Because I started this diary, on a whim; I�m not absolutely sure where i wanted to go with it.My main regret is that I haven�t eloquently kept this diary to one subject.. This entry about WORK- another about my kid- an entry about how someone made me mad. Hardly ever about �ANA or MIA for pretty obvious reasons. I�ve just always kept it a secret.

I secretly read Other Ana Diaries and don�t have a single ANA friend in real life� EXCEPT for MIA - SHE�S too real! Always in the back of my, mind. It�s what I think about mostly.. And everything revolves around Mia and when can I visit her next. I would have enjoyed my involvement with you ED people if I could have chatted about what I do day after day.. I know people can understand themselves better if they see Mia in themselves reflected by me..Maybe one day I will know what to say about MIA.

Over the year the diaries I read have changed, the people who read me have changed too, people come and go � that�s life, isn�t it?

I first got a diary when I was only about FIFTEEN? It was May of 1990..teen bubbly writing too. My diary was a navy blue cloth bound cover with a frog on it. Sure it�s immature but I think I started writing because I liked the diary�s childish cover. I was SOO into frogs. So when I finished that journal and grew up a little� I picked out a flowered one, and a diary with a sun on the cover after that� I still have them all; In a box in my closet upstairs. I started a handwritten journal which to hundreds of pages and numerous volumes..the first one lasted about two years. I wrote about friends, and fights,, a lot like I do now�And later came boys. I never wrote about sex.. I never wrote about MIA -NOT EVER. I remember thinking that a diary could be found by someone and I would be accountable for what I had written. But I never remember being introdouced to MIa either... I just realized one Day.." Where did this habit come from" Where did i get the idea to start this... Its almost as bad as having amnesia about it... It kind of scared me that i couldnt remember in a way... In the back of my mind it may have been an episode of Sally jesse Raphael- and a woman that ate only 7 chips a day on a special blue plate... but that seems like something i invented,, not what really gave me the idea. It was the only time i had heard of Eating Disorders, and its the only thing that connects the story together.. However remote..Somehow I connected eating with being fat , and being Fat with being worthless.. So Food=worthless. So i decided that i was too worthless to be able to eat. And I did find out later that my sneak of a sister Aubrie and her friend Allie had read it on a sleepover, and deemed it �boring� That�s because I wrote some things in code� And I can�t remember how to decipher them now.. I think if something really �good� (sex-AHEM) went down; Then I just wrote that I had a �really nice time� or something�.

This is the first diary i have had that MIA has poked her head in my diary ever.. And even then she's only been here a few times really.

Diaries are like a form of voyeurism, but it�s also a wonderful way of discovering those little nuances of the human condition that make us difficult to define. And in some of my FAVORITE�S diaries; it�s the best way of understanding different times, bring them to life as though they�re current, as though they�re living in a parallel universe. And also to find the many similarities.

I stopped writing it when I was married, it seemed a little childish. But when I look back- my writing wasn�t the only thing that was stifled. But then I started again when I was single, and alone.. It helped to lay out all the feelings. I always regarded it as a secret and private thing. I never religiously restarted until last year, during an especially boring underway time�but I�ve often revisited those early years of my life and enjoyed them over. I can read about all the old times whenever I want and part of the pleasure is recognizing where I was being less than honest with myself � knowing that the truth of my actions differed a little from what I wrote.

But diaries give us the chance to live things three times. Diaries give us the experience once for real, once in selecting how to write about them, and a third time in a vivid memory re-awoken. And of course the third of those has the added bonus of knowing how the story continued, improved, got worse, changed. Looking back to the entries of a year ago I was very unsure of what choices I was making-- and how would certain relationships go and how would they work out. At times I wanted to be able to flick the pages forward in time like a fast forward button on a VCR and ruin the ending for myself�and find out what would happen to the characters.

And sometimes -I still do.

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