Practice Hope
Encourage, Educate, Equip
Weary
wea·ry
[ wee ree ]
1. tired: tired, especially in having run out of strength, patience, or endurance
2. tiring: tiring or exhausting
3. showing tiredness: showing or characterized by tiredness
I had to enter outpatient therapy and tried very hard to get healthy. My therapist was spiritual and divinely a Christian. She gave me a book of daily devotions with scriptures to help me through that time. Our sessions helped me to realize that the road will not just change overnight. It would be a long journey full of pitfalls and backslides. But I was thankful to be alive.
It seemed like I gained 20 lbs. overnight, once I started to eat and keep food down. This was the most uncomfortable I have ever been in my own body. I think what made it so hard, was that I was not supposed to do anything about it. I had to give my body time to heal with no dieting or excessive exercising. It needed a reprieve from all the damage I had inflicted. It is difficult to look at pictures of myself at that stage. Many pictures from college show my round, swollen face from all of the binging and purging. People probably just thought that was the way I looked. These pictures break my heart when I see them. My eyes are so empty and my body tortured.
Once I was not hiding behind the symptoms of my eating disorder, the root of my problems started to be revealed. I suffered from depression. My doctor suggested that I start taking anti-depressants. It took a while to figure out the right one. Some made me feel even more desperately out of control and others caused anxiety. I remember having to leave a class lecture because I literally felt I was going to crawl out of my skin.
Over the next few years, I struggled with needing a medicine to be normal. I wanted to do it all on my own. It would seem like I was doing well and could handle things. So, I often stopped taking the medicine and would spiral out of control. My eating would worsen and the depression would obviously take over. It is a battle that continued for many years. It is only now that I am forty-five, that I do not question the need anymore. I am chemically unbalanced, always have been, and probably will always be. I need medication to balance my thoughts, actions, and words. A diabetic needs insulin to survive. I need anti-depressants. This does not mean that I like being dependent upon meds. It is something that I have to do to survive. Actually, in truth, it is also something that I need to keep from going crazy!
My husband, Darrin, has been one of my biggest supporters. He often would notice when I “took myself off of meds” and persuade me to go back to the doctor. I am so thankful that God gave him to me. He has walked in circles with me for hours to keep me from purging. He has talked me through an anxiety attack that paralyzed me in a grocery store. It was the first relationship that a man stood up for me. A man actually wanted me to be healthy.
We married in 1998. I was teaching fourth grade at the time in a public school. My life and compulsion had been my students until then. I would stay at school organizing and writing notes, making sure the desks were in perfect order, and the room was cleaned. My body obsessions still continued. I was mostly healthy, with a few backslides here and there. It was better for me to obsess about school than my weight. I had found my husband and was supposed to be fulfilled. Yet, now I wanted the next step. I wanted a child. Darrin was adopted and wanted a child more than anything. He could not wait to look into the eyes of someone that shared the same blood. I could not wait to give him that opportunity with a child of our own.
Practice Hope 