Before and After

Tonight I’m feeling sad. It’s not the sobbing-until-I-can-no-longer-breathe-through-my-nose kind of sadness – good thing for Gracie, because she never knows quite what to do with my emotional breakdowns. This is more of a thoughtful sadness of spirit as I reflect on a year gone by.

My hair is very thin. I’m afraid to look at myself when it’s wet because I can see then just how thin it is. This physical response to the stress and malnutrition and chaos of recent months has caused me to reflect on the time…the lost time, the painful time, the dark time.

I’m sad for many months of depression, lost joy, and all the hours wasted chasing down a slippery number that doesn’t even exist.

I’m sad because I decided one year ago to wean off of Zoloft and I’m sad because it didn’t work and because life unraveled for a while  and getting back to where I was is a slow process.

It’s natural to be sad about these things, and to feel like it’s all my own fault for trying to go off the medicine.

Many times I’ve questioned why I made what I view as a bad decision, and wished I hadn’t. None of this ever would have happened, then. But it wasn’t a bad decision, really; it was simply something I wanted to try, and it didn’t work. Like, at all.

My reasons for attempting it don’t seem hardly as compelling now as they did. However, God is sovereign over all things, even my own choices. His reasons are the ones that matter.

Tonight, I have no clear idea what those might be. I’m simply writing to unburden a heavy heart and move forward. I am writing to awaken hope and faith that God is able to repay me for the years the locusts have eaten.

“Before them the land is like the garden of Eden, behind them, a desert waste” – how easy it has been for me to wring my hands over losing my Before: before the horrible SSRI withdrawal symptoms, the depression and OCD and anorexia. Albeit a relatively brief relapse, to me the ground lost seems great. (And comparison never helps.)

But -

“Be not afraid…for the open pastures are becoming green.” 

I certainly wasn’t completely inculpable in all that happened; I did make some very bad choices knowing full well that they were. It’s proper to reflect soberly on the consequences. Yet God restores.

He allows humbling seasons, painful seasons, but after, he brings back life.

Joel 2:3, 23, 25 

Playing Red Rover with E.D.

A few nights ago while walking Gracie, I thought about Red Rover. Remember, that game from elementary school? I thought about it because I watched Gracie trot through a patch of clover. This reminded me of several violation letters I’d sent that week to homeowners with “spreading clover” in their yards; and that led me – quite naturally, I believe – to the phrase “clover taking over”.

And what rhymes with “clover” and “over”? “Rover”! And thus, I ended up contemplating the game Red Rover. You’d get two lines of kids facing each other, joining hands. One side would choose a player from the opposite side to attempt to break through their line, and yell in unison, “Red Rover, Red Rover, send GERTRUDE RIGHT OVER!!”

Chosen Gertrude would then thunder across the playground and try to break through a link in the enemy chain. She’d choose the link she deemed weakest, two kids holding hands who didn’t look strong enough to withstand her force. If she did break through, Gertrude chose someone from the enemy line to take back to her side. The strongest one, of course. If she didn’t, she was added to the enemy line.

It was a game of 6-year-old strategy – a balancing act. Should you call the hulking, red-faced kid, on the hope that you’d withstand his brute strength and add him to your team? Or should you call the diminutive, pig-tailed girl just to increase your numbers? The team with the most members at the end of the game won.

Somehow this clover-over-rover thought train led me to compare Red Rover to my eating disorder recovery. I thought about how a few days earlier I’d commented on a fellow blogger’s post, both of us agreeing that even after we concluded living with ED was hell, neither of us were able to simply “throw it away”.

It seems like it should be so easy: you hate it, so stop it. JUST EAT. JUST STOP.
But recovery is far from being that quick or simple. For some, maybe – but not for me.

Like a lot of eating disorder sufferers, my brain thinks only in black and white. So it was natural for me to tell myself, “OK – from here on out, perfection. Starting tomorrow, I will never binge again. I will eat perfectly, I will eschew all cookies, I will run on the elliptical, I will lose 5 pounds, feel pure, and stay that way forever”.

Um…..no.

Recovery for me has been more like a years-long game of Red Rover between Healthy Me and my eating disorder. Sometimes E.D. has more on his team, sometimes I have more on mine. Sometimes it seems like E.D. has ALL the strongest kids on his team, and he’s just recapturing pieces of me at his leisure. It’s laughably easy for him – he doesn’t even have to try, really. He’s so intimidating, my team gives up without even putting up a fight.

