm not going to lie--it was exhausting and difficult at first.  I didn't quite know what to do.  I lucked out in that I had established enough contacts previously that I could make it work from the start.

I generally don't like making broad, sweeping statements about recovery.  Recovery ends up being about different things to different people, and we each have our own road to travel on the way to wellness.

But (and there's always a but) some people just get it so damn right that I think maybe broad, sweeping statements really aren't all that bad.

A mom on Around the Dinner Table posted this in response to learning about another person's relapsing daughter:

Whatever medication and therapies are offered your d, you can play an active part yourself in

• teaching her that she has an illness where she will always be vulnerable to going down this path under stress
• helping her to understand this, but teaching her that she must never choose this path in response to stress
• helping her to create a future with possibilities beyond the pain she is feeling just now
• reminding her how much she is loved (which I know you do all the time)

Yes, this.  If you could strip recovery down to the bone (I'm pretty sure that pun was unintentional), clear away all the extras and figure out just the basics, this would be it.  Much of the hard work of recovery is in learning our own vulnerabilities and demons.  Not just learning what they are, but what makes them come out of the locked closets in which we place them, and how to shoo them back in.

It's been tremendously humbling to begin to accept that I will never be invulnerable to anorexia, not completely.  But now that I'm learning to accept this, I can focus my energies on clearing out the wreckage from my eating disorder.

Between the move and everything else that is going on in my life, I feel like I am juggling about 10 million balls, trying desperately to keep them all up in the air at the same time.  And I suppose not just keep them up in the air but keep track of where each ball is at any point in time.

If this were actual juggling instead of metaphorical, I'd be screwed.  My coordination is essentially nil.

Despite the metaphorical nature of my juggling, it is nonetheless exhausting.  I want to blog many nights, but I'm either too tired to actually put my thoughts into coherent sentences or too tired even to form thoughts, period.  I think back to my college days, when I lived on four hours of sleep and turbo-charged black coffee.  I was miserable and depressed, but I can't help but get jealous at the old Carrie who got so much done.  And then I feel lazy in comparison.

Considering I was neither mentally healthy (the OCD rituals were much of what kept me awake when I wanted to drop) nor do I really miss being that 18, 19, 20-year-old Carrie, I don't know why I haul out that old yardstick.  But I do.

One of the many topics I've been working on in therapy, from the first time I ever saw a psychologist over 10 years ago now, is "being gentle with myself."  Basically, it means sleeping when I'm tired, eating when I'm hungry, and so on.  As much as I know that not pushing myself to write in the wee hours of the morning is a victory, I still feel insanely guilty when I do lay my head upon my pillow.  As if the Forces of Lazy have somehow won a massive victory.

The years of abuse from the anorexia combined with the inexorable forces of aging have played no small role. My body simply won't let me push it that hard.  It falls asleep standing up.  It finds a way to sneak in a nap.

I took a power nap for about 30 minutes this afternoon, and I know I should be popping the champagne or something, but it makes me feel squeamish and guilty.  Sort of like when I eat something and it's not actually meal or snacktime.  My body doesn't follow a clock exactly, blah blah blah.  Logically, I get it.  But emotionally?  It's a whole different story.

I think it comes down to one word: should.  I shouldn't be hungry, I shouldn't be tired.  I have these internal rules about "appropriate" times to eat and sleep.  Feeling hungry or tired at "inappropriate" times really messes with my head.  I do love traveling, but the experience is often jarring for the first day or two, largely because my body clock is often thrown out of whack.  I do well with schedules.  I can become way the hell too attached to these schedules, yes.  But I also need them, probably more than most people.  Free time scares the hell out of me because I have no idea what I should be doing.  I've gotten okay with "me" time--reading, watching TV, crocheting, farting around in the kitchen.  All of these are fine.  But a block of time that I don't know what to do with?  Total freak out.

So I'm blogging about how I'm so damn tired I can't seem to work up the energy to blog, and here I've written a novel.  Figures.

I'm also falling asleep at the computer, so I'm going to call it a night.

Many of my recovery milestones thus far have been directly related to food/weight.  Things like eliminating my list of fear foods, not purging for a year and a half (and counting!), reaching my target weight and staying there.  Not that these aren't huge milestones, but they were also very concrete things.  I can do concrete goals very well, but more nebulous goals (increase flexibility! meet new friends!) are much more difficult.  I can't break them down into little steps.

One of the things I worked on a lot with TNT and have started to do with Dr. H is making friends.  I have been living here for a bit over a year, and I really didn't have any friends.  If I wanted to do something on a Friday night, I asked my parents.  There wasn't someone for me to call.

