I was always told that I am beautiful and that it shines from the inside out by my parents, friends, and strangers but after I got into middle school I stopped believing that I was beautiful. I started to see the imperfections that were pointed out by other girls and I started to see that the body that God created in his imagine, the body that he knit together in my mother’s womb, the daughter he made needed to be fixed. That started a journey that I have been on for the past 6 years.
In middle school I was bullied. I’ll admit that I brushed it off as not being bullied because the people who were bulling me were my friends and friends weren’t supposed to hurt you. After my 6th grade year I ended up transferring schools because we moved to a new house. Immediately I was popular because I was the “new girl”. I loved the attention since the last year was spent getting barely any from a school where I had only a few people I was actually friends with. So I was grateful to have gained a friend group and they took me under their wing as we started the new year. I felt good and I felt like I finally belonged, until I started to get some attention from some of the guys in my grade. My new friends didn’t like that I was becoming closer with the guys that they liked so instead of telling me, I was told that they wouldn’t like me because I wasn’t pretty enough. I was told I wasn’t skinny enough, that my eyes were ugly, and that my hair was too puffy. Now being the new girl and wanting to keep the friends that I just made, I accepted it and I would take any other comments they threw at me.
Over my 7th grade year I started to see my body as an enemy that was causing me to be bullied. So I decided to fix the problem myself, halfway through the year I stopped eating my lunch. What 7th grade me was blinded to was that it was ok for a young teenage girl to gain weight because it meant her body was going through puberty which was healthy. As I gained weight I realized that not eating lunch was enough to “fix” the problem. I cut back on the number of snacks and I would skip breakfast every once and awhile. The thing you should know about me is that I like to hide and bury my pain or heart aches so that I don’t burden others with it. I kept my bullying issues and me not eating lunch a secret from my parents and only some of my friends knew but I made it seem like it wasn’t an issue so that I could continue on this path of becoming prettier. By 8th grade I straighten my hair every morning, I wore the clothes that I thought were able to hide my body, and I wasn’t eating breakfast or lunch. My stomach would hurt so badly when I got home that I would eat tons of snacks, then I would eat dinner, go to sleep, and start the day feeling awful for eating so much. As you can see it became a cycle, and the real enemy Satan got ahold of my thoughts. I still remember feeling so fat after going to a friend’s house and eating loads of pizza that I chose to not eat for 3 full days to make up for it. By the third day of not eating anything I doubled over in pain in my chorus class. I was sent to the councilors office and my dad was called in to talk about “the things I was dealing with”. I was mortified. It caused me to draw even deeper into secrecy so that I would never be embarrassed like that ever again.
The first couple years of high school, I focused more on my relationship with God and asked him to guide me and show me what true beauty was and not the beauty of this world. I grew closer with him over my freshman and sophomore year but then the big terrible junior year came. I was always told that junior year is the hardest year of high school; I never believed them because I was in level classes so I didn’t have to worry. However, junior year was the toughest year for me because I ended up with a lot of loss throughout the year, instead of worrying about college and grades, I worried about the loss of control or the continued bullying that didn’t come from my friends anymore but from the seed that Satan planted in me so long beforehand. In October, I lost a dear childhood friend and shortly after that I lost my sweet puppy. I felt so saddened by the losses but I knew there was nothing I could so I tried to lean on God for healing although my thoughts about my body ended up making me feel like I wasn’t worthy of him healing my heart. As the new year just started, I ended up having yet another loss come into my life, my grandfather passed away. When I came back from the funeral I felt so angry at God for making me go through all of this pain. I hated that I had lost control over my emotions and the only thing I thought to do was push all my emotions down so that other people wouldn’t see my pain and I wouldn’t feel the same embarrassment I had experienced in the councilors office in 8th grade.
I shoved my feelings down and then I went into summer with a hurting heart. At my summer camp with my church, I opened up to my small group leaders about the pain and anger in my heart towards God and thankfully they opened my wounded heart back up to receive God and accept the calling that he had for me in the next year by coming on the Race. I went into senior year with a healed heart from loss but it was still broken from the loss of control. I went back into the mind set of, “I cannot control what happens to me but I can control what I look like.” So I kept on cutting back on the amount of food I ate and I started exercising more to accelerate the process of losing weight. Although in the spring of my senior year I started losing weight a lot faster than I had intended. I was dropping on the scale and even though I knew that I shouldn’t be losing this much weight, Satan was still attacking me, telling me that I was getting to my goal weight, that I shouldn’t worry to just let it keep happening. I ended up accepting those thoughts and bragging that I had been losing weight but what I didn’t realize was that it was a cry for help. Every time I would tell my family or friends that I lost yet another pound they would tell me to eat more or go to the doctor but I never got the answer that I craved. I wanted to be called beautiful, that since you could see my hip bones and that on a “good day” you could count my ribs, that I had finally achieved the goal Satan placed in my head. I hated feeling this way but I couldn’t escape it. The thoughts always followed me everywhere I went. My mom took me to the doctor after hearing my concerns from losing the weight and just not feeling like myself, it turns out that I had mono and chronic fatigue which explained my extremely fast weight loss which was increased from my diet and exercise and why I would become exhausted even more than I already was.
