*Sorry for the long blog--there's a part two*

There's something to be said about the line, "once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic." Even those of us who are not alcoholics know that our weakness will follow us for all of life.

I'm a bulimic...in recovery. While not "in recovery" in the truest medical sense, I've gone to therapy off and on, on anti-anxiety medication among other things. I learned while reading books on EDs (eating disorders), many people experience the want and the feelings of need in going back to their bad habits. I've been purge-free for the past 3 months, but tonight I had this urge to revert to my old habits.

I got my job at the vet clinic in Kansas. I move back in 11 days, but before I left, I decided to call up a guy for a fling. "This fling with be detached from any previous feelings I've had for him in the past 9 months."

You can convince yourself of anything while you're at it, but tonight I thought about how meeting him flared up my bulimia to epic proportions last fall. To be fair, he never has said a harsh word to me about the way I look or how I am. I believe he liked me, but never said it. Since meeting him, I became so invested about how much I ate so I would look "good enough for him" in my own mind.

In one month, I went from 239# to 205#...I ran the gamut of complications from my purging ranging from a panic attack that sent me to the ER and blood coming out of my mouth at work. Things didn't work out with him and I. I let my bulimia take over my sense of pride, dignity, and well being.

This past February, I had resumed my habit of purging now at work, the park at 11pm at night, at home when 5 or 6 other people would be there. I didn't even try to care if anyone knew. Faced with a sense of no direction, I had bought a bottle of diet pills. If the bottle says only take one every 6-8 hours and you take 4 or 5 at a time, shit is a brewing. I remember sitting in bathroom in wrenching pain and nauseous as all get out. I was literally afraid to fall asleep. My roommates worried and kept asking what was wrong. I should have told them to take me to the ER. Who knows how many of those pills I took. Maybe 4, 5, 6? In desperation, my roommates kept trying to help me. I refused to talk to them. Of course, they knew about my purging, but in my fantasy mind, they knew nothing of my feeling of worthlessness.

After coming back from a convention in Kansas City (a couple of days after the pill incident), my depression and bulimia furthered. One of my roommates finally confronted me about purging as he was standing on the other side of the bathroom door while I was doing the whole "run the shower while you purge so they won't hear you" ordeal that I had done for the past 5 months. I was furious that he had the gall to say, "why the hell do you keep doing this to yourself!"

That afternoon, sometime around February 15th, I still had about 30 of those blue diet pills. I went into the living room and just stared at the ceiling. I felt everything fall out of place in my mind. I felt crazy. I felt destroyed by my eating disorder. I drove to the clinic to talk to my manager along with my pills. "I just want to down these right now....there's nothing left of me"