first chill, then stupor, then rage black-outs.

The structure of an eating disorder, and then recovery, usually goes something like this:

...and the soul is just a word for something about the body.

-------Get thin. Decide you like it, for a variety of personal reasons. Be tired all the time. Grow fur (lanugo, if we're going to be medical about it). Craft elaborate little rituals, devotionals really, every time you eat your noodles (which takes exactly two hours, thankyouverymuch). Realize that once you start on this fucked up carnival ride, you'll have to stay on it. Forever. Or risk injury when you fling yourself off. Get pissed because nothing is going to tell you what to do, forever, oh no. You want off. Now.------------


This is the Hour of Lead -
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow -
First–Chill–then Stupor–then the letting go


------relapse, get better, relapse again, relapse harder, get a little bit better, get a lot better, relapse again, realize the pattern and start to heal for good, relapse, heal-----heal, heal-------heal.

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

------keep getting better, help others get better, ???-----------

This is the hardest part, the ???. Because I spent so much time as an adolescent shaping my brain and knowledge and skill set to reflect my obsession with food and my body (wrongly believing that I had a body, when in fact I am a body), but once I decided for good that obsession was no longer serving me....what then? What now? There is a vast expanse of my mind that could know how to paint, or play the guitar, or make chainsaw art, or solve proofs, or bind books. But instead, it is filled with dead knowledge about the energy content of every shitty cereal bar on the market. Instead of knowing how to tie sailing knots, I know that laxatives are stupid because you only lose water weight, which isn't REAL weight anyway. At night, after everyone has gone to bed, instead of reading my laundry list of philosophy texts, instead of dreaming up spells, I still watch hours of cooking shows until I pass out, even though I'm not starving anymore (watching cooking shows pathologically is a common practice among anorexics, an attempt to feed the body through the eyes).

I know all of the reasons why I became anorexic. It took years of researching the feminist-sociological-familial-psychological reasons behind eating disorders to come up with a satisfactory explanation for myself, an answer to the breast-beating snarl of "WHY?" But now that I know the why, and the how...what is there to take up my time? How do I fill that hole, that I once filled with an obsession (with the negation of food)? What now? What now? What now?

What now?

I let go (completely), I dove through the wreck (and figured out why), but now what? This is without a doubt, the most difficult part of recovery so far. The most existentially barren, difficult, maddening riddle of a part. I don't have any answers yet but hell if I'm not going to find some.