Exerpts from "Appetites"

Before I started this program, like a long time... a year maybe? I picked up this book called "Appetites" by Caroline Knapp.  I loved it.  It's not a recovery book, its a memoir by a woman who was anorexic.  I love her writing style and I liked her honest estimation of things.  

"The Lure of starving - the baffling, seductive hook- was that it soothed, a balm of safety and containment that seemed to remove me from the ordinary, fraught world of human hunger and place me high above it, in a private kingdom of calm.

 This didn't happen immediately, this sense of transcendent solace, and there certainly wasn't anything blissful or even long-lived about the state; starving is a painful, relentless experience, and also a throbbingly dull one, an entire life boiled down to a singular sensation (physical hunger) and a singular obsession (food).  But when I think back on those years, which lasted through my mid-twenties, and when I try to get underneath the myriad meanings and purposes of such a bizarre fixation, that's what I remember most pointedly - the calm, the relief from an anxiety that felt both oceanic and nameless."

An anxiety that felt both oceanic and nameless.  I have described this feeling as "the darkness"   huge, endless, "nameless".  

I was explaining my new lease on life to Maia today.  The weight will go slightly up and down my whole life and there are so many other things to worry about.  I like my experiences.  I have been really sick that last few days... ugh, and embarrassing UTI.  And I pee every few minutes and I have this constant hunger.  So tonight when I got home I had a can of soup and then I ate nearly a whole package of dark chocolate.  2.5 servings and I had 2.  Wow, doesn't sound that much now that I put it out there but yeah, I'm a little embarassed of the 2 servings of dark chocolate. but I do have to say that my hunger was gone and I was able to go to the bathroom.  I have been backed up for two days.  and now I feel like I should be ashamed and I'm going to get fat, but in all honesty, I'm too tired to care.   My life is more than the dark chocolate.  I'm active (when I'm not peeing fire) and I eat a reasonably healthy diet.  nuff said.  But that anxiety, that darkness... it ebbs and flows, a constant thread throught my whole life. It's in ebb stage right now.  I'm happy, works good, enjoying spending time with my new boy.  It'll flow again but I know that it's a cycle like everything else....

just writing with no particular goal.