I'm boggling from sleep deprivation and grief and discombobulation at the sudden schedule adjustment. Royce got back today, so Roxy has one of her "parents" back at least, but it'll be weird not being around her having been together almost every moment for two months.
I'm just not in the headspace to compile a collection of links. I'd have to vet and annotate and argue with myself over each one...And meanwhile a confetti of things to pack is peppering my brain at moments, saying and gainsaying. Including, significantly, what food should I pack? I've done so much long-haul travel, you'd think I'd have it down by now. But no. Every time, there's some difference or another over what I'm "allowed" to eat at that time, and there are other limitations too. Right now, for example, I'm thinking a good amount of my home-made greens/superfoods powder is a must, but oh I shouldn't put it in a ziploc bag because of the plastic, oh but I can't carry a bunch of glass jars oh but but... Or for example, dried fruit is usually a good bet for me, but but oh but maybe I shouldn't eat any carbs or sugar during the journey because I'm not going to get much exercise in that 24-hour period so won't be able to deplete the glycogen...(thinks the girl who has racked up seven miles or more during airport layovers walking laps of the terminal).
This by way of introducing something I regretted not having brought up in the "introduce your condition" post. I didn't make the point that anorexia nervosa is a mental and physical health condition; it's not a state of model skinniness taken too far. It comes in various flavors and degrees, and a person can move from one degree to another. The farther down the road you go, the less likely it is that you'll ever be without some degree of that thinking. Even the people I know with the strongest recovery still have those thoughts. I've had times where I did all that mental confetti stuff but it wasn't too loud to prevent me from eating as I needed to or getting on with the rest of life. I've also had times where anorexia was my full time job and that confetti deafened me to almost everything else. It's not coincidental that those were also the times of near-death and frighteningly (sometimes even to me) low weights: levels of malnutrition have been demonstrated to play into obsessive thinking and other classic anorexic behaviors.
BUT--what I wish I'd said on Tuesday is The Disease Persists No Matter The Weight Restoration Status. It's a fallacy, and a really hurtful one, that everything's better once you're at a normal weight.
Again, speaking from my own experience, most of my life since late teens it's been at least possible to infer from looking at me that I might have some issues in this regard. But after I did a horrible 'gain--lot-of-weight-on-purpose' diet some years ago, partly to prove I was 'done' with the anorexia, there were a few years where I looked more 'normal' (I've written about this on here before; sorry I'm not in the space to find links). Far from being 'done' with it, those were some of my most agonizing years. The body image stuff was deafening; the food obsessing stuff was distressing and constant. I hated and despised myself passionately and explicitly. It fed into bipolar rage and depression. In some ways, it was worse than being dangerously low weight, my brain and spirit just a nub, basically waiting to die.
If someone is morbidly skinny, or even noticeably underweight, as a result of anorexia, that is a symptom. It's not the whole disease.
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