Mourn. Accept. Live.

My therapist said she sees a lot of middle children with bulimia. By nature I am a nurturer, a lover, a feeler. I have always felt things very deeply. I can remember watching my little sister get spanked and crying my eyes out. I always wished they would just spank me because it would be less painful than seeing her be hurt.  I wonder sometimes if I just went around feeling everything for everything else and then stuffing it somewhere inside of me. Sympathy and empathy are such wonderful things to give, but I had allowed myself to give them in excess to the detriment of myself and my family.

Along with feeling things deeply, I also started caring way too much about what everyone thought about me. There are so many things wrapped up in this concept: the competition aspect of being one of three girls, being the daughter of a father who is incredibly fitness oriented, being part of a southern family who loves to eat, low-self esteem, moving in with my parents for two years while my husband was unable to find a full-time job. Without divulging ALL of my emotional baggage, there were a lot of dimensions to my eating disorder and they all started surfacing around this time.

It's still hard to decipher exactly how my eating disorder started taking control, but my therapist described it like this. "You're like a sponge. You absorb emotion, whether it's your own emotion or everyone else's. Eventually a sponge gets heavy and it has to be squeezed out." As she was saying this I could totally see the metaphor. Graphic, I realize, but the laxatives became a way for me to rid myself. It wasn't just about the food, or being skinny. It was about a release for all that emotional weight I had carried for so long. Okay, so what do I do about it? How do I stop caring so much? 

For the next couple of weeks I questioned. I questioned God. I questioned my life decisions. I questioned my reason for being. I addressed emotions I had never acknowledged. I cried. I yelled. I journaled. I mourned things I had never mourned. I shared with the group things I had never said out loud. I told them how I pictured things would be and how different they turned out. They cried with me. I dreaded every day. I knew the only behavior I could use was to feel every single thing and for so long I had learned to push those feelings away. It was exhausting. 

After taking time to mourn, cry and question, I learned it was ok for life to be different than I expected it to be. With the unconditional support of my family, my close friends, the therapists, and ladies in my group, I started to celebrate and appreciate things I had been too busy to think about. I had been so overloaded that I was not able to enjoy the blessings God had given me. Slowly, the realization of those things started to take the place of all of the negative things I had held on to for so many years. The more I talked about my feelings and things I hadn't been able to express, the more I was able to move on from those feelings and be the person I wanted to be. Sometimes we just have to step back and accept things in order to appreciate them. I was learning a day at a time that it was okay to have feelings. I learned to welcome feelings, keep some of them, and let some of them go. I started to live and not just survive and it felt good. It felt really good.