E.D.’s players all know the weakest links in my chain of defense. I realized that to beat him, I have to be careful which one I take on, and when.

I love to bake. I have a major sweet tooth. Lately I keep falling into the same trap. “I’m strong enough to have cookies in the house.”

Woops. Turns out I’m not. E.D. took back a piece of my confidence. Then he went straight for the weakest player on my team:

RED ROVER, RED ROVER! SEND HEALTHY BODY IMAGE ON OVER!

Yeah…I think you can guess how well that went.

But I’m back in the lead now. So if you’re reading this, and you can relate, be encouraged. You don’t have to throw E.D. away all at once. In fact, you probably can’t. Don’t try to take on what you’re not strong enough for right now. Recovery is a game of strategy. Make smart moves, and you can win.

Good Hungry

On a recent Monday as I left work on my way home for lunch, I realized something wonderful: I was hungry!

This wasn’t the hungry that feels like a metal ball in my gut
Or the kind that numbs my brain

Or the hungry that encompasses my entire body, that feels like my mouth is a starting gate at Churchill Downs and my appetite is a racehorse ready to run and never stop as soon as it opens.

It wasn’t the hungry that screams even louder knowing it will be ignored.

This was good hungry.

My hunger/fullness cues had been suppressed by several months of starvation-level dieting punctuated by binges that left me curled in on myself in agony. Rebuilding my recovery again was confusing because half the time, I didn’t know why I was eating:

Was I really eating in response to physical hunger, or was I only eating because I thought I SHOULD be hungry?
Was I eating just to be eating?
Or out of fear that I would be restricting if I didn’t?

Most of the time, my stomach felt neutral – not empty, not full. Not satisfied, but not dissatisfied. Interpreting my behavior seemed impossible, and I constantly questioned my motives.

So that moment of clarity between my body and my mind, when I recognized legitimate, real hunger – that felt good.

My body had known what to do with the calories I’d given it after all. It wasn’t a freak of nature that did not respond normally to food. I could eat and not gain and gain and gain forever.

Worst fear NOT confirmed!

My body was now clearly communicating its needs, and at the right time – lunch time. I probably took a skip or two on my way to the car, knowing that I, without guilt or confusion, could go home and eat honey-toasted peanut butter on soft whole wheat bakery bread, a candy-striped honeycrisp apple and carrot sticks. And I could – and did – stop when I was satisfied.

And if I could do it today, I could do it again. And again, and again. I could trust my body, and I could trust myself.

But most importantly, I could trust my faithful God to bring me back to a place of health, to once more set my feet in a spacious place.

I enjoyed every bite of that peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I loved it so much, I refused to share any of it with Gracie.

Luckily, Gracie loves carrot sticks almost as much as she loves me.

*Aw!*

How I Feel vs. What I Am

Digging through my catch-all drawers over the weekend (with the goal of actually being able to use them for clothes – haha!) I unearthed these pieces of my recovery past. Though from several years ago, it hurts to read them because I don’t have to travel too far down into myself to find the same feelings still jabbing my spirit:

It’s not hard to see why that girl felt crushed and vulnerable under the weight of life, with a mental megaphone booming self-hatred in the background.

To me, this is a picture of shame.

Then, I found this:

Regardless of how I feel about myself, the bottom line is:

I am loved.

Regardless of what other people say or see or think, my own mistakes, my humanness, my circumstances, my appearance -

I am loved.

Those old anti-Meredith tapes of mine became CDs. They grew with me. They didn’t go away. Instead they ran and ran and ran, seamlessly from year to year, cutting deep tracks, until they became white noise in my spirit that I hardly noticed.

I encourage you to write your own list. Listen, transcribe. Bring your darkness into the light.

Then write your own bottom line:

YOU ARE LOVED.

Your list doesn’t define you. Your feelings don’t define you.

The love of Christ defines you.

This love is wider, longer, higher, than your feelings can reach; it runs deeper than any grooves of pain.

His is the love that will deliver you from yourself.

As Strong as…as a Very Weak Horse!

Recovery stinks sometimes. It stinks when you look completely normal – even skinny – to the people around you, but you see Pudge in the mirror. You cringe when you drive over a pot hole and feel Jiggle. The angle under your chin isn’t as sharp as it was a week ago. You hate getting dressed because you feel your body filling out your clothes.  When people say you’re nuts for thinking you’re too big or you’ve gained weight, you think they’re nuts if they can’t see what you’re talking about.

