Step One...

I thought the life of someone "struggling" with an eating disorder was a glamorous one. Tiny clothes to fit your tiny body, with a tiny purse to carry your tiny needs to match your tiny problems...it seemed so beautiful, so simple, so unique. The truth however is that its anything but unique. Its actually so textbook and so boring that you actually take away all the things about yourself that once made you different from all the faces on the street. No one tells you the truth about Anorexia. No one tells you that you will never actually become the vision of what you thought it would look like... No one tells you that the taboo problem of girls dying from electrolyte imbalances and going into sudden cardiac arrest are actually the accurate depiction of a life obsessed with the thin ideal. The truth is that this struggle with food, this life battling an eating disorder will steal every bit of life from you. You see, you think you are different. You think it won't get that bad or be that serious. I know that's what I thought. I kept despairingly living out each day thinking that surely if I lost one more pound the life of laughter and love would somehow fall into my hands. Of course that wasn't true. Each day i actually stepped a little further from my dreams and every one of the people I loved. Each day I blindly took another chain and slipped it around my wrists...thinking I was adorning myself with the beauty of this world. Those "silver bracelets" led me far from beauty. Instead they led me to hospitals and treatment centers. They led me to debt beyond my means and the ending of college and career goals. They led me to having a tube stuck down my nose, taped to my face so I could be kept alive through a feeding pump. It isn't tiny anymore. In fact the thing I once thought I controlled so well is now controlling me. The undertow grabs your feet from under you and debilitates you until you can't know which way to swim to get air. All logic fades as your oxygen deprived mind tired to rationalize the deception and reflections of water. You are under before you even know what hit you. We adorn ourselves to belong. We beautify ourselves to be accepted. The worst part of deception is that you truly are deceived.

The truth about this all however is that I wasn't created for this world. I wasn't created to fit in and be OF the things that destroy the life that was placed inside each one of us. I was fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God...who am I to think I can create something better.

After years and year and years of living in the pain and hopelessness of anorexia its time to take a new path. I will explain more later about my heart for the next year and how writing in this blog every day is a part of my pathway to freedom. I don't know what it will look like. God knows it will be far from perfect...its going to require more honesty then I have ever been willing to face...but its time to find freedom. Its time to learn how to trust my maker and believe Him at His word...its time to find the dreams I walked away from so long ago and bring them back to life. Its time for war to be waged and hope to be restored. Its time to find freedom.