Wreck My Life Page 4

  As much as my dad thrived in raising my sister and me as young kids, he struggled in raising us as teenage girls. I can’t say that I blame him. I was challenging to love. I was busy building grand plans for the course of my days in the sand of pride and praise while he was wrestling the pressures of providing for a fast-paced family, the difficulty of self-employment, and the emotional struggles and fixations he was a bit too prideful to acknowledge. We were so similar. Emotional and passionate. Stubborn and strong-willed. Dominant and controlling. As we wrestled for that relational control, we both seemed to lose it. And the casualties of that battle usually involved our hearts.

  The final thread of control I clung to so tightly wasted no time in unraveling. Socially, my journey looked nothing like I’d planned. I walked into high school at six feet tall and 165 pounds. I think I made it around a corner and past one set of lockers on the first day of school before I heard the first “Giant!” remark, coupled with some laughs and stares. “That’s a biiiiiig b**ch,” followed suit and, “Look at that huge girl!” seemed to quickly trail behind. If these whispered comments weren’t enough, the fact that I didn’t know a single person from any of the converging middle schools didn’t help. Many of my friends from my middle school seemed to already know and have established friend groups with kids from the other districts, but since soccer had always consumed most of my free time I’d never crossed paths with the majority of the teens in my freshman class.

  I longed to fit in with the popular group that was clearly forming, but no matter how hard I tried I always seemed to sit right on the outside. I was an acquaintance but not a close friend tied to any one group. I was the girl who people would hang with at school but never invite to the get-togethers on the weekends. Or if I was, my soccer commitments always conflicted. So eventually the phone stopped ringing.

  I wasn’t one of the girls all of the boys swooned over—I didn’t have all the newest fashions or know all the trends. I didn’t care to get dressed to the nines every day for school. I didn’t carry the absurd handbags some of the most well-liked girls toted around. I didn’t drive the Mercedes so many teens somehow whipped into our high school parking lot. I wasn’t the most beautiful, I wasn’t the most socially connected, and I wasn’t made to feel welcome by the upperclassmen like so many of the other freshmen seemed to be.

  I was just me. I tried, for a long time, to fit the mold of what seemed to be so well liked. I tried to stay in with the gossip of all that was going on and tried to make sure I was sitting with the right people in class and seen with the right people in the halls. I tried to hide my height and find my clique and blend with the social scene. But at the end of the day I was left feeling out of control and ultimately just not good enough.

  Identity Crisis

  We are creatures made to worship. But when we turn our focus from worshiping the Creator who made us to worshiping the blessings He’s given us, we construct self-made standards we force ourselves to live up to through our own strength and ability. It’s like praising the soccer ball for scoring a goal rather than acknowledging the coach who trained you how to properly kick it. It’s easy for our gifts or our talents or our skills to falsely shape part of our identity. And it’s easy to disappoint ourselves when we move through life with an identity rooted in such unidentifiable things. And, for some reason, we seem to be people who would rather place our hope in manmade autonomy than surrender our lives to a God-designed identity when that identity requires faith to believe.

  My biggest issue with certain things not playing out as I’d hoped was that I saw those same things as foundational to my identity. The wreckage that seemed to come wasn’t just wreckage of my plans or my success, it was wreckage of my self-concept. In my hope to control each thing perfectly, I was ultimately desperate to control my own emotional and mental construct of me. At that time, I needed something, anything, to be my thing.

  I craved ownership and autonomy so deeply that I was willing to do anything to find something to worship freely. The plans I’d built in the sand of pride and praise were sliding. The course I’d planned to walk was weaving and widening. As the control I craved slipped through my fingers, I did exactly what our anxious human nature convinces us we must do—I blindly strained and grasped for more.

  4

  A House of Mirrors

  It was in my desperate thirst for control that I first heard the enemy’s quenching lies. If there was one fundamental thing I had actually listened to and learned in church it was that there was an enemy. I guess what I didn’t fully understand was how keen and sly that enemy was, and how easily I could be deceived. What began as lending an ear to the curious thoughts of what I could still control developed into a spiritual illness that owned my manic days.

  It wasn’t as if my wrecked fixation developed overnight—eating disorders never do. No, it was much more gradual than that, like a stew slowly coming to a boil. The ingredients were all there: lies I believed from my past, frustration and control issues in the present, insecurities and anxiety about the future. It all began as a slow simmer—a need for ownership over something. Before I knew it, my obsession boiled over and burned every aspect of my life.

  Liar, Liar

  If God is said to speak in a still, small voice, then Satan’s wrecking words are like guttural screams through a megaphone. They were all I could hear, and they grew louder and louder with each passing day.

  Failure.

  Fraud.

  Not beautiful enough.

  Not talented enough.

  Not smart enough.

  Too big.

  Too thick.

  Too different.

