It’s like a light switch.

It’s like a light switch. It’s on, though flickering, and you’re glad it’s on, you think, and you know it’s running out of steam, but it’s cold, so you figure it’s a temporary fault in wiring.

It’s not.

When that light flickers, that’s the time you need to check up on that hamster on the wheel running the power behind the scenes. That hamster is probably tired. Or it sprained a leg. Or it’s just flat out sick. And nothing but rest and medical attention will get it back up and running.

But the flicker is easy to ignore when you’ve done it your whole life because you’ve had to, because you’ve been made to think that it’s the flicker that marks your martyrdom, and the suffering — the barely-hanging-on-ness of your spirit — means you’ve got a better chance of doing it right. You’re not as lazy as you fear. You might be a good person if you’re bleeding, trampled, exhausted.

And then the light snuffs out and you’re in the dark, but you’ve been using so many unhealthy fixes and bandages to keep going you can no longer tell the difference between half-light and half-darkness, and so the darkness is just the darkness.

And there’s a bit of strange comfort in that.

The ghosts of your past, the habits, the way you’ve done things for decades; it all sloshes back to you and you think it’s a welcome guest, this familiarity, because you’re lonely and untrusting of the light, but eventually the nostalgic novelty of it all wears off and you are just, simply, in the dark.

So what do you do?

Well, I took that last bit of energy I had left and got my bum back in therapy. And after just one session, it was as if someone had thrown me a tiny life raft so I could get to the beach and lay down for a while.

I laid down for four stinkin’ days. Literally. Wrenched my back out and got snowed in. It was torture. The demons came out and pummeled me. But the good thing was, I saw that they were back. And I got my rest, even though I hated it.

I woke up yesterday and meditated after knowing it would be good for me to do but not doing it because I didn’t have the energy simply because it’s what I did. There was no “have to,” “must,” or “you’re not a good person if you don’t” attached to it. And it was exactly what I needed.

I went to work, handled the stress, did a super conservative replica of my treatment meal plan even though it screwed with my system to get back on the wagon after three weeks of running behind it, felt solid, energy flickering in and out but more evenly now, went to Yoga to the People (free) with my work friend after work after promising her I’d do it and not doing it since January 1st, and went to X’ian: a bucket list food establishment I’d been wanting to visit since I heard Anthony Bourdain loved it.

Trust me, the giant hordes of people at the yoga place and the crowded pressure filled room at X’ian and the fact that my back was killing me and I was still exhausted made me want to run far away at every turn, but because my friend was there, and because I knew I wanted this, I breathed through it, and it helped me build momentum.

Came home, didn’t go to sleep at 9:30 (or earlier) like a geriatric, read a bit, listened to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “Star Talk,” slept a bit fitfully (because of the full belly of spicy rice noodles I was having a hard time digesting, and the full belly of new prana that had invaded me like an alien possession), and woke up at 5 a.m.

Meditated for another 20 minutes. It wasn’t as good as yesterday’s, and I’m a bit wired and this coming-back energy is making me feel jittery as it usually does when it returns, but it’s okay. I’m breathing through it. I DID IT.

This morning I go back to therapy. This weekend is the keystone event at work that I’ve been given to run that I am nervous but excited about, then I meditate officially with a friend on Sunday, on Monday morning (Day Off One) I say yes to an invitation to try out an a cappella group I’ve sort of inadvertently avoided saying yes to, Monday evening is possibly a date (if I’m not jinxing it), and Tuesday (Day Off Two) I help my sister fix up her apartment in Brooklyn like I’ve been promising to do for too long.

The light switch seems certainly to be back on; though flickering, it’s flickering to turn fully on, not fully off. But geez, I gotta hand it to myself: in this case, my all-or-nothing tendencies seem to be working for me.

It’s also quite interesting how readily opportunities present themselves when you’re looking up instead of at the ground. Easier to grab, really, if you see them. Harder if you don’t.

I’d love to say JUST PICK YOURSELF UP when you’re in the dark, but my dark dwelling self would resent that advice, because it’s not so easy. Sometimes it’s impossible. Sometimes you need to sit there for a while and let things run their course; which is not to say surrender fully to self-harm and self-hatred. Just be as gentle with yourself as you can.

