I do try to understand, but I have so little information, and I've never been so successful separating emotion from intellect. Emotion tends to override. I want to understand this pro-ed culture, in the sense that I don't want to feel so clueless and I don't want "you just don't understand" to feel like a valid argument when I voice my beliefs. Then again, maybe I don't want to understand. I'm afraid of this, somewhat. I'm afraid of the scope with which this culture has taken hold; I'm afraid of understanding- and perhaps relating- to it. I don't believe there's such a gulf between people who are and people who aren't glorifying eating disorders, and I think I'm afraid to understand the other side too well. What if it undermines my own beliefs? What if I can no longer stand firmly in the reality that recovery is the best thing that ever happened to me, that this is a life or death situation, and I want to continue choosing life?

Sometimes it feels like a direct attack on my life, on my recovery. It feels like an insult. I think of my friend, killed by her eating disorder, and of people sitting around "helping each other" slip further into this illness. I wonder what it would be like for someone to look out an ICU window and watch protestors carry signs and chanting in support of the disease that is killing that person's loved one. I imagine the mother of the murder victim meeting the mother of the murderer at the trial. That's the feeling I know, and sometimes, it's the only feeling I can find. How can you support this thing, so dangerous, so violent, so cruel? How can you support this thing that tried to kill me, that kills my friends before they're legally adults?

I have friends recovering from eating disorders who are now in recovery from stroke and heart attack as well. None of them have reached 20 years yet. Sometimes, that's the only perspective I can see.

I thought differently once. I thought that I needed my eating disorder, that I couldn't survive without it. I knew that, as much as it threatened my life in the long-term, the continued use of that coping method sustained me day-to-day. I defended it, sometimes, verbally- and for years with my action. During that time, some friends of mine toyed with the disease, and each time I responded fearfully, desperate. As certain as I was that I could not give up this illness, I didn't want anyone else to begin it. As certain as I was that I needed it, I would have given anything to convince others of their options outside an ed. So, no, I don't understand. Except that sometimes, in the back of my mind, as I was begging them to find help in a different way, as I was promising to do everything I could to help them meet their needs by a different means, I wondered if it was fair. I wondered what right I had to say, "Please. Please find something else. You don't want to do this," as I continued doing it myself. It makes sense that wishing I hadn't started, I hoped they wouldn't either. That I could see the consequences more clearly for people I loved, like my friends, than for someone like myself. I knew that people I loved deserved better, and eventually, I healed enough to see myself inside that category. I recovered to the point I'm at now, to the point where I don't have to feel hypocritical when I ask people to try something, anything else...

Not quite enough that I don't feel the sting when people call my perspective prejudicial and my desire to change the situation an unfair imposition on their rights. Freedom of speech, they say, but I remember not being able to talk for nearly four years. I remember how slowly, how painfully I relearned words. Freedom of action, they say, but I know that I would never, in an eternity, treat others the way I treated myself. I would never put anyone through the daily abuse and self-hatred I endured. Freedom to continue a self-destructive means of preservation? I don't want to give anyone that freedom because I see it as a smokescreen. So long as we have that freedom, we aren't allowed any of our real freedoms, any of our real powers. We aren't allowed real help, real understanding, real and healthy ways to meet our needs. We aren't even allowed to know they exist.

People are angry because it's their choice, after all, what they do with their lives. The closer to health I come, the less I understand the concept of this as a "choice." I carry around the signature guilt of one with this disease, the idea that I inflicted all this pain and worry on my family, my friends. I minimize my pain sometimes as unimportant considering I brought it upon myself. I do these things, and yet, I don't always believe them now. I have to wonder if believing it's a choice is just another symptom of the illness. For so many people, eating disorders are diseases of control; they are ways of having power when otherwise, the helplessness would overwhelm them. I wonder how well an ed would work if we perceived it as another out-of-control, dangerous, oppressive factor of our lives. And then I remember that I don't have to wonder: I felt that fear. I felt the fear of realizing, suddenly and with great pain, that I had no control over my own behavior. Of wanting to eat, truly, and not being able to. Of saying it was over, only to discover how far from truth that was.

I had no rights in my eating disorder. I didn't have the right to be human, to need, to speak or feel. I understand lashing out at people who jeapordize the fulfillment of those rights, but I've never met anyone, actively lost in their eating disorder, who felt that they truly deserved such rights. So to me, it isn't about taking away anyone's method of expression or the realities they need and deserve so desperately to express. It's about saying what was said to me: that you can need, you can speak, you can do anything you need to do. I don't want people to live with the pain behind their eating disorder without a way of coping. I don't want to take away the language and leave the messages unheard. I simply wish, for everyone, that we could have the best possible way of meeting our needs. And I don't think that's starving, bingeing, purging, or dying without ever knowing peace in life.

For me, recovery has been (and continues to be) liberation. And I have to wonder, if they could really trust that something better, something effective would replace the illness, why anyone wouldn't want liberation...?

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