Welcome to ED Recovery Blog.
What started as a fairly standard blog - a place where I could express my thoughts, a place where others could comment on my experience and share a little bit of their own (and just maybe feel a little bit less alone), a place that allowed me a certain freedom - seems to have taken on a life of its own. Much like an eating disorder itself, the blog stopped being about what it was initially meant to be.
It’s taken me a while to come to terms with that. Even more, it’s taken me a while to really start to figure out what I wanted the blog to become and to come up with a plan for using it more effectively.
Here it is the end of the year, and with that tends to come a bit of reflection. Though I’ve started to work on personal writing projects outside of this blog, I finally decided that I wasn’t going to give up this space (something I had considered).
Rather than abandoning this space or turning it over to someone else, I’ve decided to stick with it. However, there are going to be a number of changes.
I’m no longer going to be blogging with Wordpress. While I love the blog setup, I’ve started to feel limited by it. No matter how much tweaking, designing, and shaking things up I could do, I suspect that the form isn’t going to challenge me the way that I want to be challenged. I’ve made a New Year’s resolution that involves this blog and it’s simple this: I’ll be making one post per week that tackles something that I’ve seen within the ED recovery community. It may deal with books, or it might focus on the way that advertisers are “buying in” to thin-obsession, or the emphasis may be on a treatment facility or organization that’s working to create greater awareness. There’s always a chance too that it will be something more personal. However, I want to focus on creating longer posts, providing information and - while I’m at it - creating something that’s at least a little bit interesting to look at.
Another big change: I’m taking the contextual advertising off of the page. In other words, I’m not going to be running Google Ads. There are a number of different reasons for this, the primary reason is that, well, I can’t control what shows up and, if I’m talking about some new diet fad, I don’t want a sidebar full of links promoting scams right alongside treatment centers. That said, I’m open to providing links and ads for organizations and others who aim to create a greater awareness about the harm that comes from anorexia, bulimia, compulsive eating and related disorders. From time to time, there will be donation boxes added to the site as well; in each case, the recipient will be documented. For example, if donations will be going to NEDA, to the F.R.E.E.D. Foundation, to the Binge Eating Disorder Association, or similar registered 503c organization, I will be sure to make that (along with the amount donated) clear.
Of course, that’s just the beginning. I hope to add a directory of other sites and resources (something that I started to collect information for but did not complete in a previous incarnation of this website). I want to inspire conversations on the site - and to make it easier for those conversations to make their way into other space as well.
Changes don’t happen overnight, however. I think that’s something that we can all agree on. I just hope that you’ll stick around, check them out, and be sure to let me know what you think - regardless of the differences in our experiences.