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.

I'm a writer. It's my job. For the past few days, I have been tasked with writing up a conference report I was at a week or two ago. The job was painful for several reasons. One, it was not going to qualify as life's most interesting writing project by any stretch of the imagination. For another, I really suck a summarizing things.
My lack of skills in this department weren't obvious to me until very recently. I didn't really think about it, nor did I really think about why the task was so difficult. It wasn't until I was researching an article on cognitive remediation therapy that I grasped the basis for my difficulties.

One of the tasks in CRT is to summarize a short story or a letter in just a sentence or two. The idea is to help people learn to understand the main idea of something rather than focusing on the details. At first, I thought this was a pretty unusual task- I mean, what could summarizing a fairy tale have to do with anything? But then I got to thinking: maybe this had more to do with anorexia than I previously thought.

Reading about this task reminded me of the time when my college roommate was watching me highlight my biochemistry textbook. I dutifully dragged my fluorescent green marker across lines of text, thinking I was marking up the most important sections of the chapter. My roommate looked over and asked why I bothered highlighting if I was just going to turn the whole page green.

"I skipped some words," I pointed out indigantly.

"True," she said. "I think you missed a 'the' up top."

In my biochemistry text, as in so many other areas of my life, I was so overwhelmed by the details of the information that I lost track of the entire point of highlighting. I only needed to highlight the key points, except I couldn't figure out what those key points actually were. I literally couldn't see the forest for the trees.

It was the same with my conference summary. The hardest part for me was deciding which aspects were important because it all felt important to me. Previous summaries I did when I was in school or at other jobs usually turned into long, rambling tomes because of this difficulty. Certainly, this "summary" wasn't short, not by any stretch of the imagination. But knowing what my difficulty was helped me focus my attention. I told myself that the actual writing bit was pretty straightforward, and so I needed to focus instead on identifying one or two key points from each presentation.

This wasn't easy. I worried a lot about missing something, and from picking one aspect over another. It's hard to move away from beating myself up over having trouble with what should be an easy task. But there's no reason summarizing "should" be easy. I finally finished the project this afternoon, and I am so, so glad it's over!

So I'm trying to finish up my book. The manuscript is due in a little less than a month, and I'm trying to get the last little bits filled in, the references checked, and so on. It's tedious, hard work. I also don't really have much in the way of an advance (basically, the publisher pays the author $X amount in future royalties up front; the first $X of royalties goes to the publisher instead of the author. After that, the royalties goes to the author. It's basically a gamble on the part of the publisher as to how much money they think the book will earn. I'm working with an academic publisher who operates under a royalties only system. No advance, but once the royalties start rolling in, they're all mine.), which means I have to keep up my regular writing stuff, too.

So I devise daily tasks for myself, like finish Chapter 10, email so-and-so, etc. The most common task, however, is "Write XX words." I like numbers. I like tasks that are easily definable and clear-cut. Things like "work on references" are awfully vague, and I never know how much work is required to be able to check that SOB off my list. On the one hand, discrete goals like writing, say, 1500 words are easier to accomplish because they are so concrete.

On the other hand, 1500 words don't always come magically flowing off my fingers. Sometimes I get stuck, sometimes I spend several hours chasing down a single study that I need to make my point (PubMed is a contact sport...really...), sometimes I have other paying writing jobs that act as a giant time suck. My carefully scripted goal of 1500 (or 1000 or 2000 or 500) goes caput.

That happened on Saturday. I did several lengthy interviews during the day, which were all duly checked off. But I still primarily measure my progress in words per day, which was definitely lacking. I really meant to get more done in the evening, but I got in a groove cleaning my place and then some trashy TV came on, which made me keep cleaning so I could justify my occasionally questionable taste in television programs. As it happened, time passed and here I was at bedtime with hardly any progress made on my book.

I was beating myself up in my head for being lazy and not making progress and I was a crap writer so what business did I have trying to finish a book--a book for crap's sake! But then I started thinking. My interviews gave me a LOT of good material, and I can't really write without doing interviews. I got some cleaning out of the way, which was a good thing.

The problem was that my accounting methods weren't actually factoring in the other important work I was doing. It had become just about the numbers, when in fact, the numbers only tell part of the story of book progress.

I suppose this story says a lot about my focus on numbers and on details at the expense of the big picture. No doubt it does. But this focus isn't necessarily written in stone, either. I might gravitate to it rather naturally, but I also need to work on recognizing the problems I encounter when I do this and work on bringing my vision back to be more holistic.