It’s no use trying to make anyone understand why your mind recoils so violently at the idea of taking up space in the world, why it’s such an awful feeling when your stomach touches your shirt.

Days like this, when recovery Really Stinks, call for undiluted I Love Lucy Therapy. On bad body image days, I pop in one of my favorite episodes, “The Diet”. In this episode Lucy makes the horrible discovery that she weighs not 110 but 132 pounds and sobs (reference above image), “I walked into this room weighing 110 – I now weigh 132! That’s 22 pounds in 10 minutes!”

Feel that way all the time, Lucy.

“I’m nothing but a BIG BLoated Bunch of BLUbber!”

Yep.  That too.

But being “plump” doesn’t keep Lucy from auditioning for Ricky’s nightclub act. I love watching Lucy try to fit in with the other dancers by rolling up her pants and shirt and pulling her collar down over her shoulders, and I love it not least because Lucille Ball isn’t skinny. Beautiful, but not thin.

I start to feel a little better.

Now Lucy is clomping frantically around her apartment in frumpy sweats trying to lose 12 pounds in four days, in order to fit into her size 12 costume for the number. (Note: size 12, not size 00. And even given the shift in women’s dress sizes since the 1950s, that’s still, I believe, a pretty normal size.)

After Lucy collapses into a chair, Ethel hoists her onto the scale and exclaims with glee, “Another 5 ounces!!”

Dinner for Lucy that night consists of a stalk of celery on a plate, which Lucy bitterly slathers with steak sauce. Finally she resorts to sitting hours in a “human pressure cooker” (steam cabinet) to roast off the needed pounds.

Perhaps it’s seeing my weight-loss obsession distilled into 20 minutes of ridiculousness that cheers me up so much. After all, that’s what it is: ridiculous.

When I’m laughing at Lucy starving and exercising and cooking herself until she can barely stand, I’m really laughing at myself. Of course eating disorders aren’t funny: they’re deadly. Because I’ve been on a feeding tube myself I will be the last person to make fun of that struggle. But having come through the worst of my own disorder, it helps me to laugh at E.D.

On recovery days when E.D. tells me that panic at 1-pound weight gain is fully justified or saying no to a cookie will actually make a difference on the scale – those are the days when the eating disorder needs to be put in its place. Those lies are Plain Silly. (One pound – really, E.D.?!) After all, life is too important, too much fun, too short to waste time running laps and eating celery and “going down to the corner bakery and smell the bread” without tasting any of it.

The Lie says I am strong, I am powerful, because I can say No, because I can make my body obey me and stifle appetite. Really, though, I am only, as Lucy tries to assure Ethel when she stumbles dazed out of the human pressure cooker, “as strong as…as a very weak horse!”

Which isn’t strong at all.

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. ~ 2 Corinthians 12:9-11

Worth It?

Tonight I’m writing to my sick, terrified 22-year-old anorexic self.
I can see her on the airplane to inpatient treatment in Arizona. I remember her fears and questions and the lies battling for her mind:

I don’t feel “bad enough” to be going inpatient.

What if I end up relapsing?

But…it could take a *long* time to do this alone…

I don’t think I can do it by myself…

But I’ll have to gain weight –

And what if I can’t stop eating once I start?

I can’t give up my eating disorder because without it I have no self-control.

But my heart beat feels strange and I can’t feel my left leg…What if something happens?

Once I’m back in the real world, I’ll probably just let myself get fat –

What if recovery isn’t worth it?

Lately my posts have reflected more discouragement and anxiety than joy, so now, from 5 years down the line, I want to assure that girl on the airplane:

Yes, recovery will be worth it.

Everything is worth losing for the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus – even the things I consider “to my profit”. (Philippians 3:8)

My sick mind did consider anorexia to my profit. I believed it was too hard to let go – and too important.

I can’t function without anorexia. It’s who I am. It’s what I’m good at! It makes me feel safe…

I consider it rubbish…

If I let go of my eating disorder, I won’t have anything left. I’ll be empty…

…that I may gain Christ…

But I don’t know where I am in life…without my eating disorder I’ll be totally lost!

…And be found in Him…

But without my eating disorder, I’ll be out of control…

…By the power that enables him to bring everything under his control…

Everything?

Everything.

