"An eating disorder is not usually a phase, and it is not necessarily indicative of madness. It is quite maddening, granted, not only for the loved ones of the eating disordered person, but also for the person themselves. It is, at the most basic level, a bundle of contradictions: a desire for power that strips you of all power. A gesture of strength that divests you of strength. A wish to prove that you need nothing, that you have no human hungers, which turns on itself and becomes a searing need for the hunger itself. It is an attempt to find an identity, but ultimately it strips you of any sense of yourself, save the sorry identity of 'sick'. It is a grotesque mockery of cultural standards of beauty that ends up mocking no one more than you. It is the thing you believe is keeping you safe, alive, contained - and in the end, of course, you find it is doing quite the opposite. These contradictions begin to split a person in two. Body and mind fall apart from each other, and it is in this fissure that an eating disorder may flourish, in the silence that surrounds this confusion that an eating disorder may fester and thrive."

- Wasted

It has been two years and one month since I first stepped, with sweaty palms and shaky hands, into Tsunade's office, ready to have my mind analyzed and my so-called reasoning torn to shreds. It has been two years and nine months since I was first hospitalized unwillingly, equally frightened, however substantially less ready. It has been, according to my vague estimations, just over four years since family and friends started noticing that I wasn't the picture of health I'd always been.

I have been in therapy, recovery, for two years and nine months, since my first hospitalization – the treatment both voluntary and involuntary. Help was not on the agenda of the willing (and I wasn't), but I figure that I've always known that I've needed it, even if I didn't want it. Even from the beginning, I don't believe I was ever delusional enough to think that throwing up my every meal was a healthy alternative. However, I did believe that any ill-health caused by my detrimental actions could not ever be as bad as being fat. Enter my resistance to the alleged help.

In remembering this, I can only assume that I've made some sort of progress if I'm still alive and standing here at nineteen years old, moving on to the next stage of my life. When I try to recount my experiences I would love to be able to say that I remember everything I've put everyone else and myself through, gloss over the facts as if it were something simple. Though it would be a gross injustice of the last two years if I were to lie and say it's been a smooth road or an easy journey.

In fact, I've found that keeping a positive and determined attitude towards recovery has been nothing short of impossible. I've slipped in and out of relapse and remission more times than I can remember. Sometimes I've felt on top of the world, that I'm a whole enough person and that I don't need my eating disorder.

At other times I felt like it's the only honest part of me that I couldn't bear to part with.

On my best days I remembered that I want to live, why I want to live, the kind of person I want to be. But on my weak days, I've momentarily lose the fight - and my inspiration and philosophy caves in hard and heavy. Sasuke is "sick" again, exercising, purging and questioning how on earth I thought therapy was a good idea. In those sometimes I'm not afraid of dying, it's those sometimes when I think I'm maybe okay with dying - and I think that I should hold onto my eating disorder with an iron grip because it's the only part of me with any worth. I often think that if I were to let go of it, be "healthy", I would be unequivocally and ineffablyempty. After all, the eating disorder has encroached upon every aspect of my personality and life that I ever had to begin with - there could only be nothingness left if it were to disappear.

It was this sort of downward thinking that would always lead me to the same question - Is a healthy life of emptiness really more appealing than living "sick"?

It was in that vein, my struggle was switching between the want to recover, and the want to remain with an eating disorder – in a twisted sense, it was the easy and safe choice. It took me a long, long time to realize, for it to suddenly click, that a life living (dying) sick was the life of nothingness I'd feared after all.

For over four years I was nothing more than fluctuating kilograms on the scale, three hundred daily sit-ups and an unwilling patient. I should have died when my mind gave up and my heart stopped at my lowest weight. But I didn't. I have been on deaths door more times than what I can count and yet my body has persevered free of my minds will. When my body had eaten up all its resources and left me unable to move in a hospital bed connected to IV's and heart monitors it had persisted – despite the future of nothingness my mind promised.

And so, I cannot even begin to fully express how utterly strange and bizarre it is to still be standing here, breathing, to this day. I don't believe in higher powers handing out second chances, I figure the responsibility was entirely my own. No god-sent messenger, not even Naruto could give me that. It was wholly up to me to give myself the ability to have a second chance, to redefine what living and what nothingness is.

I think to be living, coping and functioning like a normal human being is a standard of life that we all expect to have, naturally. But personally losing this standard and then attaining it once you've lost it is like coming out from a long time underground - and it just clicks - you know when you've got it back. Time goes faster again; you begin to remember details, faces, names, ideas, dreams. Your memory is no longer a colorless blur of goal weights and self disgust, but a vivid compilation of times and feelings, good and bad.

You slowly remember that people aren't the monsters you once believed them to be. Things beyond calories and meeting exercise requirements become important to you again and you remember that you have real interests and hobbies beyond the deterioration of your own body and soul. You remember it is okay to explore and indulge in all these things without feeling guilty.

Then, suddenly, you realize that you're living again.

For this seemingly slim possibility to be achieved I have spent the last two years and one month, one hundred and eight weeks, seven hundred and forty three days in therapy.

Two years and one month after stepping, terrified, into Tsunade's office I am facing my last query - I am alive, but am I living?