What I’ll say instead is this: keep getting up every day. Keep moving forward as best you can, and if you slip back, don’t condemn yourself to that for the rest of your life. Things happen in their time, it seems. After being stuck inside for four days in a prone position, I thought I would be like that forever; that all my hard work this past year had been for nothing.

Then without a huge amount of effort, I found myself wanting to try to do the things I know make me happy. And I am grateful for this turn of events. I don’t necessarily trust it, but I am going with the flow right now. I fully expect dips in all this. But hopefully I’ll be able to get through that, too, and remember to hear all the positive voices I’ve collected in my head instead of the army of negative ones that were put there for me.

Back to recovery, which isn’t, I’ve found, just reviving your eating. It’s reviving your soul, which takes a lifetime.

Borrowed hope

I hadn’t realized just how much tension I’d collected in my back and my shoulders over the recent months until yesterday, on my new therapist’s couch, she took some of it from me.

With the tears I swore I wouldn’t cry on the first visit (because who DOES that? Weak, over-effusive folk. My life is fine compared to many other people’s. I need to stop this WHINING already…), the burden that had slowly re-amassed since I stopped seeing my former therapist in August because of an insurance change began to dissipate. Slightly.

And this strange, slight light crept into the acidy knot in my chest and left it with a slightly lighter feeling of calm. I didn’t have to do this by myself anymore. And the slight light was hope.

Sometimes you don’t realize you’ve lost hope until you find it again.

It’s cold. January is bleak. People everywhere are coming down off the holidays, and for many, like me, the holidays were more challenging and less magical than we’d care to admit. Tiredness increases daily and old habits sneak in. You get up in the morning because you have to, and it’s a struggle every day. You go through the motions. You go home. You are so, so tired, but sleep is in fits and starts and full of anxious and realistic marathon dreams.

But this is what everyone is doing right now, right? It’s hard for everybody. It’s just that I’m alone, doing it all by myself, so maybe it’s slightly harder? This is how it’s supposed to be. Why am I special? Weaker? Lazier?

And then I sat my ass on my new ED specialist therapist’s couch and I remembered how much treatment helped me before. I remembered the relief. The fear, but with the sense that I didn’t have to do this alone. The ability to borrow someone else’s faith in me and in the fact they seemed convinced that things could get better when I had lost that conviction myself.

It was very hard for me to get to her, for practical and personal reasons. I explained this to her when she suggested I find a whole new team, and I said “I’m here. That’s a huge thing. Let’s sit with this and see what happens.”

She was incredibly empathetic and supportive.

“So with all the challenges you faced, why did you decide to see a therapist?”

Well, beyond the basic fact that someone recovering from an eating disorder SHOULD HAVE A CONTINUUM OF CARE FOR A VERY, VERY LONG TIME AFTER TREATMENT, I realized I’d lost hope.

Until she asked me that question, I hadn’t recognized it. It made me feel shameful because I am too privileged to lose hope. And then I gently put that thought down and realized, also, how the hyper critic in my head had also returned with a literal back-breaking vengeance.

I had just spent the past two months beating the living shit out of myself, and I really had no idea.

“Well,” I said, quite unsuccessfuly holding back tears, “There’s something in me, I guess — the naive part, I think — that believes people when they tell me that things can be better. That there’s peace and comfort somewhere down the road for me. I want things to be better, because this is very hard. I’m not entirely convinced they can be yet, but I’m sitting here because I guess I want to believe it.”

And so we will see.

Letting go

At 4:46 a.m., no fail, every morning, the bizarro hunger wail from my toothless, deaf 20-year-old gray and white adopted cat Archimedes snaps me out of whatever sleep I’m in or not in.

I remember when I was with my ex girlfriend and I had made her let me adopt the 18-year-old penis-less cat Mattie whom nobody wanted who had diabetes and who later bathed in his water bowl, then in his litter box, and rolled massive litter clumps all over our new couch, in a cage at my vet with my giant-sad-eyed stare.

“He’s 18. He looks like an alien. Someone else can adopt him. We have three cats.”

