I know they mean well. . .

But it makes me feel so tiny and stupid when people's reaction to my eating disorder is completely about food. For example, a professor I dearly love reacted to my participation in NEDAW by asking if I would eat a cookie if she brought it in. I said yes. She asked if I would throw it up. I said no. I know she means well and I know it means a lot to her to see me eat normally. But such questions and concerns, only make me want to eat in a more disordered fashion. For no other reason than to prove everybody else wrong and show everybody that these are my choices.

Recovery and food are not related as a biconditional. It is not "you are able to recover, if and only if you eat normally." Instead, it is an implication. If you eat, then you are able to recover. Eating and weight restoration are not the only things necessary for recovery. If that were the case, I was never really sick. Nobody would, and nobody has, ever picked up, on my disordered habits. My disorder is a private battle and a personal medal for me. I know that secrecy is a necessary condition for an ED to thrive and grow, so I work hard to avoid being secretive about it. It is a biologically based mental illness (see any research by Walter Kaye) and it is not my fault. Nobody blames diabetics. Nobody asks diabetics if their blood sugar is going to spike or if they can eat a cookie. For everybody else in the world, people don't judge you for eating or not eating one cookie.

So much of my ED, so much of every ED, happens internally. It is the voices in my head telling me how horrible I am. How evil I am. How much I don't deserve to eat, or that by eating one thing off my plan, I have to eat everything in sight just so I can purge because never eating again is the only response to eating in anything close to a normal way. I don't want people to know about my ED and I don't expect the majority of the population to understand the nature of ED's, but I wish they would realize that they DON'T know. And if you don't know, don't draw conclusions about me or any of my fellow sufferers, because until you read the research, until you talk to us, listen to our struggle, YOU DON'T GET IT. And that doesn't make me think any less of you. To admit you don't know is a much more impressive act than to pretend you do and judge people.

And to end this: screw the world. I am so angry at everything and everybody and I feel like I might explode. So, in about 10 hours, I will be all but unwilling to get out of bed because the anger will lead to extreme self-deprecation and obsessions. And I am never eating again.