Wreck My Life Page 5

  The next thing I knew my legs were dragging me upstairs to the privacy of the jack-and-jill bathroom I shared with my sister. As if my body had a will of its own, I anxiously locked the door and rounded the corner behind the small knee-wall and hunched my tear-filled face over the shining toilet bowl.

  Get yourself together. Stop crying over a problem you brought on yourself.

  You know what you have to do. If you don’t, every one of those calories will destroy you.

  They’ll destroy your progress, your body, your beauty.

  Think of all the things you want.

  You lost control for a moment. Now gain it back.

  You know what you have to do. You can do it. I’m here for you.

  My hand trembled by my mouth as my last thread of responsibility and rationality fought to win this moment in my story. I didn’t have to do this. I wasn’t that girl. Girls who made themselves throw up had eating disorders. Certainly I wasn’t that weak. I tried to convince myself I could burn off the calories and get right back to watching what I ate and taking control of my intake. I tried to convince myself I knew better than this—to snap out of this twisted picture. But the house of mirrors around me seemed to sing a different tune, and before I knew it I was rationalizing my anxiousness away and reaching as deep into my throat as my fingers could.

  It wasn’t easy. The back of my throat felt sharp and sensitive and I had to shake my fingers around for my gag reflex to finally respond with an aggressive move. But after a moment of struggling I felt a thick, clogged warmth roll up my throat and my eyes streamed tears and my face felt like the pressure might make it explode. But there it came. All of my regret and anxiety rolled up out of my throat and splashed into the empty bowl. Again and again and again I pried until my body would toss up more food. The thickness of the half-chewed failure ached my throat and the pressure of the convulsions caused blood vessels in my eyes to burst. Finally, the sour burning of the stomach acid that was left stung my tongue and I stopped, exhausted, and cried. By the time I lifted my head and looked into the mirror my face was as red as my bloodshot eyes. Mascara streamed down my nose and splatters of vomit covered my cheeks. I sat down against the pale blue walls of my childhood bathroom and, between my confusion and self-disgust, stared into the full toilet and sighed in overwhelming relief. There it was. All I needed to see. As splattered and filthy and tearstained as it was, it was the regaining of my control. The wreckage felt like victory.

  Will You See Me?

  My anorexia had evolved into bulimia and my dark ownership of my body was nothing I talked about. It was simpler for a while. Binging and purging was a habit far easier to maintain than eating nothing at all. The discomfort wasn’t completely gone—hunger pains were simply replaced by an aching throat and a raw mouth from stomach acid purged out the wrong way. But I found a rhythm in my habit. I started to become bolder in where and how frequently I would find my way to a toilet to feel some control.

  You know, you could be doing more.

  If you want more, you need to be willing to give more.

  You have some control now, why not strive for more?

  Take more. Do more. Be better.

  Upward of ten times a day—that’s how often I found myself leaning over a toilet bowl or washing chunks of food down the shower drain or wiping my quivering, burning mouth. In my effort to control even more, my binging gradually evolved back to nibbling—even as I kept purging. Some days I would eat as little as an apple and purge shortly after. When my fingers could no longer stimulate my gag reflex, I started using objects. A toothbrush, the base of a hair brush, anything that would force me to vomit. Anything to get those calories out.

  Eventually, my body became so accustomed to pushing the food back up that I found I couldn’t even keep food down. I had conditioned my body to purge almost immediately—which would have been ideal had it not made hiding my secret tougher. I found myself fighting to stay seated at the dinner table long enough to dismiss myself rather than rushing off to the bathroom. Even when the little I’d eaten did roll back up, I’d choke it back and try to wait it out. Half of me was constantly nervous my parents were aware, and the other half of me was fiercely protective of the secret I refused to share.

  The calories my brain convinced me I still needed to burn had to be handled somehow. With my soccer career progressing and my desperate desire to continue excelling athletically, exercise became an absolute obsession. Summer found me working out close to six hours a day. Religiously, obsessively, I trained. Running constantly, lifting weights, sprinting stadiums, then repeating it all over again. With no fuel left in me, I turned to the next level of compromise—pills. Any dietary pill I could possibly take that would provide me with synthetic energy, I took. I moved through the entire display of fat-burning promises and muscle-building quick-fixes and energy-packed supplements that lined the drugstore shelves. I rationalized that I was focused and improving for my sport, but the truth was that success in the sport, at that point, was secondary to success in controlling my body—a welcome byproduct of my fixation, but no longer my motivating factor. My identity was owned by something different, something far more sinister than my goals and my successful feats. My identity was owned by a spiritual illness and physical disease that was slowly destroying me.

  I was obsessed. All-consumed. Methodical. A servant to any and every lie Satan sold and a victim of every twisted truth my mind perceived. The enemy refused to leave me be. No part of me had any energy left to fight the manic behavior that owned me. My mind could always whip up a fresh rationalization—one of a thousand reasons why my secret and my habits were helpful and beneficial and good. I had a new excuse for my fatigued heart every day. I was weak and broken and hurting and strained. But on the outside it looked as though I was succeeding in every way.