  For a while I had enough fight in me to ignore them. After all, I lived a blessed life full of potential and provision. All of my needs were met and I was well loved. I had my health, my education, opportunity. On paper, I should have been the girl who was strong enough and well enough off to pull herself up by her bootstraps and press on. I even felt guilty, at times, when the lies rang through my thoughts and I allowed them to dent and scratch my blessed armor. I had known a youth full of affirmation and encouragement and achievement. I shouldn’t have been the one wrestling with these things. I wasn’t that kind of lonely, broken girl. I was me.

  But Satan never discriminates when he targets and teases. He could care less about who I was. What he always sees first is easy targets in the unguarded weak. Even with all the support in the world around us—an armor built thick and sturdy through our own personal strength—it takes the supernatural equipment of a King who’s already won the war to stand a chance in the personal attacks and battles of the enemy’s deceit.

  Confident? Capable? You’re not even strong enough to control the few things you planned to.

  Look around you. Where do you even fit? You have tension in your home, you have tension with your teammates, you have tension in the school’s social scene.

  You’re so desperate—pining for things you’ll never achieve.

  You’ll never have control over something because you’re too weak to sacrifice anything.

  You’re just too weak.

  The constant words grew in such intensity and frequency that eventually I came to believe they were my own thoughts. They disguised themselves as the brutally honest voice inside of me and I began to adopt them as my own insecurities. In the times I would allow my mind to wander, it always seemed to return with new lies from the enemy. Lies I began to allow to sculpt me—to reshape my worth, my confidence, my stability.

  I became fixated with my own insecurities and obsessed with my weaknesses and failings. No matter how many successes or positives surrounded me, I was colorblind to the hues of their beauty. Negative thoughts stole my joy and dragged me back into the gray area of uncertainty. With each new thought I failed to take captive and let wander like an intruder within me, it was like another mirror rose up around me, and before I knew it I felt like I was in a house of mirrors. Surrounded on all sides by a warped reflect
ion of myself, all I could see was me. My life, my wants, my flesh, my needs. My failures, my inadequacies, my discomfort, my insecurities.

  I think it’s one of the enemy’s greatest tactics, really. To provoke us to becoming so fixated with our own thoughts and wants that we are blind to the world around us. If we’re being honest, it doesn’t take much to coax us into a house of mirrors by making us believe that we are solely responsible for controlling our own lives—and that we must do it perfectly. These lies take us by the hand and walk us into a maze of self-obsession and self-absorption where all we can see is ourselves. They lure us away from a healthy perspective of the world around us and invite us into an all-consuming isolation that is blind to reality. How can we possibly see clearly, much less set our eyes on anything greater, when we are surrounded by mirrors that only ever reflect our own skewed needs?

  There is something you can control.

  That taunt came as swiftly as a second breath from the lips of deceit. It’s never enough to simply torment our heads and our hearts—Satan always takes it a step further and disguises a lie as a tempting reprieve from the suffering. And as much as I knew it was wrong, the thought of finding something—anything—to be my thing was appetizing. I hadn’t lost my taste for control, just my will to stand uncompromised morally.

  Of all things, you can control your body.

  You don’t have to be the huge girl. The giant.

  Taking control of your body would help with everything: athletically, in entertainment, socially.

  All of the ways you fall short revolve around your body.

  And it’s yours, after all. So do with it what you please.

  There was something enticing about the shards of broken truth that framed that self-centered lie. It was my body. And, of all things, that was something nobody else had more exclusive access to than me. If I could better control my body, I could force it to fit a mold more suited to the things I wanted to achieve. Sure, it might be uncomfortable at times. Nobody said the process of control was pretty. But I had the tendencies of an athlete ingrained in me and I was used to pushing myself past my comfort zone to achieve what others couldn’t do for me. If I ever wanted to gain anything, I had to be willing to sacrifice something. Whatever that may be. If anyone was going to suffer from the sacrifice I needed to make, it might as well be me.

  That was where my illness began. From the toxin of lies came the self-prescribed antidote of compromise. What eventually grew out of that was a vigilante attitude of controlling my life and my body to such an extreme degree that nobody else would have any reason to be disappointed in me or think less of me. If I could control my body, I could control something. And if that control ultimately benefitted me, then it was worth whatever sacrifice or discomfort it brought me. Nobody would have to know. No, this would be my thing. If I could hide the struggle well enough, it would make the success that followed seem as though it came naturally. That perception of ease was important to me—to my ego, my pride, and my deeply insecure need for praise and worth and affirmation.

  I had already been exposed to so many things that served to reinforce the lie that my body defined my worth. Pornography. Movies. Magazines. Advertisements. TV. It was impossible to go anywhere without some cultural reinforcement that a woman’s true power and value came from her exterior beauty. It wasn’t just national media reinforcing that message—I had a face-to-face reminder of it every single day as I walked through the halls at school. The most popular and well-liked girls always seemed to be well-toned, well-developed, well-tanned, and impeccably dressed. Their beauty was coveted and gawked at and chased and praised by girls and guys alike. It seemed to come with the territory—a requirement of sorts—that to “fit” with the most popular crowd, your beauty had to precede you. Or the “beauty” trending that semester, at least. To a girl who longed to have all that she didn’t, that power was worth compromising anything. So, with all things considered, I stepped further into my house of mirrors and wandered deeper into my disoriented suffering.