I remember going to a therapy appointment quite a few years ago, flinging myself into the chair and promptly launching into a ten-minute-long tirade about how fat this complete idiot was making me. Didn't she see how huge I was? And she still wanted me to gain weight?!?

After I came up for air, my therapist looked at me and said with a voice that can only be described as overly saccharine, "Now, Carrie, we know that bad body image really isn't about how we look. Why don't you tell me what's really going on."

The reframe sent me further into a rage. Don't patronize me, I said. I'm feeling fat because I am fat and that's it. There's nothing more to it. Period. End of story. So why don't we talk about what we're going to do about my need to lose weight now that you've porked me up.

And so on. The session would not be classified as "productive."

With time, maturity, and proper nutrition, I've come to realize that my therapist had a point. I remembered her point today, when my work schedule can only be described as a game of Whack-a-Mole on meth. I'd send one email, and other editor would ask for art. I'd send some potential images, do the changes on the previous email. While making those changes, editor #2 would write back and say those images don't work, do you have any more? So I'd search for some, and then editor #1 would write back and...well, you get the idea.

I was stressed and on edge, almost ridiculously so. Perhaps not surprisingly (to my ex-therapist, at least) the feelings of body dysmorphia, body hate, and generally feeling "fat" came back. It got me thinking to something my friend Charlotte said about her daughter. Maybe the "fat" feelings weren't really about fat at all. Maybe it was anxiety that she was trying to translate the best way she knew how. Given our culture's general angst around food and weight, maybe this is how we make sense of anxiety. It's got to be about food and weight, right? What other explanation can there be?

Obviously, this isn't the only explanation, but the more I think, the more I'm beginning to understand the validity of this. My stress today had zero to do with food or weight. Zilch. And yet I immediately started fretting about what I was eating and what I must weigh. Logically, I know my weight is probably the same as it was yesterday, and the day before that, and... I know that emails from editors don't magically make my thighs expand (seeing how many emails I get each day, that's probably a good thing). But that didn't stop my brain from diving into those old, familiar depths.

I don't think that this is the sole explanation for body dysmorphia in eating disorders--one of the emails today was from a piece about body dysmorphia that's will publish shortly--but I do think it explains why stress is such a trigger for so many of us. Our brains are just trying to make sense of something we can't explain, so we do the best we can with the vocabulary we have. My own vocabulary happens to be marinated in the larger culture of diet obsessions. Maybe Catherine of Siena would have worried about her abilities to be holy if she were in my shoes (and they had email and Whack-a-Mole in the Middle Ages). That might have been how she made sense of her compulsion to starve herself. I have the same compulsion, but a very different culture that provides a very different vocabulary.

It would have been nice--and much less patronizing--if instead of just saying "We know bad body image isn't about our bodies..." with an unavoidable patronizing undertone, my ex-therapist had said that sometimes our brains don't translate anxiety properly. That sometimes we get confused and attribute worries about something else to worries about food and weight.

A little over a week ago, I was writing about my unruly puppy dog brain.  A puppy chews on anything--it needs to chew. Just like my brain with thinking. It's why I don't do well with down time and being bored. This was the case a week ago, and things have become rather different in the past few days. I was traveling Thursday and doing the lengthy meeting thing on Friday. I'm staying with my friend this weekend and trying to get some work done in the off hours. Then tomorrow and Tuesday, it's back to the lengthy meeting thing, plus writing some press releases for them and trying to work on my book.

Phew.

It's good to have work to do. It makes me feel like I have a purpose. It pays the bills. And it also gives my brain something more productive to chew on.

I know I need to do a better job at making time to work on my book.  I was working on the bit about "analysis paralysis," which got me laughing because it's exactly why I'm a little a bit just a touch more than a little behind where I need to be on the writing. Starting the writing process is terrifying because I don't know if I can do it. I've never had to juggle this many interviews and references and all this other stuff before. I don't know if I can churn out that much writing, let along quality writing.

I also have to censor myself, as saying something is "bullshit" isn't likely to get high marks from my editor. It is still, of course, bullshit, but that's besides the point.

The solution, I've found, is simply to dive in.  Start writing.  Accept that there will be shitty first drafts and that this doesn't imply a shitty final draft.  And so now, I'm neck deep in PubMed references, pdfs of journal articles, interview tapes, and snippets of blog posts. But I banged out over 1000 words this afternoon, which is a pretty good clip.

So.