A few months ago, I joined a book club on meetup.com because I love reading, and it seemed like the perfect fit.  I lucked out, as the people there are really cool, really nice, and really smart.  My kind of people.  I could discuss politics without feeling the need to censor myself.  They were very accepting.  January's meeting was last weekend, and I went and had a very nice time.  I brought some killer scones (Banana Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip). The hostess made decaf coffee for me, since last time I turned the regular coffee down lest I be up all night, which I thought was the sweetest thing ever.

I stayed around a bit after to help clean up and to spend more quality time with their pup.  As I did, the host, hostess, and one other person began talking about their weekly jam sessions.  Apparently, every week, a bunch of them get together with their stringed instruments and just play music. It had come up during the group that I play piano and sing, and so they invited me to come.

As I was driving home, I realized: I finally have friends now.  I haven't had that in ages.  It occurred to me that they might be inviting me out of pity or guilt (they were talking about this music thing and I was right there next to them), an idea I can't totally shake.  But I also know that they genuinely seem to like me, and they aren't the type to throw out a pity invite.

It feels...really good.  I have a friend in real life, and I have online friends, but I honestly don't remember what it's like to have a group of people to actually do things with.  It's all very new to me.

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

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

So.  To the actual point of this post.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think that self-care is a big part of recovery.  That being said, my history of adequately caring for myself is generally bad.

If you are friends with me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, then you have probably heard me whinging about my awful cold.  The terrible I-think-I-just-swallowed-glass-shards stage has passed, and now I'm into trying to figure out how to get through life with five gallons of snot sloshing around in my skull.

Not fun.

So instead of blogging tonight, I'm going to take a bit of my own advice and practice good self-care.  I am logging off the computer and getting some extra rest. 

With that, I'll talk to everyone in the morning.

The last week or so has been one massive slog through writing, editing, revising, interviewing, and writing some more.  It is, in a sense, a very good sign that I'm rather swamped with stuff.  It tends to make paying the bills easier (although some of that writing is for a freelance gig that I'm "auditioning" for at this stage, and therefore no payment is guaranteed. But it's a great career opportunity, and I'm excited about it).  I have a headache, I can barely keep my eyes open, I want to beat my head against my desk in frustration half the time as I'm trying to write about science I can't quite wrap my mind around.

I'm simply exhausted.  I just want to nap.  I took an hour or two this afternoon to read, as I had a brief reprieve in the never ending gauntlet of deadlines.  But tonight it's back to the computer and work, followed by more of the same for tomorrow.

This kind of grim exhaustion, followed by the deep inner sense that I have a job to finish, reminds me of eating in the early days of recovery.  I would have gladly eaten all of my exchanges at an all-you-can-eat buffet first thing in the morning so I didn't have to worry about eating the rest of the day.  I was just so sick of the endless slog through meals and snacks.  I wanted it to go away.  And that's what this is kind of like, although I do actually like writing, which I couldn't say about food back then.  It's this numb exhaustion, combined with the knowledge that the end result is rewarding.

Today's work really hurt my brain, as I'm trying to write smartly on science I'm not exactly sure I understand.  In fact, I'm pretty sure I don't understand it one bit, and I had to eventually phone the researcher and ask him to explain his work using words with no more than three syllables.  I still don't think it worked.

And this exhaustion has led a slight uptick in feelings of depression.  It's more of the anhedonia and apathy caused by being too tired to care much rather than an actual "I hate my life" feeling.  I used to deal with this in a very ED way.  First of all, I better not be tired because I still had to get through my exercise routine, and I was never too tired for that.  The exercise also served as a little pick-me-up, and as a vent for my stress.  It's hard not to turn to that when I know it's so effective--at least for the short term.

I suppose this is part of what recovery and life are all about. Surviving the crappier times without resorting to unhealthy behaviors.  Recognizing that said crappy time won't last forever.  Integrating self-care into your life (such as my reading and blogging this afternoon).  And the acceptance that the ED won't change your current situation for the better.

My friend Charlotte had posted about how far her daughter had come in her fight against anorexia over the past year.  In an email to me, she asked me to post this on my blog:

This time last year (3rd November, 2009), my daughter's anorexia had changed my warm, funny bright loving daughter into a cobra with PMS, my other daughter was crying hysterically, my husband was as angry as a hungry grizzly and I have never felt so hopeless and helpless in the whole of my life. So, taking courage in both hands and laying aside my uptight English reserve, I posted on the ATDT forum asking for help.


And through them, I found Carrie.

