February Song

I don't want to jinx anything... but the past couple days have been pretty good, anxiety- and mood-wise. And I haven't taken a lorazepam since Sunday evening! It's not that I'm trying to quit, as I'll take it if I need it, but seeing as just a few weeks ago I was taking one every two days at the very LEAST, this is tremendous progress.

On Tuesday I found out that the limey git school of theatre dean is probably getting sacked at the end of the year, which made me immensely happy. Apparently not many of the professors like him, he's neglected a lot of his professional responsibilities, and he's been sending ooky text messages to at least one of his female students talking about how he was going to "make her a star."

Then today, I gave a presentation in my poli-sci class. The professor, whom I really like but who seems to be a hard-ass when it comes to grading, told me that it was "fantastic," "definitely in the 'A' range," and that I explained the concepts I was supposed to be covering "better" than he'd been able to articulate during lectures.

Score!

I have a lot of academic hurdles to get over in the next couple weeks. It's midterm season, which means lots of rehearsals, papers, studying, and pulling shit together. But for once, it feels manageable. Not easy. Manageable.

What does not feel very manageable is the fact that I have to start RF tomorrow (just by 50 calories at first, then adding 100 every couple of days). I'm really not ready. I mean, my weight is at a tolerable place for my ED, and I'm actually just under where I reasonably expected to be by the end of this month, but mentally there will be a lot of guilt to overcome. I know this is something I need to do to buy myself time, otherwise I physically couldn't make it to the end of the semester. And I know it's something I need to do so my parents won't freak out over my eating habits when they next see me, otherwise I couldn't permissibly make it to the end of the semester. But it just feels like such a betrayal to the eating disorder when I'm SO CLOSE to breaking my old lowest weight for this height. It feels like I'm being set back such a long time.

I've finally hit a point where I feel comfortable wearing just about anything. Like the worst an outfit can do is make me look slightly less dead, not the dreaded f-word. (Or even the h-word... "healthy.") This helps in winter, when I have to wear bulky sweaters and layers just to keep from feeling like I'm going to die of hypothermia. But I also feel like I'm wasting my much-improved body image as I sit shivering in a winter ski coat that's the same shade of blue as my lips.