Being in the thick of a project makes it much easier to work because I've gotten over the most massive hump that's known as "Getting Started." I'm still petrified that there will be some scrap of research I've failed to factor in to all of my writing, and that it will essentially blow my book to bits. I know--how ironic that with all of the reading and researching I've done, I still have this fear. But there you have it: analysis paralysis in action.

I'm currently on the road for one of my recurring freelance gigs. It's pretty new--I just started last month. I found out about the job from my science writing teacher, who passed along the job opening. I'm really liking it, and it pays really well.

Which brings about the point of the post.

I asked my teacher how much I should charge on my job proposal, since I really didn't know what the going rate for a freelancer was (generally, I'm paid by the job, not by the hour or month).  She told me what she knew, and my jaw dropped. It was a serious amount of money, and I hesitated for a long time about quoting that much.

I thought about it and figured it couldn't hurt, and I didn't even know that I was competing against anyone. And if it was the going rate...  I did put on the proposal that the rate was negotiable because I didn't want them to reject me outright because of my fees.  I'm not so comfortable financially that I'm unwilling to take a little less money with the knowledge that it was going to be a regular, recurring job (it's a MAJOR luxury when you freelance).

I fretted for days about the amount of money I was charging. I thought they would laugh me out of the interview room.

In the end, my fee wasn't mentioned. They hired me right after the interview, no questions asked.

My dad asked what I was making (he helps me with accounting), and I told him.

I also added, "I can't believe they're paying me that much! It's almost ridiculous!"

He said, "Clearly, that's what you're worth."

I said, "But it's $XX/hour!"

"You're worth it."

Obviously, I was. They wouldn't be paying me the rate I quoted if they didn't put the same value on my work.

It's something I have trouble with--valuing myself and my work appropriately. I think I inadvertently cheapen myself. I'm not that good and it's not that difficult or that much trouble.  Except that it is.  Or that other people think it is and are willing to charge for it and actually get paid for it.  I'm afraid of doing that--of finding and asking fair market value because I really don't think I'm worth it.


If I hadn't asked my old writing teacher, I never would have asked enough money.  I never would have valued myself properly (partly out of ignorance, partly out of fear).

It's a huge learning curve.  And it's scary to think that my skills are worth it. But I guess they are.

I was sorting through some of the links I had bookmarked on my Twitter page this morning, trying to use the current lag in work to get some other stuff done.  Like looking at random web pages I had one marked as "potentially useful."

Which is how I found this blog post from PsychCentral on creativity and work. The blogger quotes author Elizabeth Glibert:

Always, at the end of the day, the important thing is only and always that: Get back to work. This is a path for the courageous and the faithful. You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.

It has a lot to do with writing and the creative life, yes.  But it also has a lot to do with recovery.

Many of us start down the road to recovery (if not dragged there, kicking and screaming) mostly because we want to feel better.  The ED is making us miserable.  This isn't to say we're especially keen to stop ED behaviors--an eating disorder does have an adaptive function, after all--but we generally get sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Which makes for a rude awakening when we realize just how miserable recovery is.  It's why many of us find we need the support of a hospital, treatment center, and family/friends.  Recovery is making us even more miserable than the ED (as if that were even possible!), so clearly our goal of feeling better was misguided.  So we piss and moan, something I'm rather expert at.

Get back to work.

I love writing, yes, but the process isn't always pleasant. I regularly sit down in front of my computer feeling like my brains have turned to spaghetti and I have totally forgotten how to put a simple sentence together.  The only solution is to start writing. Get back to work. 

Nor does recovery always seem intuitive or natural or even always more pleasant than the eating disorder. I've fantasized about "taking a break" from recovery or trying to get people to understand just how hard recovery is.  But easy isn't the point, nor is other's recognition.  The hard work of recovery doesn't stop with a pat on the back or even a trip and fall.

At the end of the day, there's only one thing left for us to do: get back to work.

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.

For much of the past few weeks, my long hours working were because I was desperately in search of a story assignment.  This past week, I actually had said story assignments and now I'm busy completing those stories and sending out feelers for future stories.

Same long hours, only I'm actually getting paid.

I feel this is a good thing.

The real benefit (besides the paycheck, that is) is that all of this work keeps me somewhat distracted from the fact that I feel like a cargo ship.  Even when I can't forget about my ocean liner status, my work reminds me that I can still be a successful person even if I put on weight, or even if I'm not exercising and eating heaps more than the average person.

My work gives me a sense of purpose that not much else does.  I like what I do, and I find it more rewarding (long-term) than the eating disorder. Not letting myself get too sick to work is a huge motivator for me.  The drive I had for all those years to lose the most weight is still there.  I'm just trying to reign it in a bit and redirect it into something more positive.