“But no one is going to take him,” I said softly, sadly, manipulatively. “He’s been in that cage for three weeks. His owners tried to put him to sleep. The vet saved him so I could take him. You know this is what I do. You can’t fight this,” I insisted, flashing the big-eyes.

“If he’s still there in two weeks you can take him,” she relented.

Two weeks later, 3 a.m., her smelling like falafel from our 12-hour day — her cooking, and I running around — in the restaurant in Woodstock we ran, I slept, awoken only by her nudging me awake, then screaming at him and me, to tell me, “He’s doing it again.”

It was Mattie, who was deaf. We were not told he was deaf. We found out after he’d howl this distinctive “I’m a deaf cat and this is what a deaf cat with no aural aesthetic sounds like” noise more akin to a tortured spirit trapped in our small, echoing house at 2 a.m., then 3 a.m., then 4 a.m., then 5 a.m. And no amount of yelling, coddling, holding, or stroking could stop it.

I was used to the crazy noises of “nobody wants me” animals interrupting my already interrupted and abnormal sleep patterns. She was not.

“You have to take him back,” she said. This after I more-than-willingly cared for her 16-year-old dying cocker spaniel (whom I loved dearly) who should have been put down YEARS ago but whom she could not bear to part with, who splatter shit and peed on walls and furniture and self (who I bathed daily because only I could do it without her freaking out), had to pee every hour (whom I took out), and who would only eat what I cooked her every morning after she lost her appetite.

Ironic? Yes. Did that stop me? Absofuckinglutely not.

“You mean kill him,” I said. Point blank. She made me pay dearly for this cat’s wee-hour deaf Alzheimer-y “where the fuck am I” cries. Fortunately for all three of us, he declined quickly three months after we’d adopted him and I made the humane decision to put him to sleep one morning when I woke up and found him, four pounds lighter after a week of starving and IV-hydrating (performed by me) in a puddle of his own piss.

She yelled at me the whole way in the car and back in the car because I was “too upset.”

So now when Archy, my Prozac cat, my neanderthal-skulled, nobody-wanted-me shelter rescue, wakes me before I am ready, it doesn’t ever occur to me to complain.

I’ve had him for ten years. He’s the longest continuity I’ve had in my life, save my eating disorder and his sister, Charlie, who is 10 1/2, and he’s been through EVERYTHING with me: my failing health, his failing health, our treatments, our operations, our hardcore dental and his parasitic events, my shitty people, my not so shitty people; and everywhere I go in my home he follows.

Every time I cry he jumps up and jabs his now-boney, scraggly paw at my face as if to say, “Hey. You have me. And I’m, like, the human equivalent of 400 and I’m still going. Snap out of it, woman.”

And I do.

Lately I’ve seen friends’ younger animals die. In a lifetime of animal ownership, I’ve seen my animals die. I’ve endured the raw pain of it. I held Charlie’s 1 1/2 year old sister in my arms when she died on our way to the vet — watched the life force leave her as she stared at me, resigned to it.

I’ve grown strong enough to know that one of the exchanges for having incredible, fluffy, unconditional love in your life is that they die far, far quicker than you or their less-than-unconditional human counterparts do. So I’ve kept Archy’s death in the back of my mind.

And others have made sure I do so, as well, because they know how attached we are (I write as he lies next to my computer with his face on my pinky, so I write with a still pinky. That’s hard. But I’d rather have his face on it than not.)

Recently he’s had trouble breathing because of allergies, just like his mama. I know after years of animals that cats oftentimes suffer more when brought to vets, and over a stuffy nose, well, I just can’t do that to a 20-year-old and have the vet say, “He’s going to die soon. You just have to wait for the nose to heal. Call us if he stops eating.”

Which I know well to be the telltale sign of the end. Especially for Archy, the “steal-the-food-sureptitiously-with-my-paw-out-of-other-cats’-bowls” kinda hungry guy. The one who pounces me even if I’m chewing celery, nervous he may not get a piece, or who wakes me at 4:46 a.m. if his food bowl is any less than 3/4 full, which is every day.

Thus far, he eats three times as much as my 10-year-old Charlie, though he is still rail, rail thin. And gets thinner every day. But he has the energy of a kitten.

