It's not what you think.In fact I can guarantee it's not what you think.
You wouldn't possibly foresee that the heroine's greatest foe was indeed a simple mirror and. . . a toilet. You wouldn't dare imagine that the heroine was terrified to be alone by herself in her darkest moments because of the fear of what she would do to herself.
You wouldn't imagine that I, just a redhead, used to be the mirror&toilet-fearing redhead.
I'm 22 years old, and my fear of a toilet goes back about 6 (almost 7) years when I was turning 16. My fear of a mirror stems back for as long as I can remember. In fact, those who know me would have a hard time understanding that at a point in my life I had a hard time smiling because I wasn't sure I knew how to. I was probably 14 then.
I remember it vividly: I was 15 years old, sitting on our hand-me-down couch downstairs watching TV and one of those lifetime movies about bulimia came on. It has Calista Flockhart on it, who at the time was going through a lot of public skepticism if she actually had an eating disorder, so there was a slight bit of irony about her portrayal of this woman in the movie. I remember watching her and her best friend in college binge eat, throw it all up in the bathroom, then working out obsessively. Her friend died. I sat there staring and while I felt some sort of sadness for them I also felt a sense of relief. My thought literally was: ". . . does that really work? Could I really lose weight quickly doing that?" I tried it later that day.
I didn't stop trying on a daily (nee, hourly) basis until about 6 months ago. I didn't understand that that lifetime movie would pretty much crack through my fragile self-esteem and shine a light that I saw as hope but was actually going to quickly turn to pain and destruction.
I'll spare my readers (if any) the gory details, but suffice to say it escalated quickly, I lost about 30 lbs in 2 months, and I was up to purging 11 times a day. It was a sickness. I was pleased with the results I was seeing, and I loved the compliments I was getting, plus my new boyfriend at the time didn't seem to be bothered by my "new diet".
I was 16 years old when I thought about running my car off the road out of sheer hatred for myself. No matter what I did I was still the heaviest girl around, which of course meant I was the ugliest, which of course meant I was repulsive and worthless. I would never do anything in my life worth anything (despite being called to children's ministries recently) and no one would care if I was gone. I was nothing.
I read through what I just typed and my heart just breaks. I have tears rolling down my cheeks as I type and I say that because it's literally the grace of God that saved me. My heart hurts for that girl I used to be. I tried so hard to make things better myself- I got a Christian boyfriend at a Christian college, and it turns out I ended up compromising myself with him and crossing so many boundaries. My depression was out of control. I would spend days in my room wishing God would just kill me because I couldn't do it myself.
This isn't to get sympathy from anyone. This isn't to get "awww poor girl" from anyone, and it's not to make anyone feel like they need to treat me differently. It's so people understand me a little better. It's so people see how amazing God is. Actually it's all so people see how deep God's love really is for us. The fact that I kept shunning God for years and he still pursued me? How does one ignore that? How can you still want to die when the creator of the universe already died for you?
God told me to get out that compromising relationship when I was 20. I thought we were going to get married, and God had other ideas apparently.
A day doesn't go by that I don't thank God for that.
When I was "alone" (in the martial sense) I had to find myself and what she was like at 20 years old. I knew the me that had a boyfriend, but I wasn't sure who I was without one. I started dating him 3 months into college and being in my 3rd year of college, that's a lot of development that happened there. I look back on myself at 20 and look at myself now at 22, being single for almost 2 years (March 11th!!) and I want to cry again. God has been so amazing. My heart literally twitterpates at the thought of how different I am because of God.
Biggest shocker?
I love myself. I genuinely like myself. I see a worth in myself that I didn't know was there before. I haven't thrown up once in 2009 and prior to that I had thrown up 3 times since June. I'm not perfect. I'm growing. I'm changing on a daily basis. I fall and I trip and I bleed and I want to give up but the second my head starts to fall, God grabs my face and tilts it upward back to the proper point of focus. My God is bigger than my problems. He is bigger than bulimia, bigger than sexual sins, bigger than depression. My God has saved me and redeemed me in a way that I truly never thought was possible. In chapel at school sometimes I'll just stand there and weep because of God's love for me and how much He's done for me when I don't deserve it.
I deserve nothing, yet He's given me everything. In myself I fail miserably, but in Him I'm victorious. To myself and the mirror there's imperfection, but to my God, my Abba, I'm His beautiful girl: His masterpiece creation. My tears flow at this moment as a woman that's completely broken and in love with God and so grateful for the best friend and love she could ever experience.
"Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, who have confidence in Him and because of Him." Jeremiah 17:7
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