Of course, this drive still has many of the same pitfalls as when I was anorexic.  I never feel good enough.  I always feel the need to be doing more.  I worry that I won't be successful.  I have that constant refrain in my head: "I suck, I suck, I suck."  It's very easy to throw myself into my career to avoid these anxiety-provoking thoughts in the same way I did with the eating disorder.  I realize I can very well transfer one bad "habit" for another.

It is a risk.  On the other hand, when I can quiet the cacophony in my head, I also find my work engaging and fun.  I am driven to write well, but I rarely feel driven to write, period.  That's something I want to do. 

My career won't cure my eating disorder, but staying busy with, well, life is a big help.

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.

The past few weeks have been really chaotic, work-wise.  I actually haven't had that much work (I'm mostly finishing up old stuff), and so I'm scrambling to get stories placed so I can hopefully pay the bills.  Tonight, I got slammed both with a need to send out new ideas and finishing up a story from before.  When I figured out what my workload was going to be, I pretty much panicked.

How was I going to get all of this done?

I realized I was going to have to move some of my trawling for story ideas to tomorrow--deadlines always win out over no deadlines.  But I was behind anyway and frustrated, and then I had to contend with trying to schedule and then transcribe several last-minute interviews.  I was simply overwhelmed.

Photo by Summations

So I watched TV for an hour and did some crochet.  Then I went back to work.

I still have more to finish tomorrow morning, but that was part of my plan.  I feel okay now.  Still frustrated and disappointed at how hard it is writing-wise right now, but I put on my Big Girl Panties and did what needed to be done.  That "me" time was essential.  I wouldn't have made it through the rest of the evening without that little break.  But I did it.

I guess the moral of the story is that I can balance work and play, and that I can calm down and assess the situation like a professional.

Every night, the same thing happens. I mean to blog, I really do, but then I sit down at my computer and I'm just too stinking tired to write very much.  All I want to do is go to bed, preferably for a very long time. Plan B is to see if I can chug some Animagus juice and become my cat.  It's pretty much the same, I'd say.

Having such a mismatch between my drive to get things done and the energy needed to carry them out is really frustrating.  Usually when I'm extremely fatigued, I'm either so driven by anxiety and OCD that I don't even ask if I have the energy, or I'm so depressed that I don't care if I get anything done.  I'm fundamentally a very driven person, and I usually can summon the energy to do what I need to do on a pretty consistent basis.

But over the past few weeks, I've just been utterly drained.  I rarely make it through the day without a nap.  I feel like all I do is eat, sleep, and work.  I've done some crochet, yes, and I do try to watch at least one TV show a day, even if I am catching up on email while watching.  And it figures my book club picked A Tale of Two Cities for this Saturday's meeting. This isn't a piece of literature that can be described as a "page turner." 

I easily slip into mopey, woe-is-me moods.  I feel like I have no confidence, not because I'm actually lacking in confidence or drive, but because I don't have the energy to summon confidence.  Screw life goals, I just want a nap.  I want my email to stop pinging me with new messages, I want my editors to stop requesting another set of changes.  I want to wander around Target and not worry about how much work I need to be doing.

I wish I could just accept the fact that doing the extra eating and recovery work means that I might not be able to function as well at work and that's okay.  But that doesn't come easily to me.  In fact, it doesn't really come at all.  I don't look at my grades in grad school in the depths of my ED and think "Imagine how well I could have done if I wasn't sick!"  No, I think that I should have done better and worked harder and maybe tried to get more studying done while spending hours on the elliptical machine.

I can tell myself that I'm doing the best I can, and even though I get that it's true, I also feel that this still isn't good enough.  And then I realize that I don't have the energy to try harder even if I could, so it doesn't really matter.  The spoon analogy does help here. I'm using extra spoons at mealtimes and on recovery stuff, so it makes sense that I have fewer to "use" with work and other things.

I guess the moral of the story is that I'm tired of always equating fatigue and proper rest with laziness.  And when you're constantly fatigued, it's a pretty crappy situation to find yourself in.

Last week, I received a wonderfully unexpected email in my inbox from my editor at Psychology Today. I had been working with her on a piece about eating disorders (it will appear in the July/August issue), when she asked me to join the Psychology Today blogging team.  My focus? The science of eating disorders.

And so it is without any further adieu that I introduce you to:

Body of Evidence: Dispatches from the Forefront of Eating Disorder Science.

