& i would have stayed up with you all night had i known how to save a life.

This date sneaks up on me every year and catches me by surprise. The "it-feels-like-just-yesterday" has started to fade. The absence I feel as a result of your death is always present. The moments where I want to call you up to tell you something have long since stopped. I know I will never get over your death, but I have finally accepted it.

Five years is a long time without you. Five years is really a long time without anyone. Five years of false promises that in your death I would take recovery seriously; that I would stop treating my life like it was a game that I could never lose, that I would stop playing the odds as if I were above everything that killed you. Five years of relapse, of giving up, of treatment, of hospitals, of therapy, of group, of putting in a half ass effort to, what I am learning now, was a pathetic attempt to convince myself. Convince myself that you could be in recovery while simultaneously losing weight. That recovery meant it was really okay to binge and purge so long as you had control - that going days without eating was really okay, because if you're in control... Five years of lying to myself, and where have I gotten?

Last July, I gave myself six months to live and if at the end of those six months, things were still the same, then I had full permission to just check out of life. That I had played my part and done what I felt I was supposed to do, and I could peace out and be done. And those six months, were not easy. There wasn't some life changing moment where I realized life was worth the fight and that if I just gave myself time, things could get better; I could make things better. But to say that I did not change over these past six months would be a lie. In the subtle, smallest ways I have changed and that has made it worth the fight.

I don't make promises to you anymore. I don't make promises in your death. I've long stopped. But I've been learning to make promises to myself; learning to be accountable to myself. Learning with the help of the people who populate my life with their unconditional love for me, with their eccentricities, with all the pieces that make up who they are. I'm trying, now. Really trying. Really forcing myself out of this eating disordered world. I wish you could see the things that I am doing, meet the people who have brought out the best in me, but also meet the people who brought out the worst in me, because it was all just a learning experience. Like you. You were a learning experience, ARE, a learning experience. These past five years without you have been a learning experience.

Life is so short, and we only get one shot at it, as far as we know. I can't fathom the idea of leaving the people I love the way that you left me. I can't fathom passing my pain onto the people who have loved me and supported me and been there for me. I can't fathom how you were okay to do that to me, but I forgive you and it is time for me to move on now.

It's time for me to keep living.

the light meets the dark

I have all these ideas about what recovery means to me and what that looks like. I don't really know where they come from and what it all means, or even if it's how it will look for me down the line from now. I've been doing so much thinking about the eating disorder world and if we ever really do leave it, fully, I mean. I want to reject Marya Hornbacher so badly when she says you never come back all the way. That you always have one foot in a world where everything is backwards and upside down and sad. I want to reject this because it pisses me off. And I feel like it just gives me an excuse to be like, well if that's always how its going to be, than really, what is the point?

But I've really been contemplating this, do we ever leave it fully? I see people who are recovered, hear stories of people who are recovered, like K, and it makes me long for a formula - one solid answer. I know it's different for everyone, but I want a formula for recovery. I want to know how to get from B to A. I want to know if that's possible, or if we just stay in some limbo.

But truly - years down the road from now when someone is doing better, can we still be so heavily impacted by the eating disorder in the most subtle of ways? A comment about weight, or a diet, or calories - doesn't it all just revert back to the eating disorder? My cousins wife's daughter from her first relationship told my niece that she was fat at Christmas. And I listened to my niece go on and on about how she was going to go on a diet, and that she weighs herself every single day. She's 9. And right away, my mind just reverts to the eating disorder - to that time in my life. And it's moments like that that make me think, do we ever truly leave it? Or are we forever living with one foot in the world?

I have this ridiculous notion that I'm going to get together with all my friends who were sick at one point in time, and we're all going to be recovered, and talking about the menial tasks of life that really, aren't so menial. Tasks that I didn't think I would live to be able to do - picking out towels for the guest room, getting the mail, paying bills. Simple, stupid, everyday shit. But simple, stupid, everyday shit that exists in the real world. And that's the difference.

This was just a giant 1 in the morning ramble because I can't sleep and because I truly want to believe we can leave the eating disorder world, despite the evidence to the contrary.

i like it in the city when two worlds collide

Where am I at these days? Somewhere in the middle, I like to believe anyways. I don't know, I feel ridiculous saying it, but I sort of just like gave up when I got home from New York and when things got tough. And like that's really what always happens. Things get hard, reality hits me, and I just decide to stop fighting. Like, I went out for lunch today with a friend who said it so well. Getting better and being better - I know I can do that here and there. And it's right, being better and being healthy and being the person I'm supposed to be - I know that I can do that in New York. I know HOW to do that in New York. And like, then I come home, I'm forced back into a reality that I don't want and somehow I tell myself that I don't know how to do it here.

The thing is, I know how to do it here. If I can do it in New York, that has to mean I can do it here, I'm just choosing to not, or ... not trying hard enough? Maybe? I don't know. Things are so much more on track now than they were when 2011 came to a close and when this year first started. We're only a few weeks in, but I feel like I've got a better grip on things right now than I did when the year started. It was like, I knew what I wanted to do, where I wanted to be and how to get there. It's like, I knew the way and yet I was still so incredibly lost, if that makes any sense. Like that quote "Have you ever been so lost? Known the way and still so lost?"


School is going really well right now. I'm sitting at a 99.3% average for my biology which I'm extremely thrilled with. I have to sign up for Grade 11 Chemistry and then of course, do grade 12. I'm hoping to be done with high school in the middle of march, if not the end.

I guess that's all there is to update? I don't know. I feel like I lead a very boring life, but I guess I'm okay with that.