Desire to Recover

Hey blogworld.
I feel weird posting right now because there's something I've been meaning to send to a friend and I'm embarassed to show my face online. Friend - I PROMISE YOU I am going to get that video to you in the morning. I know I said I'd do it this afternoon and when I send it to you I will explain why it's taken me so long.
That said...it is, as I've come to call them, a "ridiculous hour of morning" yet again as it almost always is when I engage online. There are less than noble reasons for this. Hell, let's be real here - I binge and purge all night long. That's "where I'm at" right now. And it's 4:30 in the morning and I'm just getting to my current, probably less-than-helpful-for-sleep "before bed" routine, which includes being online.

/end preamble. I was thinking today about desire - specifically the desire to recover, the desire to get better. I think there's a lot of value in that desire, because it's reasonable to assume that if it's not present a person will not act on it, right? I didn't realize just how much I will probably be referencing the things I've learned in my 12 step program in this blog and please bear with me because this is tricky due to the anonymous nature of 12 step. So I won't be naming my program, and I'll have to be careful when writing about it. Now - the program I have been in since I was 17 years old states that the only requirement for membership is "the desire to stop". There's no other prerequisite and I respect that very much. You don't have to be intelligent, or pretty, or even nice or respectful because the common mission is to help people - all people who want help - find relief from active addiction.
Desire is a good starting point. The thing is, I think, with eating disorders and addiction that desire wavers. It's not reliable 100% of the time. When things get tough, it may dwindle or appear to evaporate for a period of time.
I absolutely have the desire to find freedom from my eating disorder. I long for it. I suffer intensely and have been greatly compromised in many ways. Eating disorders are ILLNESSES - real, whole mental illnesses. I and many others are SICK with this thing. It is not an easy thing to recover from and I think that is largely due to the fear that sometimes/often trumps that desire to be well. (Sidenote - another concept I was introduced to thanks to 12 step is "Spiritual Opposites" - as in love/hate, dishonesty/honesty, and so on. A good friend of mine has said before that she believes fear's spiritual opposite is love - which is confusing at first but after some thought I grew to find that startlingly insightful and kind of brilliant. Think about it.)
A funny thing about desire is that a person can have multiple, conflicting ones - the desire to be well versus the desire to remain eating disordered (or the desire to not give up certain things about the eating disorder)...I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I'm trying to segway into how I was feeling earlier today.
I was feeling sad because I wanted to not-give-a-crap about food. I wanted to be able to enjoy what I was eating and not worry about what I was going to "do" about it or if I was going to do anything about it or how many calories were in it or how I'd hide what I was doing if I did anything about it or what it would do to my body if I did nothing about it, and blahblahblahfuckingblah, on and on and on...I felt so trapped that I almost started crying. There's absolutely an element of personal responsibility here that I'm struggling with, but please be aware that I can see that it is there. Right now things are kind of a complicated mess - my therapist insists it has a lot to do with malnourishment/starvation - but what it's ultimately going to come down to is altering my behavior, right? That's another thing 12 step places heavy emphasis on, is ACTION. Taking actual actions and/or not taking certain actions.
Anyway, later - an hour or so ago - I was browsing a recovered person's facebook page. She's pretty public about her recovery and I think she's awesome. I was looking through her photos and realizing that wow, this woman is in so many ways the embodiment of who I want to be "when I'm in recovery/recovered". She's able to appreciate so many of the things I sense I'd appreciate and like, too, if my every waking moment weren't riddled with this thing. She likes poetry, literature, coffee and tea, cats, music, academia, crafts, politics...and going through her albums I felt a familiar pang of longing. A longing to, for the love of god, start actually living the life I've fantasized about creating for myself and filling it with the things I dream about. I really want that.

Oy. I couldn't tell you if I really believe in my bones that any of this is possible for me, but I have been trying to have faith in the people who have recovered who say that they doubted it, too, and that it damn well was. Trying to believe the tons of people who also thought they were the exception to the rule but discovered they weren't that I'm not an exception, either.
It's hard. Things are really ugly right now. One foot in front of the other, I guess - read a little and go to sleep.