I won't stop blogging here at ED Bites. This blog will remain my place for personal insights and such.  The PT blog will cover more of the latest research and other issues related to eating disorders.

I hope you like my new blog, and be sure to come on over and view my first post.  {{I get paid based on page views, so be sure to visit regularly!}}

I need some help from my wonderful female readers aged 18+ (sorry to exclude people--part of the request from my editor) for the story I'm working on for Self Magazine.

The story is on late-life joy, and using wisdom from your grandparents to live a better life.  I want to get comments from real women about life lessons they've learned from their grandparents that have helped them find fulfillment in their current lives.

If you would be willing to share your comment and/or be interviewed (briefly), please email me at carrie@edbites.com.  I will need your full name, age, and location.

Feel free to use the comments section on this post to share anonymously.

THANKS!

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.

Last night, I was finishing up a really complicated story on aging (and lack thereof) in animals.  I had a lot of information to incorporate, and interviews to listen to.  Considering that it was one of my longer pieces as well, and it's not difficult to call this story rather challenging.  If I had to produce this story while in grad school, or even when I was first starting out, I think I would have had a complete meltdown.

But I've been freelancing for a solid 6 months now, and so I've learned a lot about who to write, how to assemble information, how to create a story line.  Yes, this latest piece was the most challenging of pretty much any that I had worked on, but I also had a lot of experience to call upon to get the piece done.

I think the first draft actually turned out well.  I had no meltdowns--not even a small one.  Frustration and grumbling at the computer, yes.  But I didn't freak out.  I took a deep breath and told myself "I've done this before, and this story isn't that different. I can do this."

I'm guessing my skill as a writer has improved as I've done it as a career, but it wasn't some massive skill acquisition that got me through this story.  It was experience.  I've done this before and I can do it again.


It's the point I keep working towards in recovery.  Recovery doesn't get easier because you get "better" at it.  It doesn't get better through some sort of magical, mysterious process.  It gets better from experience.  Pushing through the bad feelings and eating anyway is an experience you can call upon later.  There's a sense of satisfaction in getting through something difficult and knowing that you can manage it again.

I could call upon experience while writing because I had done it, day in and day out, for months and years.  I knew what it took.  I knew how to break it down into smaller, more manageable steps.  It's a sense of...confidence.

That confidence is powerful.  No, that confidence didn't get my story written, but it helped push me through.

And so it goes with recovery.  It's learning small things that work, learning how to use those things in a variety of situations.  It's figuring out how to put everything together.  It's knowing that you can.

The story hasn't appeared online yet--that will have to wait for Monday or Tuesday when I finish the editing process.  Nor is my recovery complete.  But I am working to gain experience, skills, and confidence to get me through.

When I don't want to deal with something--ED or otherwise--I tend to avoid it.  I must confess that it is, occasionally, effective.  Sometimes people need to let their tempers cool off, and sometimes rebooting the computer really does fix everything.

Most of the time, it doesn't end up like this.

Usually, the scenario goes something like this:

Make a small mistake.  Feel embarrassed.  Avoid dealing with small mistake.  Small mistake festers into a big mistake.  Avoid dealing with that, too.  And so it goes until I spiral into a masterly cycle of self-hatred and despair.  In the midst of this self-hatred and despair, I never really deal with the actual problem: my avoidance.  Instead, I tell myself that the real problem is that I'm lazy, stupid, and a bad person.

Aside from the verbal self-flagellation, the litany of reasons I suck gives me an out.  Bad people do bad things.  Ergo, I have no real reason to push myself to stop.

It happens with the ED stuff (embarrassment at a small slip -> don't tell treatment team -> I'm a failure -> small slip becomes a big slip), and it happens in real life.  I never really listened to criticism and helpful feedback because in my mind, anything less than perfect was just an example of how crap a person I am.  I didn't listen because there really wasn't much point.

So I avoided even more.  Pulled away, hid from view--even when admitting my difficulties would have made the situation so much simpler.

An example: I was late on a deadline this past weekend.  Part of it was the chaos of moving, yes, but once I realized I was overdue, I resisted buckling down and attacking my job.  Plainly, I was mortified at my mistake.  I can be a space cadet at times, but generally I can keep things put together.  By going back to my work, I would have to admit to myself that I wasn't perfect, that I had royally screwed up.  So I put it off.  It was the weekend, and it wouldn't have mattered much anyway.

There was an element of truth to that.  But if I was being honest with myself--
If I cut the bullshit and really admitted to myself what was going on--
I was avoiding dealing with the problem.

