Divorcing Anorexia

As I step through the maze of brightly colored toys, design to challenge and amaze my child's mind, I look about the room and think, "This is not where I pictured life at this time."

If you were to ask me two years ago, where I would be now..I would not have said, "Married, with one child, in my own house." No, definately not. Perhaps I would have said, in nursing school..out partying til the predawn hours, and barely getting by on a waitress' tips.

But now, as I look at the cluttered chaos that makes up my living room, and watch my son weave in and out of the blocks, books, discarded art projects..I realize, this is where I am meant to be.

Two years ago, my life was a sprawling decent into the apitamy of hell. It was a secret hell that no one knew about, desending beyond the 8th circle of Tarturus to something more personal and dark. Self loathing and lack of goals does that to a person. I was struggling with my relapse, fighting to find the surface in the black waters that I was drowning in.

There was drinking and occasional dabbles in less savory things. Things that even now I do not want to admit to myself. I worked my fingers to the bone at work, and then slipped out into the darkness of a dance floor, with a stiff drink in my hand to escape. Sleep was the enemy, atleast at night. Slipping in at pre-dawn light was a regular occurance, and I learned to function on little to no sleep. I could feel myself slipping back into the dangerous world that had ensnared me in high school. It was a seductive swaying world before, glittering with the promise of control and freedom. That had been a lie. Nothing waited beyond that door but heartache, chains, and death. A part of my brain must have known that back those two years ago, because I did not give myself fully to the depravity of my temporary life.

There was always an aching lonliness for something more than the empty shell of a life I lived. And so now, even as I stare at a ransacked living room, strewn with the remnants of a life that was merely a dream but two years ago, I would change nothing about my current state. Nothing.