  Through all of the pain, the abuse of my body, the neglect and obsession, the lies and fixations, I found myself finally succeeding by society’s norms. In the midst of my mess, athletically I was excelling tremendously. I was finally selected onto the Regional Olympic Soccer team and began competing internationally in Sweden, Mexico, Germany, Austria, and Italy. In 2006 I was named a youth All-American by the Soccer Coaches Association of America. In 2007 I was named the Atlanta Journal Constitution Player of the Year. I broke every goalkeeping record at Lassiter High School and was finally invited to US National team training camps. On the entertainment side of things I won and placed in beauty pageants, including placing Top 15 in Miss Georgia Teen USA. I began fielding interest and pursuit from countless universities, and eventually signed a Division I college scholarship to LSU. I fielded new compliments of “how gorgeous” I looked, and garnered a one-on-one meeting with an executive at a prestigious international modeling agency. Relationally, I was suddenly becoming a person of interest in my high school halls and capturing the attention of the boys both in my grade and upperclassmen alike. And socially, I was suddenly finding myself more accepted and worthy of the popular crowd’s attention and time.

  All I had hoped to control was laid out before me. And every part of me truly believed that once I’d achieved these things I would be happy. Every person I met reminded me, looking at my incredible circumstances, that I was so lucky. Yet standing in the success of my self-centered sacrifice, all I felt was empty.

  I suppose we always figure that the benefits will outweigh the costs. We wouldn’t yearn for control or believe the countless lies or be more than willing to compromise if we didn’t truly believe it would all be worth something in the end. We begin with the end goal in mind. Then somewhere along the way the motivating factor shifts to become our pride. Scripture warns us that pride comes before a fall. Yet every time we lay in our own wreckage after the fall and wonder why we feel nothing at all. We think we know best what we want and what we need, yet our chapter of wreckage always ends in a slow bleed. And when we realize that what we thought we needed doesn’t satisfy, we crawl, in shame, back to the starting line. />
  There was never a specific moment where I stared myself down, acknowledged the severity of my eating disorder, and declared that it had to stop. I’m not sure I believed I could stop. I knew that I was sick and fiercely tired and desperate for some type of break. But I’m not sure I ever believed that was fully possible for me. After all, I knew my demons for three and a half years. I moved through all of high school wrestling lies and obsessions and rationalizations and fixations. My house of mirrors was my home. As mentally and emotionally and spiritually exhausted as I was, I had grown familiar with only ever seeing my own reflection. In a sick way, I felt safe in my condition.

  But at some point toward the end of my time in high school I stumbled across a piece of Scripture that simply read, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). I was set to graduate a semester early and head off to Louisiana State University to begin training with the soccer team in the spring and, for whatever reason, something in this tiny verse stirred something fierce inside of me. Aching and ill and dying for the promised rest, I turned for just a moment from my disease and found my way to my knees.

  My prayer was nothing fancy. It was cloaked in shame and frustration and apprehension. My words were desperate and raw and nothing I’d be proud to repeat. But they were all I could find in the midst of my suffering, and much to my surprise at the time, God’s grace gently found me.

  God, I can’t do this anymore. “Come to me, all who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” If that’s true, will you see me? I’ve tried so hard to control so many things. And I’m terrible at it. I’m tired. And I’m hurting. And I want nothing more than to be set free. If that’s even possible . . . will you see me, God? Will you see me?

  It’s hard to describe the courage that flooded me—the strength that found me in that blue-carpeted bedroom in our house at the end of our quiet street. I felt peace. And even though my hands still trembled and I had no idea what my next step was supposed to be, I knew, deep in my heart, there was a next step for me. I suppose I was gifted hope that night—a tiny breath of hope that healing was possible and that this bondage didn’t have the power to own me. Hope that there was something more than the shame of my suffering.

  A few moments later my mom walked into my bedroom to put away some laundry. My hands were sweating profusely and my heart was pounding, and once more I allowed the hot bulge in my throat to billow out of me. This time it wasn’t food I was releasing, it was truth—and it poured from me. I opened up to my mom about everything I had been doing, everything I had been hiding, and all of the damage I’d wreaked on my body and my heart for the past several years. I half-expected anger and frustration to well up within her, but was shocked when her tears met mine and a holy anguish flowed from her like grace and glory.

  She was stunned and heartbroken. But if she thought twice about allowing anger to play a part in her response, she never showed it. She met me with open arms of compassion I never could have expected, and she arranged for me to spend time with a nutritionist and counselor over the course of the next few months. Her love led me to slowly release the control-fueled resentments I held toward my dad, and her grace coaxed me into a place of slowly releasing the control-fueled relapses I’d wrestled with by myself. As I worked diligently to overcome my compulsions and addictions, she faithfully helped me to begin to navigate my new walk with Christ, subtly teaching me that the nutritionist and counselor could help, but if I desired true healing I had to set my own eyes on the Healer. Boldly helping me understand that an inherited faith wasn’t a faith I could trust.

  So with a gradually loosening grip on control and a determination for my college transition to turn a new page filled with hope, I limped into the first steps of my own walk with a King I still barely knew and made my way south to the wild Louisiana bayou.

