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.