To anyone reading, if you are that girl, asking the same questions, wanting freedom even as you count the number of almonds you put in your oatmeal (made with water, never milk),

Recovery is hard. It is uncomfortable, sometimes painful, sometimes humbling, confusing, and frustrating. But I want you to believe me that it is not only worth it, but possible through him who allows us to share in his resurrection from the dead.

“Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already been made perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.” (Philippians 3:12)

In the Process of Time

I didn’t mean to skip that meal. I mean, not at first I didn’t. But afterwards, I loved the familiar good feeling. Especially when I weighed myself the next morning. I may not be in control of the drama at work or really much else in my life, but at least I know I’m not getting fat. The number on the scale was like a comforting hug.

When does it end, I wonder? Was missing one meal such a huge deal? Probably not…but it cracks open that door again I’m trying to hold shut. I keep thinking I’m past this, but sometimes eating disorder recovery feels like walking the wrong way on an escalator. Every step I take towards the end of this Valley, mechanical forces of thought negate it, relentlessly pulling me straight back: You can’t eat that you can’t weigh this you must burn that look like this fit into those…  Several nights ago, my dad said, “I’m sure you wish you never had another eating disorder thought ever again”. I said, “yeah…” and then cried. Because I do. I love this excerpt from Part II of Pilgrim’s Progress; John Bunyan knew most of us have our own particular troubling monsters:

The monster, you must know, had his certain Seasons to come out in, and to make his Attempts upon the Children of the people of the Town; also these Seasons did these valiant worthies watch him in, and did still continually assault him; insomuch that in the process of time he became not only wounded but lame, also he has not made that havoc of the Townsmen’s Children as formerly he has done. And it is verily believed by some, that this Beast will die of his Wounds. ~Pilgrim’s Progress, Part II

Recovery isn’t like flipping a switch. It’s a faithful watching for the monster and not forgetting about him in his “off-season”. The times he shows himself again – like the skipped meal earlier this week – are not discouraging setbacks but opportunities for me to assault him, if I’m ready. Recovery and healing from eating disorders – or from any persistent struggle, thorn or sin – comes with many battles. Otherwise I might be tempted to think I had removed my own thorn in the flesh, that I am Great-heart. It’s just as easy to forget about the One Greater-than-my-heart as it is to forget about the monster when he’s gone.

Right now the monster is wounded; soon he will be lame – though present, he will be powerless. Then someday, this Beast will die of his wounds…but in the process of time.

“…God is greater than our heart, and he knows everything…” 1 John 3:20

5 Years of Mays

Tuesday, May 16, 2006 

At Remuda Ranch

Gone with the Wind is on. I am so tired. With the new summer schedule, I’ve been getting up closer to 4…

Today was a wonderful weather day. The morning was mild, the evening has been exciting and stormy and patio umbrellas were blowing into cacti and the clouds were terrifically dark. We felt a few raindrops! Walking back from chapel in the wind and dust I was thinking about how before the rain, the storm comes…it stirs everything up, it’s scary. In my mind I can hear the sound of the rain as it starts to fall, then the rush as it is released. It is a healing sound to me, the sound of grace…

Wednesday, May 17, 2007

I am sad tonight. I am really struggling with my eating disorder right now…I feel like…it’s slowly closing in around me. Like a domed ceiling slowly closing over the stars. Like a tyrannical voice in my head. The compulsion to exercise and restrict, to control my body. I worked out again at the SRC this afternoon. It’s incredible how 2 days on the elliptical machine and doing ab crunches on the ball can draw me into the “womb” of my eating disorder and away from the world. I want to lose weight, but if I do my parents will notice and tell me “we can’t go down this road again,” and I will feel like saying shut up, I can go down any road I want to. I could be so much more than I am right now, life could be more. But with my eating disorder, possibilities and dreams and desires – everything becomes dulled. I’m wearing myself out. I want to, I don’t want to, I want to, I don’t want to, I want to, is the story of my life right now.