  5

  The Suicide of Simple

  My parents and I rolled onto campus just in time for the start of spring semester in January 2008. Not only had I committed to play soccer at Louisiana State University, I had also worked to graduate high school a semester early and enroll in the spring instead of the usual fall start. I’m sure I seemed crazy, considering how physically grueling the off-season can be for a collegiate athlete, but I wanted to be present for an extra semester of fitness and training in the spring. Anything to get a leg up on the competition come fall. Choosing LSU hadn’t been hard, but it had been one of those unexpected and inexplicable decisions I’d never thought I’d make.

  The recruiting process while I was in high school had been competitive. Division I colleges from all across the nation had shown interest, sent letters, and invited me out for unofficial visits along the way. I was considered a top goalkeeper recruit for the Class of 2008—publications ranking me as one of the top six in the United States. To be honest, my ego loved the acknowledgment and the pursuit. The bigger the school, the bigger the program, the more I reveled in the letters I’d receive and the conversations I’d have with coaches. When I had to start really narrowing down my options, however, I first looked geographically. I knew I didn’t want to go to the West Coast because I wanted my mom and dad to be able to come to my games. I knew I didn’t want to go too far north either because there were few things I dreaded more than playing in the cold. So that left me juggling conferences and schools primarily in the southeast and, if you’ve been raised in the South, you know there are few things more storied and exciting than the SEC (in my opinion, at least).

  Out of all the Southeastern Conference schools showing interest in me, LSU sat at the bottom of my list. They recruited more enthusiastically than any other school, with personalized letters arriving in my mailbox every single day of the week, but in my eyes, on the soccer side of things they were one of the least decorated programs in the league. I knew they had just acquired a new coaching staff a few years prior and were working passionately to build the program, but I wasn’t convinced that the unfamiliar land of Louisiana was for me. In fact, my only perception of the swampy state had come several years prior when we took a family trip to New Orleans and I accidentally learned, at age ten, what a brothel was, and that apparently laws were a little different on this place called Bourbon Street. My poor parents. That was one vacation they probably wished we hadn’t gotten quite as “whimsically lost in the city” like we tended to do when we traveled. There was so much eye-shielding and fast-paced walking that, eventually, my sister and I just stared at the ground and acted like we couldn’t hear or see. I will say, though, that vacation introduced me to a hot, dark corner of Preservation Hall and some of the most intoxicating jazz music I’d ever heard. In considering LSU and the state of Louisiana, that muggy and magical memory always stood out to me.

  The Tigers’ persistence in recruiting paid off and my dad finally coaxed me into at least taking an unofficial visit to Baton Rouge. I reluctantly agreed and after an eight-hour trip we stepped out onto a campus that I couldn’t believe. From its tall, looming oak trees to the red tile roofs and Spanish architecture–inspired buildings, it was mesmerizing. It was enchanting. The athletic facilities were unlike anything I’d ever seen and the rich history of the sports legacies written into the fields and stadiums were captivating. The coaches didn’t need to say a word—LSU sold itself. Soccer may have been a less developed program there at the time, but I headed home to Georgia with a question posed to me: Did I want to join an already-storied program and be another average-sized fish in a big pond? Or did I want to rally behind a vision and belief, be a big fish in a small pond, and commit to helping grow a program’s history?

  Less than one week passed before I called up the coaches and verbally committed to play soccer for Louisiana State University.

  The First Few Steps of Faith

  Just over one year later, on a cool January day in 2008, I hugged my mom and dad goodbye and stood alone at the starting gate of my biggest step of faith.

  The college transition was in no w
ay easy. Eager to explore all that my new home had to offer, I was often consumed by the excitement and intensity of change. I stumbled, as many young freshmen do, in finding my identity and learning the ins and outs of my new routine. The newfound freedom was disorienting. Figuring out who I wanted to be in college was equally confusing—especially crawling out of such a private identity crisis in high school.

  Coming in a semester early, I didn’t have a specific class to identify with, either. There were a lot of athletic advantages to arriving in the spring, but a big disadvantage was that I didn’t have a built-in group of new teammates or classmates my age. At the start of a new school year, everyone understands new freshmen need to be oriented and given a chance to learn the ropes, but I landed smack in the middle of the school year and was a new kid on campus with no other new kids awkwardly navigating the transition alongside me. Most days it felt like drinking out of a fire hose—everything was intense and fast-paced. My suitemates were juniors, my teammates were all different ages and all over the place personality-wise, and my classmates were all well-adjusted to the study habits needed to survive college and the ins and outs of navigating their way around the university. As for me, I was none of those things. Everything was new—and seemingly worth trying.

  For a while I really struggled socially and behaviorally—and, often times, just plain sensibly. Once again, I didn’t concretely know who I was or who I was supposed to be. I was impressionable and gullible, willing to try whatever the group I was hanging out with was doing. Experimenting with alcohol was new to me, the freedoms of living on my own blindsided me, and the longing to find my niche once again pulled at my puppet strings. But while I may have stumbled and struggled to find my groove in some areas, there were a few avenues I channeled my discipline and focus toward in which I excelled tremendously. Regarding athletics, nothing could distract me.