When reading this blog entry, I hope no reader will lose sight of the essential fact: that living with anorexia is not really living, and that life is immeasurably richer once anorexia has been rejected. There are as many different degrees of ‘recovery' as there are former anorexics, and at any point I think it's legitimate to say: ‘This far is enough. I haven't the strength - or simply the inclination - to take this process any further.' I'd like here to thank my partner, David, for inspiring me to take my process of recovery a little further - and encouraging me to write about my plan to do so.

So here, if you like, is my mission statement for leaving anorexia a little further behind.

1. I intend to work less. My life is still governed to a somewhat crippling extent by the deep-held belief that no other activity is as valid as work (‘work' meaning essentially my academic career: research, publications, conferences, teaching). I still find it odd to be confronted by the fact that other people don't live life like this. This attitude has an obvious pre-history: my mother would be the first to admit that her own life has been disproportionately dominated by the need to work as much as possible (as an academic and latterly a freelance writer and broadcaster), and although my father is much better at socializing, travelling, and generally relaxing, he's managed to fit a great deal of work into the past few decades (enough to become a professor at Bristol University, coordinating multiple research groups and commanding high-profile grants). My mother's partner, too, has published prolifically and grown famous as a TV presenter. Working hard is an assumption about life that I've grown up with, and yet the assumptions that lie behind it are far from clear. Fame and money are nice to have, perhaps, but behind my obsession, and I think those of my parents, have never been these; for me it's more an almost moral elevation of the pursuits of the mind over those of the flesh (or merely the slightly less engaged mind); a surreptitious attribution of value and importance to the fruits of intellectual endeavour. This is not to say that when questioned, this value evaporates entirely.

I do believe that exploring the mysteries of what happens in readers' minds when they read great novels, and by extension what it means to be having imaginative experiences, or any sort of experience at all, is important and exciting - but I also know that an inquiring mind inquires and alights on new ideas far better when it's rested and distracted and then returns refreshed to whatever is the task at hand. It's ironic that all my study of reading has meant that I've been loath to set aside any time at all for just reading, for pleasure - for the pleasure I've been trying to pin down in my thesis. I know, too, that I'm not likely to make progress on these questions such that it's worth ‘sacrificing' the rest of life to them; I know that life is frighteningly short, and that I want to savour more of what it can offer than libraries and the computer screen and a narrow rim of everything else around the edges of existence. Yet I also have the memories of all the years of solitude when I never really took breaks and still managed to achieve good, even great, things academically. I'm still afraid, I think, of life passing without achievements to mark it out from the ordinary.

Perhaps that's a lot of what the anorexia was about - a desire to escape the ordinary, however bad a way it was of doing so (‘bad' in the sense both of being destructive, and of simply not working because being ultimately quite unremarkable). I'm determined, though, not to be one of those stereotypical academics who writes about life without ever living it, and therefore I shall start with renewed determination trying to counter those intuitive reactions that tell me: don't go out, you'll be tired in the morning and not be able to work, because work matters more than anything else, and why - well, because it's work, and work matters and nothing else does - because work isn't connected to anything else, is it...? Another irony is that one of the main strands of my theory regarding reading has been that cognition is inherently enactive (see a major article re enactive perception here); that the mind is nothing without the body. Yet I seized on this in the midst of doing all I could to kill off my body - and hence my mind - bit by bit. I will not allow these remnants of that spurious separation of mind and body - hence thought and action, hence work and life - to remain unchallenged in my mind and my behaviour.

2. I need to keep getting used to the body I now have. I never felt particularly happy with my body when I was very thin, but that didn't matter because the quest to reduce certain parts of it ever closer to total skin and bone, or concavity, was an aim beyond all questioning. The aesthetic sense that valued thinness above all else was immutable too: it was a visceral response to the sight of bones and gauntness (my own or others) that didn't preclude my finding beauty in paintings of truly beautiful women, for instance, but became a necessity that didn't have or need more to it than: thinness is what is desired. As my body first began to change, over the first year or so of recovery, I was intrigued, watching what happened. I worried about my tummy, but I was rather delighted by how my arms started so quickly to look like proper arms again, and amazed - I don't know why it had never occurred to me that I might have them - to have breasts. Then, about six months ago, as my weight reached the top end of healthy, I started to become anxious and a little self-conscious, but some quite innocuous measures have allowed me to lose a bit since then, and now - well, how is it now? David often tells me how beautiful he thinks I am (though everyone's partner does that), and I suppose when I look in the mirror at my face, I quite like what I see. I can see it's attractive. But the rest of me - I find it remarkable, even though I understand and believe it on an intellectual level - that men (and women) find me appealing, that I don't look simply ordinary (at best), or frumpy (at worst); that this body of mine now isn't in many eyes inferior to the one I've left behind.

I've more or less conquered the checking behaviours that used to reduce my focus to only tummy or upper arms or sternum, but still I have an awareness that some deeply hidden ideal is still asserting itself when I see myself, and saying: this is wrong. Photos help, to some extent, to see myself through others' eyes; attention from the opposite sex does too; but ultimately contentment with this, with my body as it is when it's healthy and strong, has to come from me. I need to practise looking at all the very thin or very muscly women that society mistakenly chooses to idealize these days, and tell myself every time what looking like that entails, and ask myself every time: do I even really believe that looks good, aside from the superficial status that society currently accords those visible tummy muscles or vertebrae? Because the answer is always no, from the part of me that speaks with the warm voice of aesthetic conviction and pleasure.