I just read a letter in my yahoo inbox, about a journal I kept, in the two years during which my eating disorder took complete control of my life. It's not often I read letters regarding that journal anymore - that journal in which each entry was a letter, that journal, whose title - way back when (it seems, not in time, I guess, but in experience) was Letters to No One. Despite my insistence on writing into a void, I had quite the readership and quite the response. So many people followed my adventures and misadventures; so many people called to me, gave me kindness, gave me pain. This was in the days before diaryrings; I had never heard the phrase "pro-ana" and I didn't consider mine an eating disorder journal. Even now, I wouldn't consider it that. I didn't use it to chronicle my calorie intake, my weight ups and downs, though thoughts and wishes certainly slipped in. I had an eating disorder, and that - reading now - is obvious; it's amazing how long it took my doctors, my family, (and me, as well) to catch onto what seems so obvious: How sick I was. But I didn't come to write about that, just as I didn't mean to be writing about it some two years ago. Then, I came to the old journal to write about myself, and sickness was the only self I knew; it clouded all else. Now, here, I came to write about letters. Letters about letters, about illness, where sicknesses connected to each other, and people overlapped. When we are sickness only, it's easy to blur into each other. It's easy to say, "She said what I'm always trying to. We have the same life." And what a compliment, to be called eloquent, articulate, to hear, "Thank you for saying what I never can." Don't I still love those words? Don't I? Or does it really hurt that much, to hear that someone else can't speak, that I have lost the pleasure in hearing from that person that I can...?

I lost a great deal in my illness; certainly, I did. It's a disease of deprivation, and be sure, what you don't (think you) choose to sacrifice will be stolen from you. There are no bargains to be made with eating disorders. It may devour you in courses, but in the end, it wants your all. Your essence. Your life. I hear it tricking other people, now. I hear them saying they don't want to live, the same way we said, "I don't want to eat" and meant it, thought we meant it, learned to mean it. We learned not to want everything it wouldn't let us have. We responded naturally to an insanely painful life with saying, "I don't want to live." Not, "What is causing this pain?" (It wouldn't have let us know the answer was an illness we could conquer when we let free our force. The hits it would take, oh, even if we let our hope free...) I learned silence and gasped at all the pains of being disconnected, unable to communicate, without knowing they were the fault of illness. If I understood that the pain would ease could I speak, I blamed myself. I said already, self and sickness blurred. And it was easy in that, more than easy, to write letters saying, "We are so much the same." How could we have known that, not knowing who we are?

You know, I don't believe you can know yourself so long as you hate her. Nothing can be understood through that fog. Sickness is a poison-fog. I kid myself that the words I write now aren't to no one; I worry when I think they are. I've learned to communicate and to value that communication. I grow impatient with relationships that remain entirely on-line, no voices shared across telephones, no shy hugs followed by an uninhibited embrace. I've learned to communicate, to have those things, to want those things, to admit - without shame - that I need those things, and still I wonder about my words. I was at diaryland writing about my then-life, which I would now call a battle, difficult to define, between the dying and her buried wish to live, before ed glorification had infiltrated, before an underground community of pro-illness diaries had formed, and certainly before that community climbed into the foreground. I wrote what was illness then, which now can be read as something else. We have two languages using the same words. I read my own letters and fiercely grieve for the girl I was, the girl I'm healing, slowly, into the woman I am. Others read them, now, and see themselves. Our diaries, then, are just another set of mirrors. And if you could understand what a fun-house frame that reflection of you is, if you could truly know the difference between what your eyes view and what they see, you might begin to understand, why I don't want to be the mirror in which you see yourself. Not as who I was then, not fogged by sickness. Don't look into me and find yourself more lost. Don't blur to fit my outlines, skewed as they were when I drew them. Don't connect to my sickness and give your own that much more power. When we connect by sickness, we undermine each other; we say, our illness is so common. We forget ourselves. Some of us have half our lives in common; some of us know nothing of each other. And we are connected by an illness like an unnatural disaster, like a holocaustal tragedy. But if that's our only common ground, I'd like to know our differences. I'd like to be acquainted with who you are. I know illness more than I'd like to; I've seen illness in so many forms, at so many stages, committing too many violent acts to list without breaking down and having to wait to finish this, which for the moment, I choose not to do.

I used to have an illness. Now I'm recovering from one, and I was worrying this morning, as I read my letters, that any given entry in my current journal - where the illness creeps up a bit more than its norm, more than I'd like it to - could be read and understood in that second, sickness language from which I've tried so hard to disconnect myself. But, no. I'm not a single entry or even the sum of every entry. I'm not even the sum of every entry in every journal, pre- and post- recovery. To be so, I'd have to be clear, and I am murky, deeply so. Clear, I might make a good mirror for you; simple, I might speak your words. But I don't want that job, and that praise stings me. If you haven't found your voice yet, you haven't found yourself, and if you're sick, you're losing time. I'm frightened. I have deep and shadowy emotions; they confuse me. I won't make a good mirror; you must find yourself to show on your own terms. Me... I'm too much myself to reflect you. I want to keep it that way for both our sakes. I don't write letters to no one anymore; the ink I use is not invisible, and though we share words, we place and space them differently. So tell me your story in your voice. Or forget me and tell it entirely separated. I would love that letter, never in my inbox. The full shape of you no mirror - glass or journal - can reflect.

The letter today does not know much of who I am; the author's been away from me too long. She doesn't know that I have a new journal, have had it for two years, that my name is Mary Brave, or that my battle against sickness - while important - matters a great deal less to me than the peace I know, at the deepest level, even in that fight. But she's been away. She has her own words. She's gone through her own changes. Who knows, maybe we have a common story here and there - maybe we should talk again... Two entirely different women finding space to chat, building a common ground.

We don't need to identify with each other, having identified ourselves. We can connect without that. We can communicate, and it's worth more than I (at least) knew it would be. I'm coming to the best part of my letters now: that I can sign them. I sign them "love" and don't feel fear. There's no obligation in that love; I feel it, and offer it, the way some do "God bless." It's un-romantic, un-assuming: "I live in love and can't help but share that energy." I sign "peace." I sign words I made up to amuse myself. I write in my own language, and I sign my own name...whichever nickname seems appropriate. I sign my name.

Chord. Atoms. Mary Brave.

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