Yesterday on Twitter, a blogger who had read my Dr. Phil anorexia post tweeted to me. I went over to look at her blog and felt the familiar stomach drop when I read this:

A month ago, in Flagstaff, SB had a Subway sandwich for dinner Friday night and at lunch on Saturday she had a few of the sweet potato fries I'd ordered for the table. Yesterday, when it was suggested she needed to drink Gatorade to combat the recent dehydration that led to her fainting twice and being rehydrated in the E.R. this past Sunday, she cried. And said no.

As a mother, my stomach drops for the blogger. As a recovered anorexic, my stomach drops with muscle memory. 

I'm reading THE MATHEMATICIAN'S SHIVA by Stuart Rojstaczer. In a book within a book, the protagonist's mother writes about going with only a tiny bit of food a day in war-torn Russia. Her description of hunger is spot-on:

I want you to follow my instructions. Take your eyes off this page when I tell you to do. Look at the room around you. Wherever you are, simply open your eyes adn look, listen, smell and think whatever thoughts come your way ... Then imagine all of your awareness disappearing. Your eyes work, yes, but they don't see anything. Your brain won't let you process such information. The smells, they are gone, too. Your ears, they work simply to warn you of danger. Your thoughts, all of them are so uncomplicated and pure ... All is about the numbness inside you ... You are truly in hibernation. Everything has slowed, because any processing, physical or mental, requires energy, and that, if you are truly nutrient-deprived, is precisely what you don't possess.

When I read that, I remembered crying from hunger. And I also remembered crying from fear of what would happen if I ate, because the hunger was easier to tolerate than the fear. The space between those places is anorexia. I wrote about that motivation and that place in my young adult novel, THE OBVIOUS GAME. Writing about it forced me to go back and experience those feelings again, and it was no fun. However, it's important for those of us who are recovered and feeling brave to talk about life after an eating disorder, because when you're in it, you can't imagine life on the other side of it. I keep writing. I'm here. I'm on the other side. It blows my mind that I still get 2-3 emails a week from people who love someone with anorexia. They are desperate. They have no idea what to do with this thing they don't understand at all. They want me to tell them what to do. I can't totally do that. I'm not a psychologist or doctor. All I can do is try to explain how their loved one feels so they can support that person in the best way possible.

My new friend Jenn told me about the March Against ED next week (September 30) in Washington, DC. I wish I would've known about it earlier, because I think I would've tried to go. If it happens again next year, I will be there. There is so much misinformation about mental health in general, and anorexia is one of the few mental disorders you can see on a person, which I think contributes to even further misunderstanding, because you form opinions without knowing the person at all just by looking at them. 

I have a list of ED resources in my Young Adult category up in the masthead. I will be updating that list with some more from Jenn. I was never inpatient anywhere (I threatened to run away and I was 18) and I ended up recovering physically in college and mentally in my thirties. 

They were deep ruts in my brain. Deep, self-loathing ruts. Filling them in was the hardest thing I've ever done, and it's what I want for every disordered eater out there. It can be done.

I'm relieved to hear Jenn's daughter is in recovery. There are many other people whose sons and daughters aren't. I know. They email me. It's best if you catch it early. It's often comorbid with other mental illness and therefore hard to separate or identify. (Is she not eating because she's anxious? Is she counting her calories because she's OCD?) If you think there's a problem, it's better to err on the side of caution, just like you would if your kid suddenly sprouted an unexplained lump in her breast or a persistent ache in her teeth. Please don't assume what you see on television is real. It's not dramatic or romantic or disgusting. It's someone who is hurting really, really bad. Someone hungry in every sense of the word.

Hello Everyone! It's that time again. We have less than two weeks until the YA Scavenger Hunt begins. I hope you reserved plenty of time for this one because there isn't just one team or two or even three. This time we have 6, that's right, I said 6 YASH teams which means more prizes, news, and fun for all you readers out there! So let's get started!

TEAM RED INCLUDES:

 

TEAM GOLD INCLUDES:

 

TEAM GREEN INCLUDES:

 

TEAM ORANGE INCLUDES:

 

TEAM INDIE INCLUDES:

 

TEAM BLUE INCLUDES:

  There are so many books here I don't even know where I would begin. I hope you all are as excited as I am! The YA Scavenger Hunt begins at noon pacific time on Thursday, October 2nd and runs through Sunday, October 5th. That means to get through the entire hunt you'll need to go through 1.5 teams per day!

Are you going to play? 

If you're at work, put on headphones.

The noise was incessant. I mentioned it to my husband, who was working from home. "What is up with that BIRD?" 

We noticed Kizzy staring intently at something just outside the window. 

It was a baby bird. A fledgling goldfinch, fat as a tennis ball with tiny little legs.

And it was cheeping its heart out.

At first I laughed at Kizzy's interest, knowing he couldn't reach the bird.

Then I worried. 