  Losing Control

  It’s not as though I spent my first days hunched over a toilet with my fingers down my throat and bloodshot eyes. No, my struggles began much more subtly than that. It began as daily, cognizant decisions to control the small choices. I watched what foods I picked to eat and the size of my portions. I watched how frequently I was exercising or how much energy I’d seemed to have exerted at soccer practice. My habit of eating larger portions was hard to break, but there was something in the hunger pains that soothed me.

  I started to feel better if I was acutely aware that my body was aching for more. In my mind, if my body was always slightly hungry, then that was a sure sign I was never overindulging. If I wasn’t overindulging, then my body was being forced to burn away some of the stored fuel and fat I was carrying. When I didn’t feel like I had burned enough calories at practice, I would tag an extra workout onto that day’s schedule. Small equations always seemed to creep into my mind, balancing out what I had eaten and what I suspected I’d burned off. The hunger pains weren’t ideal, but they were manageable. I reveled in managing them closely. It was comforting to know that I was controlling my will. Craving but not caving in to what my body and brain desperately needed.

  Eventually, the rush I got from controlling my hunger and seeing the slow changes in my body coaxed me to even more drastic extremes. Not only was I watching, more religiously, the types and amounts of foods I was eating but I also began to watch people around me make their food choices. Observation turned to comparison and comparison turned to judgment. I was oddly jealous of those around me who seemingly had the willpower to make more disciplined, constraining food choices than I did and oddly resentful of those who seemed to pay no mind to what they consumed. Perhaps a part of me longed for their freedom—but a bigger part of me grew in silent bitterness and disdain for those who were weaker and less disciplined than I was learning how to be.

  My changed behavior seemed to only tighten the tension at home with my dad. Food was his vice. That was no mystery. For a man who found great comfort and enjoyment in eating, my newfound nibbling seemed to frustrate him to no end. My attitude toward his excessive eating didn’t help, and the deeper I sunk into my disorder the more expressive I became in my judgment of his choices.

  My competitive nature only seemed to fuel my issues. I was developing an unhealthy relationship with food, one that first grew out of an unhealthy relationship with my own body. Which first grew out of an unhealthy relationship with my body’s own Creator. That relationship was as starved and aching as my shrinking frame.

  My hunger pains were gripping and my headaches were increasing and fatigue was always present. But if I could ignore the pain in my growling stomach long enough to fall asleep at night, the rush of success I would feel the next morning made the new day’s battle seem worth it.

  Desperate for even more control, I began a daily log. Whatever I ate, I wrote down. Every physical activity or workout or practice, I charted. I became fixated with the numbers and indulged in equations to keep track of my discipline: calories consumed minus calories burned. Every day was a new competition. Defeating each hunger pain was a small battle won, and making it through an entire day without cracking or caving was the ultimate victory. The smaller the resulting numbers became in the equations, the larger my pride and my sense of control grew. I rationalized that I was simply a health-conscious eater—I was a competitor and an athlete, and all great champions made sacrifices in their strides toward greatness.

  But as my body struggled, my athletic performance followed suit. When my lack of energy caught up with me in training sessions and I couldn’t quite push through like I used to, my anxious emotional state became even more fragile. Fragile enough that, finally, one day biology overrode my will and I spiraled even further out of control.

  I can remember all of the mental and emotional torment so clearly. I cracked. And binged. Standing in the narrow pantry of my childhood home,
I ate and I ate and I ate. My stomach cramped and ached in shock, but I just couldn’t stop. I ate anything I could get my hands on until I’d scraped that pantry empty—and then I moved to the fridge. My mind went numb as I gorged myself with food and mentally satiated every nagging hunger pain I’d wrestled with for months. In the moment it was euphoric. Like an addict finally getting a long-awaited fix, I reveled in the food-induced high. But it didn’t take long, once I finally slowed to a stop, for the high to fade and my thoughts to creep back as I sat bloated and defeated and wracked with self-disgust.

  Fat.

  Glutton.

  You weak, weak woman.

  You’ll be just as fat as you ever were.

  All that you’ve sacrificed and all that you’ve worked for is lost.

  You thought you had control? You’re pathetic.

  You can’t control a thing. You failed. You slob.

  You’ll end up looking just like your father—his size is in your genes, after all.

  If you don’t make this right, you’ll never be good enough.

  Satan’s adaptability to the specifics of our circumstance is unrelenting. I couldn’t win. The lies would appear one way for one season of thought and morph into another way for the next. There was never a moment of reprieve. It’s as if the enemy is bitter that he doesn’t have the power to create or bring life, like the King of all kings, and his only hope is in his ability to copy or mimic or camouflage himself in the midst of our suffering. If we’re not aware of this tactic and prepared for this strategy, it becomes so easy to believe anything and everything.