When I heard that part of me was relieved because I knew I wouldn’t have to tell anyone about me being anorexic and the other part of me was so scared because I knew that I could continue to use this excuse to not eat as much since I was sick. My heart was screaming from pain and sadness but my head was telling it to shut up and everything was going as planned. I didn’t know where to turn and as training camp for the race came up I asked God to help me, to just give me freedom. The summer came and went and I ended up in Albania faster than I thought I would be. Being on the farm made me just feel worse about my body because I kept losing control over and over again. Relationships were lost and things seemed to spiral down around me without a stopping point in sight. We went to debrief and as I sat with Jesus just calling out to him for answers he told me, “You need to tell them. You have to or else you’ll end up getting worse and you will be sent home.” I sat in my bed and cried at those words that shook me to my core. The Mission trip God called me to would be taken away from me if I didn’t open up to my group about my struggles with anorexia. So we came back and after working up the courage to speak, I told my team through my painful tears that I had been struggling with anorexia for so long and what Jesus had told me. The thoughts of judgement and condemnation that Satan put in my head were whipped away by the love my team showed me. After telling them God told me that it was time to talk to my parents and my leaders. I have never felt so loved and cared for by so many people. Over the last month and a half, I have pressed further and further into God’s presence, and each day he heals my heart more and more. Each time I feel Satan coming back to hurt me with horrible thoughts, I begin opening up to some of my team mates and my squad coach telling them what he has said and letting them speak life into me, canceling out all the things that tried to plant themselves in me again. I have seen the blockage that was in my heart be torn down from the love that is poured into me every day.
I know that this must have been a shock to most people but it’s not something that I am willing to hide anymore. God has told me that hidden secrets need open healing. So I am opening up to the world about my struggles I’ve dealt with since 7th grade which terrifies me. I am not asking you to take on this burden because I am believing and seeing that I won’t have it for much longer. That God is going to heal my broken heart because I have now fully given it over to him to piece back together. I won’t say that it has been easy because it sure as heck hasn’t. I have wished that I could go back to the days when it was just me and my brokenness but God knew that a single person could not heal on their own, that’s why he places people in our life to help lift us up, love us, speak LIFE into our minds/hearts, to point us back to our loving father who picks up the pieces.
During one of my quiet times God showed me a picture of me playing soccer (which is funny because when I did I was the kid who sat and picked flowers from the field) as he cheered me on. I saw other people standing on the sidelines yelling about all the things the team did wrong, but our father, our loving father ran down the sideline with me. He rejoiced when I fell and got back up, he was there leading me in the right directions, and he was screaming “that’s my precious daughter! I am so incredibly proud of my beautiful baby girl!”. He told me that those other people yelling about the things that I was doing wrong was Satan trying to pull me down but God was there the whole time I was running and playing the game. God isn’t going to leave your side when you are hurting. No matter how deep, painful, or even how long you have been struggling with something, God wants to give you freedom. He yearns for the day when you just place your heart in his hands and give him the chance to piece it back together, giving you complete freedom from whatever it may have been.
Let God be the one to piece you back together and let him run alongside you, cheering you on the whole time. So there is my story, I’m not done healing yet but I am obeying God and I’m letting him take my heart. My hidden secrets have received open healing.
The open healing didn’t come easily. God had to put me on the race and speak clearly to have me recognize that healing needed to happen. I knew that the race would change me but I never expected something like this. Where God used the quiet farm and the time we had there to open up my heart. I didn’t think that the race would be apart of bringing me so close to God as I am now. I see him in the faces that surround me so far from home. My team has never given up on me no matter how much I tell them about my past they are always willing to listen and speak life into me. I know that I wouldn’t be able to have started the healing I have received without the race. It has been the hardest thing I have ever done (I’m only on month 4!) but I would not trade this journey for anything.
