So after watching How I Met Your Mother yesterday, I’ve decided something. I’m going to write letters, from here on in, to myself about my ex for when I start to miss them, when I start to idealize the good stuff and forget about the bad. Ted always does it for when he begins to miss the person when he forgets the real reasons they broke up, the reasons he shouldn’t go back.

So here goes the first one of mine: the one about my eating disorder.

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Make a list of what is really important to you. What do you value? What do you strive to accomplish with your life? Ask yourself if your eating disorder is getting you closer to your goals or moving you farther away from your goals.

Okay, so goals for my life. You would think this would be an easy question and yet I’m sitting here wondering what I want from life.

So first goal: figure out what I really do want out of life.

My eating disorder isn’t helping me to figure that out, it’s “coping” with the fear of actually having to deal with life and what it will bring me. I haven’t thought about my goals because I’ve been so wrapped up in this disorder.

Here are the goals that I can think of:

Do something meaningful in the realm of psychology, biopsychology or neuroscience; raise money for causes that matter to me, like eating disorders, epilepsy, cervical cancer and cancer in general; write a book, whether it gets published or not doesn’t matter, I just want to write a book; have dogs, lots of dogs; find someone to fall in love with…real love; travel to Greece, and to as many places as possible; to recover from my eating disorder.

So, obviously, my eating disorder is keeping me from accomplished that last one. But the reason I want to recover is so that I can actually accomplish the rest. My eating disorder has destroyed pretty much every relationship and friendship I’ve ever had, so staying in my eating disorder will never allow me to find someone that I love (that loves me back.) I won’t be able to travel because when I’m in the depths of my disorder, I’m weak and my life is in ruins. I can’t keep a job, meaning I’d never be able to stay somewhere long enough to really make a difference. My eating disorder makes me weak, but to accomplish all of the things that I want to, I need to be strong and most of all, I need to be alive.

My eating disorder will take my life before I can do any of these things. For every day that I am enveloped in my eating disorder, I am bringing myself farther from accomplishing my goals.

I need to recover. My dreams are too important to give up to it.