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.

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.

Mud Season

Fresh buds are beginning to feather the branches here in Raleigh. We’ve passed through fall and what claimed to be winter (but was in fact an imposter!) since I last posted.

Though I feel majorly cheated out of winter, I’m happy to be springing forward and leaving behind a dark and chaotic season in my life. After many painful, confusing weeks, I am finally emerging with new growth. (New growth other than a lot more silver hair, I mean. To quote Lucille Ball in an episode of I Love Lucy: “I’ll bet, Ethel, if I skipped my next Henna Rinse, I’d find my hair snow white”. I can, at a moment’s notice, usually summon an I Love Lucy quote to suit any specific situation. Feeling fat? “I’m nothing but a BIG BLoated bunch of BLUbber.” Etc. etc. More on this amazing skill another time.)

For a while I sort of flailed, unable to find a way to condense what happened into a kernel of meaning, something to hold in my hand, because I always want explanations. I always want neatly packaged answers. Only recently have I stopped asking why I decided to withdraw from my SSRI meds, why I fought through awful withdrawal symptoms only to relapse into my eating disorder and end up returning to the medication. Though it seemed like so much wasted effort, time and tears, I’m beginning to see why it wasn’t.

Six years ago, I was driving 8 hours round-trip several times a week to meet with an eating disorder therapist. Spring in Colorado is less a triumphant explosion than a slow thaw, a tiny but steady drip from the tip of an icicle. The world which seemed so pure and beautiful beneath the white drapery of winter becomes brown: brown with piles of plow-scraped gravel, dog feces, mud. Driving through the mountains between Steamboat and Evergreen I passed the thawing carcasses of dead animals long encased in ice by the roadsides.

I can see how God has used the past months to expose carcasses lurking under the snow in my heart. He uncovered sins that were keeping me from changing. By his grace and unlike me he isn’t content with whitewashed death. So – it’s an ugly, messy time, but it is necessary. The snowmelt makes mud, but then it waters the valleys. The frozen stillness becomes a rushing, swirling, foaming dance that sinks into the earth, calls out the green grass and the red, purple and yellow wildflowers. Before change comes truth. Before growth comes the thaw. Before spring comes mud season.

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.

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.