A simple email to my editor saying "Oops, totally forgot in the moving chaos, I'll get something to you by Monday morning," would have essentially fixed everything.  Sending that email would mean I had to admit something was wrong.

I didn't want that.

I wanted to pretend it was all okay.

That wasn't okay.

The ED was a way for me to avoid so much of the crap that was going on in my life.  I didn't actually have to deal with it because I was focused instead on exercise, food, and weight.  When I was into the anorexia, I mentally checked out of life.  I didn't intend for that to happen, not really, but it fit my profile of dealing with things.

Avoid.
Ignore.
Smile through the tears.

Neither my reluctance to send an email nor the anorexia-driven avoidance really ever solved any problems.  I could pretend for a while.  Pretend that everything was fine, that it was no big deal, that I could manage everything.

This weekend reminded me that I couldn't.  My editor asked me to kindly send her an email when I was going to be late.  To be honest, I earned that. 

But this screw up allowed me to see another of anorexia's accidental functions.  I could connect the dots and see the patterns.  Avoidance.  I started to see the consequences, for once.

So I stepped out of that self-hate spiral and told myself: the only way to solve this problem is to get to work.  Not punish yourself with more exercise or less food or some other misadventure. I didn't need punishing, I needed to sit down and finish what I had started.

And so I did.

I don't know whether this means I'm definitely in the right career, or just a glutton for punishment.

I started another blog.  A science writing blog.

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known." --Carl Sagan

I know that the only way to get better at writing is to actually do it.  And there are so many cool things to write about, things that I won't get the chance to cover for, you know, money.  That's where this blog comes in.  It's my chance to write about all of the cool things that I normally wouldn't write about.

I probably won't be blogging all that much at first.  I'm trying to pack and move, and deadlines for paying work will always take prescedence.  So, too, will ED Bites.  It's my baby.  It's not going anywhere.  I've put way too much effort into this blog to let it wither away.

But I also need to start putting more effort and time and energy into non-ED things.  I don't think this blog is holding me back--far from it.  Yet I also don't want to be known just for my ED work.  It doesn't bother me that most of the world knows me for ED-related and recovery things.  At the same time, that's not all I want the world to know me for.  It's been a big part of my life, but I hope to make it a much smaller part of my life.

Hence this blog. 

It's a recovery step, in a way, even though it really has nothing much to do with the eating disorder at all.

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.

I'm a writer, so it might seem kind of odd that I have trouble expressing my emotions verbally.  But there you have it.  It drives my mom bonkers that I don't like to talk when I'm upset.  She wants to help and I'm as closed as an emotional clam.  This isn't always good--I often hold things in until I snap--but I often find that I don't need to process emotional stuff out loud.

I've never been one to wear my heart on my sleeve.  I'm a terrible actress because I find the thought of being emotional in front of others terribly embarrassing.  So verbal displays of emotion with anyone besides my cat is pretty darn rare.  When I used to read those little magazine articles about "How to communicate with a human male" or how men respond to problems, I always laughed, because they seemed to be describing me.  I enjoy helping others with their problems, and listening and problem-solving, but when it comes to being the actual person with the problem?  I'm not a talker. 

For the therapeutically inclined, not liking to talk about your feelings is pretty much anathema.  Maybe it's why I like CBT, DBT, and ACT so much.  But this recent thread got me thinking about how I can express myself non-verbally.

For one, I've always been better at writing about my feelings than talking about them.  For another, there are so many ways you can deal with emotions, even strong intense emotions, without words.  Some people love art.  Others clean when they get stressed.  I like to crochet or blog.  I also love cleaning out my drawers, closet, etc--it's like emotionally purging.  Getting out on my bike really helps clear my mind and let's me be more rational about what's upsetting me.  Being outside period is therapeutic.  So are crafty things like making jewelry and sewing (I swear I'm not a reincarnated version of Donna Reed. I swear).

Some of my old therapists liked to link my seeming emotional constipation with my eating disorder.  If I could just talk about my feelings then I wouldn't need to use ED symptoms.  Except, of course, I did my best to hide the ED symptoms, which meant that I couldn't be using them to communicate.  Nor did anyone bother to ask whether I was this way about emotions long before the eating disorder surfaced.  But I digress.

Rather than expressing emotions, I think the important thing is to accept, understand, and process them.  Verbally is fine.  So are non-verbal methods.  What do you think?

How do you deal when words fail? Share your thoughts in the comments!