A mean disease

It's a mean disease. Everything from the past root issues, the trauma, the abandonment to the numbers and the addiction and the desperation to cling to a lifeless embodiment of lies. It's cruel. It is vicious. It's mean. I know that seems childish. I know standing back as an innocent victim seems a bit naive or ignorant. But I think there are moments in time when I am just taken back by how deceptively the roots of an eating disorder slip down into the cracks of your life and before you know it your hands are tied together and you feel as though the world could never understand how you can love something and hate something simultaneously with such raw and desperate passion.
It doesn't play fair. In fact it actually serves a purpose and meets a legitimate need and brings relief to an aching heart. It confuses the mind by bandaging the wound and leaves you perpetually empty, a nice change from the fullness of emotion.
I drove home from work today in silence. Five O'clock traffic was wearing down my already shot nerves and all I could do was stare ahead of me. I didn't have the capacity to listen to the radio or even sing to music. I was incredibly frustrated because in that moment I ached for the numbness that the eating disorder would bring me. I was desperate for the sound of my mind racing with thoughts and numbers to the degree that it would provide white noise for the emotional torment of a triggered memory. I spent a lifetime avoiding the truth and now I feel like I will spend the rest of my life trying to forget. And its silly because I know food has nothing to do with why things are hard right now. It's not about calories or fat or numbers...and yet those are the things that send me over the edge... that take me from pretending nothing happened at all to melting into a puddle. I didn't want to go out to lunch again today. I really didn't. So when it was another restaurant I didn't know with another man I am still getting to know I was overwhelmed before we even sat down. Things just went downhill from there. By the time we were leaving our last agent's office I was reeling with anxiety and yet showing nothing but calm. I was amazed how put together I could appear to be when inside I couldn't think straight. Its a talent that has aided in my detriment. So as I drove home in total silence I felt like a drug addict needing a fix...an alcoholic needing a drink. But I can't stay abstinent from my drug of choice. I knew I had to go home and face the demon and stand against it, when I felt completely powerless to do so. It seems mean. Like making an alcoholic go sit in a bar 3 times a day or an addict go hang out at their dealers house. I am not saying those addictions are any less difficult to overcome than my own...im just saying its a different level of having to daily take part on the very thing that has destroyed my life.

There is a little girl who I have been connected with who just entered treatment for the first time. I have friends who are dying. Literally. Yes its about the food right now but its not. Each one of them have a story and within it food took hold of them in some way shape or form. Too much or not even close to enough. It promised to sooth their emptiness and bring control to a world that had failed them, crushed them, and left them to fend for themselves. It's a mean disease, fueled by a mean past. My heart pounds in frustration tonight as I continue staring..looking past the screen in front of me and into the eyes of the moments, the people, who took my heart away. Some days I wonder if the greatest treatment, when in combination with professional help, is love. Not for any other reason then that they are who they are and deserve to be handled gently and loved fully. Maybe, just maybe, if they could find the comfort of Jesus through the arms of his people they wouldn't be so desperate to be held by the illusion of control. What if we held them. What if we loved them. What if they really didn't have to be alone.

I simply long for the day that freedom flows out of my words, my thoughts, and my actions. I long for the day when I can feel the Lord pick me up and carry me through the past, healing the wounds, and bring me into my present...going before me into my future. It's a mean disease...but I have a God who is bigger.

my mind is screaming

This is the first time in a long time that I have felt such a desperation to write. There is no direction I am intending to go, no frustration I am trying to sort out. I simply, for one moment, need there to be no filter, no restraint, no pressure to be something or someone that I am not. I think I have carried hope for such a long time, believing that things will one day be different. However deep down I know it is not the kind of different that will ever happen. I have longed for there to be a day when suddenly I find what has been missing. The wound inside my heart is healed with no scars to show. Relationships are easy. Joy is found in abundance. Food is the furthest thing I am focusing on. It is the idealized depiction of a world that could be... but one that had become as easy to believe in as unicorns and mermaids... as there ever being perfection in every aspect of who I am.

I can't help but think its not supposed to be this way. I know that in the garden so long ago humanity became separated from the life we were created to live... separated from the one we were created to abide in. But everyday I see people who are living in this world and they are alive. They are not weighed down with anxiety and depression and fear of everyone and everything. They aren't overwhelmed by the idea of change and paralyzed in the midst of it. I meet people who enjoy life and seem to have peace in the confidence of our maker. And I wonder to myself, why can't I? I think the easy thing to do would be to turn to my past and place all responsibility on what has been done to me... but I just can't do that and actually believe it to be true. So its actually easy for me to take a can of spray paint and cover over all the pictures in the story of my life. I want so desperately to believe that my stories are nothing but lies and ploys for attention and excuses for failing to live a normal life. I want the sole problem to be me... that I have done something to deserve to feel this way or that I have brought this upon myself... because if the problem lies in my sanity and my behavior then I can fix it. Lets say I am a liar and I lie to everyone I meet. And lets say the punishment for that is extreme anxiety or fear... then the insanity will only last as long as I am bad... which means there isn't permanent damage, you know? I can change my behavior. I can be a better person. I can love deeper, serve more, encourage better. But lets say for argument sake something did happen. The abuse was real... then what. I can't take that away. I can't erase the damage that did to my heart and my mind. I would be abandoned with the memories and remain at the mercy of another person. I would be shattered, in a state that can never be flawlessly put back together. Millions of little pieces glued side by side, hoping to reconstruct something that resembles that life I once knew. But everything inside is different and the person staring back at me in the mirror is a stranger. I try to be better, just obviously not hard enough.

I know there are people who are able to find healing. There are people who bounce back and are able to resume life...often times being changed for the better by what they have endured. But I don't know if I have the strength to keep believing that for myself. I am so frustrated by how hard this transition has been for me. Every thought I have is intensified by anxiety and fear and it steals away joy, contentment, moments with my family. They say to stop freaking out and to just calm down but what does that even mean? When I feel like I am being swallowed alive by a life that is headed in an opposite direction of where I want to go. I feel like what I wants doesn't even matter. I feel like I am getting advice from everyone around me telling me about how good the direction I am heading in will be. I feel like I am screaming at the top of my lungs telling everyone I am going the wrong way and that this isn't what I want and I honestly feel like it doesn't matter. Like when I open my mouth nothing comes out... its like I am living in a nightmare where I am crying and falling apart and everyone somehow sees me smiling and happy. Outwardly I appear to be doing the right things but in all reality on the inside I feel like I am being tortured...like I am watching my greatest fears being lived out right before my eyes and no one except me sees a thing.

In reality the reason no one can hear me is because I actually am not saying anything. I am not screaming, but instead I am saying the right things at the right times... trying desperately to be the person I want to be. I kept living out the definition of insanity, trying harder and harder to turn into the person I pretend to be, and getting stuck in the same place I have been for the last 15 years. It isn't something anyone else has put on to me...but its this brokenness that so many days I don't believe I will ever live without. Moving is hard. It takes months, sometimes years to establish a new life. I have been here for a month. But I feel like I am drowning. I feel like the need is now. I feel like the world is slipping through my fingers and I am doing my best to hold on. But much like sand it slips through the cracks in my life and before I know it there is too little that remains to get back what I have lost.

I don't know what comes next. I don't know how to try and put a positive spin on how I am feeling. I do know the truth is that there is hope. That change takes time. And that there is a love that can heal the deepest wound. I pray for the strength to embrace, to trust, and to lose myself in my maker, so that one day I can honestly say, I am free.