"Perhaps the most mysterious universe of all is the one within us."

My Psychology textbook finally came, which means I can start studying. The only material we're being graded on the entire semester are the combined scores of three tests. That's it! No quizzes, no papers, and no homework assignments. This is SO the opposite of how things work at my real school in New York...

I don't know how I feel about Psychology yet. Part of my ambivalence comes from the fact that I can't really decide if I think it's a science or not. I think there are certainly parts of psychology that can be attributed to chemical and biological factors, but so much of it seems like overly generalized theories thought up by people who wanted easy answers to complex phenomena. It's making me really frustrated actually. I mean, I don't pretend to be a genius about anything, so I'm not trying to sound superior. In fact, psychology is such a budding field that I probably sound incredibly ignorant... It's just that my thoughts are complicated enough and I'd rather be learning something like Biology where I can have concrete answers. Anyways, I'll stop knocking the subject and try to keep an open mind. After all, mental health professionals have done a lot for me.

Speaking of which, I had my first support group session at MEDA last night! Yesterday was just kind of mediocre emotion-wise. My mood was pretty much shot all day so by the time 6:00 rolled around the last thing I felt like doing was talking about my feelings. But, it turns out the best time to talk about stuff is when it is the last thing you want to do. The turnout was pretty small, just the group leader, me, and two other girls. Neither of them were extremely thin so that was a relief and I didn't feel overly fat. It's funny. No matter what, before any sort of support group or group therapy with other patients, despite how much I know about eating disorders, and despite knowing that a person's weight has very little to do with whether or not they have an ED, I ALWAYS assume I'm going to be the heaviest and everyone else is going to be emaciated. So far it's never happened. Anyways, both of the other girls were bulimic. It is the most common ED after binge eating. We went around and checked in about how our weeks went and how our moods have been. One of the girls, Jamie, is in pretty much the same boat as me- Took last semester off from school thinking she'd go back in the fall, then took a sharp turn off the deep end in August and put off the return until Spring. The other girl, Laurie, is one year sober today but still binges and purges. We talked about addiction and habits and then spent a good fifteen minutes talking about how none of our friends or family members understand what it's like. Everyone expects recovery to have a definite timeline but eating disorders just don't work that way. It was an interesting conversation, and then I drove home and had a big bowl of whole wheat crackers for dinner. Not a 100% balanced meal but it's all I was hungry for and I think it evened out calorically.

Now I'm off to Staples to buy index cards and a big old notebook for class.