I both know and do not know what I will do without my little angel. My boyfriend. My best friend. I understand that animals die. But these past few days, be it reality or fear of reality inspired by my poor friends’ animal losses, I’ve been acutely aware of the fact that in many ways I’ve been saying goodbye to him for months: extra special food. Extra long water-out-of-the-faucet permission. Extra long pets, extra tolerance for his cuddling and his lost, Alzheimer-y meows in the middle of the night.

Life has been exceptionally cruel and more-than-exceptionally kind to me with my animals. So I should focus on the latter, I think. Until his time is up, you betchya I’m going to give it all I’ve got.

I went to Harry Potter World and had a nervous breakdown

There I was, standing with a line of children between the ages of 3 and 17 exasperatedly lined up behind me as I angrily waved my interactive $45 wand at a storefront window at Harry Potter World for the fifty-seventh time.

A bit of a crowd of adults and Universal employees had gathered around me as I rapidly fell apart, thinking to myself “Well this is the story of my life. I am the Neville Longbottom of wizards and the Dumbledore wand I bought was a typically gross overestimation of my abilities as a human being.”

Yes, I actually thought that. Except it was more like a sweaty, panicky malattempt to hold back sobs while the cloaked worker of the nearby wand shop whom I’d defiantly told my wand was broken stared at me in simultaneous disbelief, annoyance, and, worst of all, pity.

The worker stepped in, took my wand I insisted like a petulant four year old was broken “Because I just know it is. You don’t have to check,” and made the music box in front of me start and stop with a flick of the wrist.

Red-faced and horrified with myself, I stepped back in and tried. No go.

The stream of children behind me each successfully did the same as the wand shop lady, one after the other, first try, like some macabre, surrealist insecurity nightmare as I stared at them, stared at my feet, tears plopping on them.

My sister and cousin tried to comfort me (though no doubt wondering what the hell was wrong with this 35-year-old wackjob who was crying because her infrared wand didn’t make the music box go) while the wand shop lady took my wand behind the scenes to “fix” it.

While she did, a father and his young daughter stood up in front of the window. He said to me, “Watch how she does it. Small, precise movements. You can do it.”

As predicted, she stood up to the window and the music box turned on.

I was returned my wand and one more time, though all I really wanted to do was run as far from HPW I possibly could, flicked my wrist like the 17-year-old, and lo and behold, it worked.

The confused crowd around me cheered for me. I could not believe what was happening. I felt so ridiculous, but at the same time, relieved that I’d actually made it work.

Harry Potter is like my Prosac. It’s essentially the only movie that comforts me when I’m depressed. I’ve been watching it for years. The themes of good triumphing over evil, the bullied kid being redeemed, the “bad people” being shown what fo,’ and the uniquely nuanced lack of absolute good and absolute evil in them strike me deep in my core.

Needless to say, I am very attached to the films and books. And Dumbledore’s quote (whose wand I couldn’t make work; whose wand that, when I bought it, ACTUALLY made me think, “Am I overreaching with this one? Maybe I should try a kid’s wand…”) is a bit of a mantra to me:

Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.

Sometimes I feel like the characters are my family. I hate theme parks. They are the antithesis of my ideal experience. But for Harry Potter World, I braved it. And it was beautiful. You really felt like you were there at Diagon Alley, and the rides make you feel like you’re actually in the movie.

Plus, there was the coming out of the stress of the holidays and a host of other recently emerged issues, being in Orlando which reminded me of Miami while I was in treatment, many unsuccessful attempts to find a therapist at home, and the rapid approach of the year anniversary of my intake to Oliver-Pyatt Centers (Feb. 18).

All of that, plus failing as a wizard, made me break down.

It was a dark time. And I could have walked away. Or, I could have been an adult and not reacted that way. But I did neither, and I accepted it.

So when I stepped back up to that friggin’ music box and it actually went, I did feel a little happy. And the rest of the trip with my sister and cousin was not ruined. It was fun. They forgave me (I think). And even though there’s a group of people on this planet who will probably tell the “Remember that time that big ole’ woman cried because her wand didn’t work?” story over and over and over, it’s okay.

Plus, it’s pretty hilarious now that I’m over it. Sigh.