The silhouette of a doe-eyed girl who at one point had a name

That's sort of what I feel like sometimes. Just a silhouette of who I was/am. It seems like there are precious few people with whom I can be myself. (Curse you, english grammar, for making sentence structure ridiculous.) Then again I don't honestly believe there's anyone with whom I'm completely myself. That's as it should be, though. There are always aspects of our personalities that are inappropriate or irrelevant around certain people or in certain situations. I'm not going to talk about my sex life with my coworkers, or tell a cashier that I didn't sleep well. And likewise I'm not going to be serious with my husband or silly with my boss. There are always aspects of ourselves which are ruled out based on varying factors, but the way I feel goes above and beyond that in many ways.

It seems like I'm in flux as a person and I don't know what I'm like beyond this basic outline. I know I'm growing and I accept that as a person in flux there are bound to be areas where I'm still not sure what I look like, metaphorically speaking. It just feels as if there are more unknowns than knowns and I'm not sure where to take that within myself.

I don't know what I'm doing with myself, essentially. Particularly from an anorexic stand point. I'm no longer obsessed with losing weight, but on the other hand that could be because I've been consistently losing fat for a while now. Not anything major but just slimming down gradually. I've also had no trouble with resisting binges and when I do eat slightly more than I'd like, I don't freak out over it because I know in the next few days it'll come off as if it had never been there. I'm 5'7", 130 lbs., and for the first time in a long time, I honestly feel like I look good, but I still feel anorexic. I still want to be thinner than I am, and I feel like if this trend I have going were to end and I were to start gaining again, I would be back to heavy restriction and guilt. ::sigh:: I'm still mostly zen but I'm being progressively dragged back into human drama by stress from work, introspection, etc. I don't really know what to make of it, honestly. I suppose only time will tell.

I can't think of a way to transition out, so we'll go with this one:

The End

Zen is a good thing

Well I'm closer to my eventual goal weight but I'm still feeling really casual about my restriction lately. It hasn't been dramatic or anything, I've just had no urge whatsoever to overeat. Eating is fine. I don't mind if I have a decent portion, but once I'm done I just stop with no desire to keep eating. I'm steadily thinning out in little bits. My weight hovers around 132 now. I was ecstatic when I stepped on in jeans, a t-shirt and a belt and it told me 130. That has to be taken with a grain of salt, naturally, because it's an analog scale, not a digital one, but it's good for rough estimates.

I'm really starting to be genuinely pleased with how I look, barring random bouts of insecurity. My body is just toning up in general because I'm slowly dropping excess body fat. My waist is thinning down so I'm not as displeased with my butt which I felt was severely lacking for a while there. Also now that the rest of me is proportionally smaller I'm not as obsessed with the idea that I have tiny breasts. Still toying with the idea of getting a boob job, though.

Overall I feel I'm in a good place with my weight right now and I hope I can maintain what I have going. I guess we'll see.

I think I've figured out what purpose I want to put to this blog. I want it to be my purge for all the insanity that circulates in my mind. I have a livejournal account separately which I use for day to day things, but somehow that journal is off limits for my E.D., probably because only a handful of the people privy to it have any idea I'm anorexic. I wouldn't feel comfortable posting about my thought processes on there. I would feel exposed; the responses would be either uninformed, completely inappropriate or both; I'd stop using it.

However, this blog is private in the sense that only people who know about my E.D. have access to it; people who won't judge me for my flawed reasoning and who won't tell me I'm crazy when I say I feel enormous for eating. That makes this safe in a way that I haven't previously experienced.

So as a test run, I'm going to start with this.

I read posts constantly about how girls haven't eaten in weeks and they have lists of safe foods and plan their meals out to the exact calorie count, but even when I was at my worst (98lbs. 5'6") I had no eating plan. I didn't compulsively exercise. No food was safe.

It was never that certain foods were allowed and others weren't. Food wasn't even my enemy. Food was just the measure of my success or failure. Hunger was the test of my willpower. Either I ate or I didn't. Success or failure. High fat foods with sugar and carbs were larger failures than low cal foods, but it was all failure. Food was my vice, my private guilt. It was the measure of my greed.

I never carried a picture of a model in my purse or took freezing cold showers to burn energy keeping warm. I didn't see a fat person in the mirror because I was emaciated and it was painfully obvious, but I was beautifully emaciated. I could see my bones, and feel them directly under the skin. I could feel the core of me in every hunger pang and I was aware of my body through its emptiness. Fat was the enemy.

But this doesn't seem at all like the measure of today's anorexic. In fact, by the methods most anorexic girls follow I barely qualify. I've never held a fast for more than a week, juice fasts notwithstanding, I'm not compulsive with exercise, I don't run, I have no safe list... You'd think I was just a girl on a diet.

I suppose what I'm really kicking around in my head is the idea that anorexics now have a program and a strategy guide for coping; and the question of self-perpetuation.

All right, let's start this thing off. This account will primarily focus on my eating disorder. If you don't like it, move along. I'm not doing this for your benefit. I'm mostly interested in keeping up with my friends who have this address.

And just so this post isn't a total waste, here is a poem I'm deeply in love with by Fannie Heaslip Mae.

She made a little shadow-hidden grave,
the day Faith died.
Therein she laid it, heard the clod's sick fall,
and smiled aside --
"If less I ask," tearblind, she mocked, "I may
be less denied."

She set a rose to blossom in her hair,
the day Faith died.
"Now glad," she said, "And free at last, I go,
and life is wide."
But through long nights, she stared into the dark
and she knew she lied.