I think that I’m really angry at myself, for my eating disorder, for struggling. I felt very good and in control, I suppose, drinking my water with my zero-calorie raspberry white tea to-go mix and exercising hard and restricting and eating my wasabi peas one at a time. Is this relapse? Whatever, sometimes I don’t care. I wish I could say, these are the things I love about life, and I would rather have them than my eating disorder. But tonight I feel like I have to have exercise. I have to have products made with Splenda, chewable vitamins that are sugar-free. It’s not that I necessarily want or like these things, but I must have them…

Friday, May 16, 2008

Oh man – I feel out of control because I ate lunch, and felt like I sort of scarfed it down, and I ate 2 low-fat free cookies at Harris Teeter with some other samples…All of a sudden yesterday I started to flip out about gaining weight. I think it is because I went to Panera for lunch and had an apple, a French baguette, and a bowl of broccoli cheddar soup since it was a cloudy, windy, cozy day, and I ate it all. My wise mind tells me I didn’t gain weight overnight because I’ve been undereating and running every morning. This is an ED thought designed to keep me restricting. I will have to finish these thoughts tomorrow, but one last thing – as I was standing at the sink washing dishes, the most wonderful shower came through, just a heavy, straight-down, refreshing rain, singing in the leaves…the kind of rain that made me want to run out into it and twirl around!

Monday, May 18, 2009

All of a sudden I am struggling with ED compulsions and thoughts that seem to have come out of nowhere, really. Things I thought I was done fighting are back – yesterday going to the grocery store was harder than it has been in a very long time. I didn’t want to have anything to do with food. Having to make choices was too overwhelming; I just had to buy the bare minimum and get out of there. I even had a hard time making the bare minimum choices.

I haven’t felt urges to restrict and lose weight in a long time, either, but they are back, too! I’m thinking how can I do this without getting in too deep? I don’t think there’s a way – and do I really want to dig myself into this hole? At night I can’t sleep sometimes because my mind is fixated on how the insides of my thighs are touching. The last week or so has been a dark time for me. I guess I expect myself to maintain a “high” forever? which is obviously unrealistic.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Lord, you are so beautiful and so good! Thank you so much for all you have done. You send joyful, abundant rain on us when we are dry. I love to think of how you are like the rain – abundant, life-giving, refreshing, satisfying thirst. Thank you for the rain that is now falling. Yet I also think of the rain that fell in Nashville a few weeks ago that destroyed so much. Both good and bad are from your hand, and it is only your mercy that withholds, that gives us the rain we need yet restrains calamity, what as sinners we justly deserve.

I weighed myself and I was really surprised to see that I was XXX.X (!). I’m having a conundrum because I think if I exercised more, I’d be able to sleep better, but I would also lose weight which wouldn’t be healthy. Tonight I tried giving my muscles a good stretch – maybe that will help.

My favorite part of today was – well, there were several. One was when I came home at 5:30 and had to run through the downpour without cover and was squealing and jumping over puddles and small rivers and getting joyfully soaked and was then greeted by the world’s happiest dog.

Today, May 17, 2011, it rained. In the morning, so hard I didn’t think it could get any louder on the office roof; this evening so softly it only grew gradually on my consciousness. Today, I ate jelly beans, chips, and Reese’s peanut butter cups after dinner. Then I felt too full, out of control, and guilty. My worst fear loomed again: what if I get F.A.T.? My eating disorder whispered in my ear that I could make up for the “excess” by skipping breakfast tomorrow, or something. Better yet – skip a meal and exercise harder and longer.

All of a sudden, I became legitimately scared of losing my balance. I worked so hard for this, I finally feel mostly normal – what if I lose it again?! So I dug out my journals, curious to see how I’ve grown. It’s clear that even five years after inpatient treatment for anorexia, still…still it’s in my mind. But while reading my journals, I remembered that something else has stayed with me - God’s grace. His abundant showers. His storms. He has been in the good and the bad, from a few wet drops on my face in Arizona to this morning’s rushing downpour. The balance never was mine – it was His. So recovery is not mine to lose. Of course I had a hand in it, but it wasn’t the guiding hand.

I have no reason to fear.

In which You Stand

My anorexia tricked me.

Tricked me into thinking it was a safe hiding place from the scariness of adult life. But anorexia lied to me.

One night in my dreams I escaped from a prison cell and ran away. I burrowed feet first into a snow bank, smiling to myself as I peeked out of the hole, thinking no one can find me here. I retreated further into my snug cave, further back and further back until my feet broke through behind me into a black void. My once-safe crawl space had turned into a bottomless hole that was closing over me. My arms were pinned to my sides, and there was nothing under my feet. It feels like being buried alive.

My only way out was to be pulled out.