I called the nature center. They said no biggie, the parents are feeding it. It's just learning to fly.

I googled some things. The Internet said leave it alone.

I had lunch. I took some calls. I worked.

The cheeping continued.

My maternal instincts said something was wrong.

I moved outside to see if any parent birds were coming.

They were not.

I wondered how many hours the fledgling had been alone without food.

The baby bird tried to hop. He fell over.

I called the nature center again. I said, "There are no parents."

She said, "Are you sure he's a fledgling? It's late for that."

I said, "Yes. I'm positive."

She said, "Bring him in."

I went and got a shoe box and lined it with an old tshirt. I put on a garden glove and picked up the baby bird, who cheeped at me. I put him in the box. 

I drove to the nature center.

I talked to the baby bird the whole way there. I told him it would be okay.

When I got there, I opened the box. 

The first thing I saw were his hooked little feet. Hooked in a way they should not be hooked. His eyes were closed.

"Oh, no!" I gasped.

The nature center worker took the box, barely glancing at it. She patted my arm. "I'm so sorry," she said.

I gave her the box as the tears started streaming down my face. I did not want the dead bird's coffin anymore. 

"I'm sorry," she repeated again as I turned to go.

As I drove home, tears streaming down my face, I thought about ISIS and ebola and genocide and war.

But I did not care.

That baby bird was in my backyard. On my deck. And if I had acted faster, I could've saved him.

I felt like we got to know each other a little.

He was my baby bird, and I failed him. 

Today I'm over at Fiction Reboot|Daily Dose talking about how hard it is to write a believable teen character. Read it here.

I had this friend who died almost two years ago at the age of 41 teaching people to body surf in the ocean.

I had this friend who made fun of me even as I sat in the hospital with cat bite fever. He sent me a bouquet of flowers. The card read: "Suck it up."

I had this friend who lived life so large it scared me sometimes, because I am small.

He has been gone for nearly two years, and part of my young adulthood died with him.

I had this friend, and I will not forget him. May we all live such a life that leaves a mark on everyone we touch.

Ani DiFranco was wrong to try to host a gathering in a Southern plantation, but she also taught me a lot about life as a writer.

"I am struck by the mediocrity of my finest hour."

"I don't know why red fades before blue, it just does."

These two sentiments have colored my career as a writer.

I struggle to be taken seriously, mostly in my own head.

The anger I feel always fades before the shame that I am not better. The knowledge that we all die alone doesn't stop me from wishing someone would remember what I said before I went.

And then there is the horror that I care.

It is the first cool night of fall, and always, I remember how much I feared the cold when I was starving myself.

When I was eighteen, and my boyfriend went off to college and there were no texts or cell phones, and all I had was a Jimmy Buffet CD and letters to warm me.

When I was nineteen, I got a tattoo of the sun on my inner heel to warm me. I was still starving myself. My grandfather rendered the sun in copper, and now I own it but don't know where to hang it.

I don't fear winter in the same way, because I am not that girl anymore. I know how the story plays out, at least as far as the second act. I know the protagonist is no longer starving.

But there is still fear. That I won't be relevant. That I won't be heard. That I'm what I fear: Just another small life on the rock that burns and then flames out for the sake of warming the planet for one second in an ocean of years.

It gets colder and the rock turns, but at least I am better equipped to face the turn.

Because I have grown. And I am no longer starving myself.

Her hair flies back in the wind because the motor's almost shot in Vicki the convertible so the top stays down now. It has to be helped up like an old man out of a chair, and most of the time, we don't feel like dealing with it. We leave ourselves exposed to sun and sky and wind because the sun feels good when it's not raining.

We are talking about growing up, and I tell her the thing my dad told me about SEEs, Significant Emotional Experiences, the thing I put in THE OBVIOUS GAME, how you have to have two SEEs before you can really contribute to society, how some people go their whole lives without having two. You need two to understand other people's anger.

"You've had your two already," I say. "When Grandpa died and when Bella and Petunia and Buttonsworth died."

"Did you have two when you were a kid?"

"Yeah. When Grandma got cancer. And then when it came back. And then when my gran died. All that happened before I left for college."

"I've had more than that," she says, and her hair whips again around her face, her eyes shaded with sunglasses.

"What was the other one?"

"When Ka'Vyea got shot."

Oh. Yes.

I've been wondering how that affected her. We haven't talked about it. I've been waiting. She was such a trooper every visit to the hospital, and I have never been so proud of my daughter as when she walked into a room to see her friend with a feeding tube in his nose unable to sit up in bed and act completely natural, to play Connect Four instead of staring in shock at the machines surrounding him.

"Yes. That was really scary, wasn't it?"

She nods. There's more to say, but neither of us knows how to say it now. He's back at school part-time. He didn't die. We're very glad about that. But it's still not fair he can't walk. None of this is fair, and we are both gobsmacked every time we start to talk about it. So we stop.

I keep driving. Her hair streams out behind her.