A year on, a lot has changed. My warm, funny, bright, loving daughter is back. My other daughter only cries when she gets moisturiser in her eyes. My husband is back to his habitual horizontal position and I feel empowered and useful.

And, I still have Carrie.

We talked about how far we have come in a year and for both us, looking back, has been cathartic and hopeful.
 
I feel like I've known Charlotte for so much longer than a year.  She has truly become a dear friend.
 
And yet, looking back over this past year, I realize how far I've come.  I've actually embraced the concept of recovery, not just to get my parents off my back or to make my therapist happy.  There are still parts of recovery I hate, but I'm starting to really accept them.  I do still miss the eating disorder at times, but I also have other times when it's not at the forefront of my mind.
 
If you would have asked me last year what I would be doing in November 2010, I wouldn't have told you that I would be trying to buy a condo and working full-time as a freelance writer.  That I would actually be showing signs of success in my career.  To be honest, back then I wasn't really thinking of the future.  The future consisted of trying to weasel out of the next meal or next snack.  It consisted of dreaming and hoping and wishing.  Yeah, it would be nice to kick this ED to the curb, but it would also be nice if pigs would fly and my coffee cup magically refilled itself.  That didn't mean it was going to happen anytime soon.
 
My life isn't what I anticipated it would be before I got ill.  I didn't expect to be still living with my parents at age 30.  I didn't expect to have more health problems than I care to count and know that padded rooms on psych wards actually exist.
 
Yet time passes and things get better.  Until I got into this conversation with Charlotte, I didn't realize just how much progress I have made.  I am, by no means, totally recovered.  I still struggle with ED thoughts, but I find it getting so much easier to keep the behaviors in check.  Thinking of a life beyond the ED isn't just a pipe dream anymore.

I have the Arnold Family Thighs^TM. It makes jeans shopping an absolute nightmare, and let's not even start in on my body image issues.

But I'm not going to bore you all with an entire post about how much I hate my thighs.  I think about it enough.  Instead, I'm going to write about a time this past weekend when I didn't totally hate my thighs.

I've written about my love for my bike and how cycling has really helped in my recovery.  This past weekend, I did a longer ride as part of a group outing to a local national park.  The trip was really, really fun.  I was rather proud of myself that I kept up with the fastest in the group with no problem (except for the one self-proclaimed Speed Demon).  It was a mixture of road and paved and unpaved bike trail.  The weather was perfect, and I had a great time.

While I was riding, though, I wasn't cursing those Arnold Family Thighs^TM.  I was thinking that those thighs--my own damn thighs!--might be one of the reasons I was so good at biking.  Instead of being a liability in jeans and a bathing suit, my thighs were an asset.

I still hate how they look.  I still think they quiver so much when I walk that you could reasonably measure the vibrations on the Richter scale.  Cycling hasn't made me love my thighs, but it has made me appreciate their function.  I'm not going to get all sappy on you and write a long thank you note to my thighs.  That's not the point of this post, nor could I handle that much cheesiness all at once.  The point of this post is learning to appreciate something you don't like, of turning your liabilities into assets.

I've probably mentioned this before, but my OCD habits and behaviors have gotten me a writing job (that I ultimately turned down for other reasons).  My proposal was the only one without any typos, so the person picked me--I don't think I was supposed to see that email, but there you have it.  Most of the time, my OCD is a huge drain on me and the stuff I want to do.  I can't do things because I'm too busy checking and counting and double-checking.  I don't like my OCD stuff.  It annoys the crap out of me.  But as much as it has been a tremendous liability, it has also been an asset.

The liability of my thighs is probably mostly in my head--and in a few screaming hot pairs of jeans I had to leave behind.  But my thighs aren't universally bad or useless.  They help me ride my bike.

The "It Gets Better" campaign is geared at gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and questioning young people who might be struggling with the issues surrounding coming out to friends and family.  It was started in the wake of horrifically common bullying and rejection that these teens face, to let them know that life does eventually get better.  It's a wonderful campaign and a wonderful message.

If there was only one thing I could tell my readers who are struggling with ED and recovery, it would be that it gets better.  It really does.

I didn't know that I would ever be able to look forward to a meal with friends, or buy a pair of pants without a major meltdown in the dressing room.  I didn't know that I would ever be able to exercise without being obsessive and compulsive, or put butter on my bread.  I didn't believe that I could get through a meal without wanting to jump off the roof because the anxiety and guilt were so horrific.

It took far longer for the pain to ease than I thought it would.  I had stopped believing that things would get better.  But eventually, with more work than I thought possible and the healing hand of time, things did start to get better.