One month later, almost to the day, was Easter Sunday. That morning I stayed away from the early potluck breakfast at the church; I stayed home and forced myself to eat my customary ½ cup of plain oatmeal made with water. It was hard to finish.

At church they were eating my mom’s peach-sausage Bisquick bake, her molded lamb-shaped sugar cookies I had always loved, homemade sticky buns, every wonderful breakfast food. It would have been so easy to eat it, and I really wished I could. I’d been trying to follow a meal plan given to me by a nutritionist but the more I wanted food, the harder it was to eat anything, no matter how healthy it was. Even touching food was scary. I was always freezing cold in my snow cave, and some days all I could think about was how I can’t believe this is happening. I can’t believe this is happening. I felt hopeless.

But that Easter Sunday, Dad preached on 1 Corinthians 15:1:

“Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand.”

In which you stand. Those four words were God’s answer to my nightmare that had become real life, where my feet dangled in blackness without a foothold to keep me from slipping into the abyss. He reminded me that morning that His resurrection was my foothold, my foundation, my firm place to stand.

My anorexia tricked me. Tricked me into thinking it was a safe hiding place. Anorexia lied to me. But the gospel found me in a place no one else could reach and spoke to my heart the truth that He would keep me from falling until He chose to pull me out.

This week is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week.

Winter

On an afternoon in December 2005, I sat on my bed while snow erased the world outside the window. So far, one month at home had not been the answer I expected it to be, had not magically cured me of my eating disorder. I remember hoping the snowflakes falling outside could become a metaphor for my life suddenly turned so crazy…

…crazy like the panic I felt when my dad poured a glass of juice, set it on the counter, and forced me to drink it. Crazy like bird-skinny arms and hiding butterscotch chips in my drawer and lying to people I love and never feeling warm and purging and trying to purge and jeans falling off and hair falling out and the number on the scale falling and the snow falling outside…falling…falling…

…covering the frozen river where I now stand in my snowshoes. How did I get here? My parents outlawed the treadmill. But Anorexia will not be bossed around. It will have the last word. And that’s how I got here. Anorexia and I waited until Dad left the house, annoyed at how long he seemed to loiter. While he warmed up his car, we took out the oatmeal and a breakfast bowl, even started to boil water on the stove, pretending we meant to eat breakfast. Keeping up appearances. Knowing we weren’t fooling anyone. When dad’s car finally coughed out of the cul-de-sac and onto the road, Anorexia told me we were safe.

I step down onto the river. A silent stretch of white, lined with bare cottonwoods. I will snowshoe, I will burn calories. No one can stop us. I am happy because I am alone with my eating disorder. Because I only ate an orange today, and snowshoeing burns 300 calories an hour. I take a step and sink in the deep powder, untouched until now except by feather-light animal feet. Step. Sink. Lift. Step. Sink. Lift…step…sink…lift…The snow is deeper than I thought. Too deep. Soon I’m breathing too hard and fast. But the Eating Disorder tells me turning around is not an option no matter how starved or scared I am, or how far away the house is, how much I want to go back.

With a tingling numbness in my chest, I lie back in the snow and stare up at stripped cottonwood branches grasping at the sky, wondering if something will happen to me out here, far from help and cold.

But nothing happens. At least nothing drastic, only Meredith’s slow shrinking. Frozen and hard like winter, pale and bloodless. Cold and brittle. Anorexia owns her body, and the two of them don’t care about the people they hurt. When Mom cautiously enters Meredith’s room, almost tip-toeing because she fears this alien girl sitting at the desk; when Mom looks at the girl at the desk and thinks this is not my daughter; when she sits on the bed crying, Meredith thinks Go away. How long are you going to sit there? She says it, too, by not meeting Mom’s eyes or responding to her tears.

Sitting on my bed in Colorado on that December afternoon, I flipped through a coffee table book about snowflakes and read about how they grow: “As it traveled, the crystal was exposed to different conditions. Since a snow crystal’s growth depends strongly on its local environment, each change in the wind caused a change in the way the crystal grew. The exact shape of each of the six arms reflects the history of the crystal’s growth. A complex path yields a complex snowflake.”

I wondered if this struggle, if overcoming this horrible monster with its teeth sunk in my brain, was, in God’s plan for me, a gust of wind designed to shape me into his perfected creation? I went outside with a magnifying glass and squinted at the flakes falling from the skies and landing on my mitten, each one with a story to tell.

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February 20-26 is National Eating Disorders Awareness Week.