What do you want?

Do it.  Work out what you actually want.  Regarding anything at all.

Did you wake up this morning, thinking 'today I want to do x in order that in seven years time I can have y sort of life?'  I have to do this a million times a day at the moment.

'What do you need?' is one of my therapist's favourite questions.  I have slowly, haltingly learned to answer in vague terms 'I need to talk about ...'  or very occasionally 'I need some human contact' (a ridiculous phrase that I have just about managed to blurt out from time to time, meaning please put your hand on my shoulder or take my hand or something so that I feel connected to a person, and thereby the world).  Never, ever, have I been able to make a direct request, but I've heard the question enough times to know that if I sit and think about it, I might in an indirect manner be able to respond semi-truthfully.

This is a different question though.  'What do you want?'  means work out where you want to be next year, in five years, in ten years' time.

I am currently pondering this with regards to food - it always seems a good starting point, the obvious, diagnosable problem which I can take practical steps to change.  Working out what I want when it comes to the jumbled chaos of how I think is far too complicated currently.

I've been in proper, active recovery from EDNOS this time for nearly 8 months (after years of 'trying' and relapsing), and I still do not know what I want.  I know that in May last year I decided I was done messing with messing around and wanted to be healthy, but the challenge is remembering what truly is healthy.  Half the time my definition is, frankly, wrong.  I can't really pussy-foot around with the ambiguity of 'healthy' because what I think is healthy changes from day to day - it either means stuffing myself with as much food as I can fit in and announcing gleefully that I Couldn't Care Less what I weigh, or it means eating nothing but salad.  Or on saner days it means being able to eat the requisite number of calories for my body to do what I ask of it and not wanting to die because I happened to include a sausage roll in this, or dared not to actually count.

So what do I want?  And how does that impact on what I do today?

Maybe in the subconscious interests of research, eating has been terrible the last two days.  I am now more than ever convinced that bingeing and purging is NOT what I want (this actually did not ever feature in any definition of healthy, so I guess that's useful, knowing that at least one of the definitions I have IS what I want!).
I also do not want to be so emotionally 'healthy' that I no longer care what my body does and looks like, so stuffing as much down as possible is out too.

The problem, really, is that I want to eat, exercise, enjoy food, feel comfortable about eating in a way that most people would define as healthy, and yet, there is still this insistent voice that says that I want not to care about food at all to the point where I can completely take it or leave it.  There is the rub.

I still want to be thin.

But is that me?? I am almost certain the answer is no.  I am almost certain that it is in fact my illness, so magnificently under control most of the time, that speaks with a very loud voice, and convinces me that it is myself speaking.

This I know:  I want to want health, in every respect, and according to every 'normal' person's definition.  The next step is to know that I just want it, and to continue to live in a way that leads me in that direction.