The waiting was the worst part.  The waiting and the not knowing if it would get better.  It was something I had to tell myself, over and over and over again.  Recovery is terrifying, and I had been so battered by the eating disorder that I didn't think I would make it through recovery. 

But then I got to the day where I realized recovery was almost a default.  Eating wasn't scary, it wasn't an effort to haul myself off the treadmill.  My life was my life, and I had an existence that honestly had nothing at all to do with my eating disorder.  It took me a long time to realize that this "getting better" wasn't going away.  The hard work had finally, finally paid off.

I am not, by nature, a very confident person.  I doubt myself.  For that matter, I doubt everything.  And so, like many people with eating disorders, I doubted my ability to get better.  For years, I thought I was too messed up to ever return to anything called normal.

I was lucky.  I had family and friends and a treatment team who believed in my ability to get better.  As much as I hated being strong-armed into treatment, I realize now that it was a sign of how much they believed in my ability to overcome anorexia.  They (rather smartly) didn't try to make me become a prima ballerina because the odds that the class klutz could manage a pirouette were pretty slim.  I think they knew, deep down, that I could get better if I had the chance.

There were many things that made a different in my recovery, but I think that was one of the big ones.  I needed someone else to believe in me until I could believe in myself. I tried to get better numerous times, but I could never shake that monkey on my back.  And so each effort, I had less and less belief that it would actually work.  Not surprisingly, each effort had less and less effect on the ED behaviors.

Some of the clinicians I saw doubted my ability to get well.  I was "chronic" and "long-term" and "unlikely to recover."  I had no reason to disagree with them.  But those treatment providers who did continue to believe in me provided me with a ray of hope.  That ray of hope wasn't enough for me to kick anorexia on my own.  I had to be strong-armed into treatment one last time, but nonetheless.

It's hard for people to balance their confidence in your ability to get well and the extreme difficulties that getting better actually takes.  The Pollyanna-ish "Oh, you'll be fine, dear" struck me as rather fake.  An eating disorder isn't a cold.  It's not a take two and call me in the morning illness.  Yet in order to do the hard work, to go to therapy week after week and take your pills and eat the damn food (all that damn food!), you need to know that, somehow, you will get well.

I think people underestimate the effects of confidence.  I finally have confidence in my own recovery, after years of doubt and disbelief.  By giving me no other choice that complete wellness, I could finally get healthy enough to see that recovery was possible.  It sounds almost paradoxical, but it's true.

I ate lunch at Panera today, and there was something new on the menu: calorie counts.

It didn't mess with my head as badly as this prior experience, nor did it rattle me for very long. It annoyed me and upset me a bit, in no small part because I wasn't expecting it.

The calories were listed on the right-hand side of the menu, next to the price. The description of the food was listed on the left. When I was deep in the ED, I would have picked everything out beforehand if I couldn't weasel my way out of the occasion, so I could make absolutely sure I wasn't eating one single calorie more than I had to. I would have asked for the chips (if my meal came with that--it threw people off my trail) and saved them "for later," neatly disposing of them when no one was looking. Early in recovery, I would have made a minimal attempt to ignore the information, and then have found the lowest calorie item and ordered that. I would have gotten the apple or the carrot sticks as a side dish, but I would, in fact, eat these.

I was able to be much more calm and rational. Instead of finding the item with the lowest calories and then deciding if I would order that (as long as I didn't hate anything integral to the dish), I looked at the different dishes and then checked the calories.

In an ideal world, the calorie information would just be numbers, like the metric tons of methane produced by flatulent bovines. "Party facts," my undergraduate advisor called them. But over a decade of an ED means that facts aren't just facts. They're very emotionally charged facts. They're not just numbers, nor are they going to BE just numbers any time in the near future.

Given that fact, I did the next best thing: I tried to make the (irrelevant) information as small a part of my decision as possible. I did order a yummy entree salad with a hunk o' bread on the side. It fulfilled my meal plan requirements. The number was also within the "acceptable" limits. Was there something else on the menu I might have liked more? Probably. Were the calories a factor? Yep. Were they the only factor? Not really.

The big difference wasn't that I overcame my calorie-counting compulsion* and felt the shackles fall from my ankles. The difference was that I could be much more rational and healthy about my decision-making process. I could focus on what I might want to order AND the calories. Usually the first factor was almost completely ignored. As long as I didn't hate the lowest calorie item, that was what I ordered. I freaked out and all semblance of sanity went out the window. This time, it didn't. This time, I was able to step back for a second, take a deep breath, and do what I needed to do.

*I get obsessive about numbers in general- the OCD and the AN pretty much fed the compulsive counting.