Moving: It’s Just Another Word.

Moving forward.

Moving away.

Moving beyond ED, moving on with my own unencumbered life.

I’m trying ti sift through a pile of emotions related to our move to Indiana and them into categories with positive or progressive labels. Semantics is the key to keeping the extreme emotions (on either side of the spectrum, or aisle, if you will) in check.
Finding myself in a new geographic state does not solve my anxiety or send ED packing, but it does offer ample opportunities to “unload some baggage,” both literal (my closet is a little roomier these days) and figurative. The following proposition is both daunting and exhilarating, dependent on how I phrase it in my mind at any given moment: No one in Indiana or at the still undetermined university I’ll call “home” come fall needs to know that I have spent the past 15 months wrestling with an eating disorder. None of these future friends has seen the emaciated Mary or watched as I slowly isolated myself – from here on out I can choose to be free. This is not a choice I would make, the struggle has changed me and I’m “woman enough” to talk about it. Even then the conversations are on my terms. No one will have heard from a friend of a friend or a parents that Mary Baldwin came home from school anorexic. If this part of my history is relevant I can choose to share it with whomever I wish.
For each of us the move is riddled with different questions, puzzlements and possibilities. When settled in front of the same fireplace that has crackled us comfort for the past decade our individual unknowns quickly morph into private horrors, but only if we first lend them that power “for nothing’s good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” (Hamlet 2.2)