Hope is the thing with feathers

"Hope is the thing with feathers - 
That perches in the soul - 
And sings the tune without the words - 
And never stops - at all."

If you are reading this post, I am guessing today has been hard on you. I don't know if I can be a voice of comfort to any of you, but I did feel the need to add my voice and my feelings to the void here.

Today has been hard on me too. I woke up this morning terrified and upset, and immediately started crying when I saw how many of my friends on Facebook felt the same way. And if I am this terrified and upset as a young white woman, I can only imagine how terrified my Muslim, Latinx, immigrant, African-American, POC, and LGBT friends must feel. How can we continue to live in a country that elected a man who seems to hate all of us so much?

I don't know, but we must. As easy as it is to say "I'm out of here," we must not leave. We must continue to fight for what is right, fight for love and hope and freedom for all. Yes, this election has been a slap in the face to all of us who spent the last eight years fighting so hard for freedom and love everywhere. This has been a slap in the face primarily from rural, working class white men and women who feel that the government does nothing for them. In some sense, I think I can understand why many have felt left behind by Obama, though he certainly has been my champion. But I can't understand why those people would vote for this racist, sexist, xenophobic rapist. I feel that this loss wouldn't have hurt quite so much if Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or John Kasich had won over Hillary. I can never know how I may have felt if that had occurred, but I imagine it wouldn't feel like this.

Because right now I personally feel attacked. I am scared I will lose my right to have an abortion if I ever find myself in that situation. I am terrified that I will lose my  healthcare, as a young, very low-income graduate student. Hell, I'm even terrified that I may lose my job, my career path, and a planet for future generations under this president-elect and Republican congress who have such hate for science.

I also feel for my friends who will and are being told to leave the country. My wonderful Muslim friends who are told they are terrorists. My LGBT friends who are being told that something is wrong with them, they can be "converted," and, oh by the way, no you can't marry the person you love anymore. I feel for you. And I stand with you, as a young white woman who actually probably has the least to lose under this presidency than any other group, with the exception of white men.

I am grieving right now, and I am going to hold on to that for at least a few days. I urge you to as well, because the grief process is important and essential to your well-being. But then I encourage you to pick yourself up on the ground and remind yourself of all your friends that are here with you. We have not left. And we cannot leave, if we want to continue to build an America for all of us. The rest of the world has not left us yet either. Stand with your people, and stand up and speak up for those who may become increasingly marginalized the next four years. Even if you feel like a whisper among the massive shouts. Find people who will be your voice. And do not stop fighting.

"The human voice is different from other sounds. It can be heard over noises that bury everything else. Even when it's not shouting. Even when it's just a whisper. Even the lowest whisper can be heard--over armies...when it's telling the truth." -The Interpreter

These next four years are going to be hard. The rest of many of our lives may be very hard, especially if what many of us fear will occur with the Supreme Court comes to pass. But do not become cynical. Even in the darkest of times, in places of the world where the sun has set, a tomorrow will come. Do not give up hope on the world. Hold onto your hope, your love, and do everything you can to be a beacon of light and strength in this world we live in that currently seems so hateful. 

It's tough to make predictions of what will happen to our country currently, and so I actually urge you not to try. Try to spend less time engulfed by fear, and more time engulfed by hope. Spend less time engulfed by fear and more time fighting. Your voice does matter, even if today it does not feel like it. We cannot, and we will not, be silenced.

I love you. Keep up the good fight and continue to spread the light. 

"Walk in Unity. Walk in Love. Walk in Light and Wisdom."

NEDA Week 2016: Some of my story + HOPE

So my eating disorder history isn’t really something I talk about much anymore. Not because I am ashamed of it, necessarily. I mean I still don’t *like* to talk about it necessarily, because I do know of the stigma, and so it isn’t always comfortable. One of the main reasons I don’t talk about it also is because I do feel like I’ve come so far from that dark place, though of course my life is in no way perfect or completely happy even now.

We all NEED to talk about eating disorders, though. We need to break through the stigma and tell the truth. Speak of the pain and the reality. The cold stark hospital rooms, the crying late at night because we are hungry but we aren’t allowed to be hungry, the sunken eyes, and the bone cages. And deep deep cold that goes all the way down to our bones.

And we also need to talk about the hope that there is. Eating disorders are terrifying, isolating, lonely illnesses. It is so hard to believe when one is stuck in the depths of these awful disorders that there is some brightness out there on the other side. I know it was hard for me to believe at first. Or, well, actually it was very hard for me to believe for a very long time, even after I had finally set on the path to recovery. And that’s OK. Normal, I would say. Voices are whispering in our ears and our minds that nothing is OK, that nothing will be OK, that we don’t need food, that we need to control something…

But, slowly, slowly, we all can rise.

Because we are so much stronger than our eating disorders. I know for anyone currently stuck in one it doesn’t feel that way, but it is true. 

I don’t really remember how or why my anorexia actually began. It still sometimes feels like I went from a happy and carefree 8^th grader to a sad and cold 10^th grader shivering in a hospital room and suddenly afraid to let myself eat normally. I know it didn’t really happen that way, but it’s hard for me to pin down when anything started, when I took that first step down into the sinking hole. Again, I think this is normal for many, but it still weirds me out some to this day.

I do think in many ways I was predisposed to my eating disorder. I was a quiet child who thrived in school and always wanted to please others—my teachers, my parents, any authority figure, really. But though I was quiet, I did have a good group of friends. I transitioned well to high school. I had the strong and loving support of my dad and stepmom.

One thing I do feel affected me greatly in many ways was the “loss” of my mother. I put that in quotes there because I never really lost her in the true sense. And she has been there for me in many ways, and is still there for me today when I need her. I love my mom and I have forgiven her. I understand her now. But even knowing all that now, I don’t like to downplay how her “loss” affected me. After my parents divorced when I was 12, I did feel in a way like I had lost my mother. Not physically, but emotionally…and in a lot of other senses. At the exact time I was developing and turning into a teenager, I had lost the thing I needed most: a mother figure. I had no one to guide me through the crazy world of puberty and boys and hormones and emotions. Sure, I could’ve reached out to someone, but I choose instead to ignore it and pretend I was just fine with everything that was happening. Over the years, my dad remarried to a woman who was a much better mother figure overall. But as my sister went through her own traumatic teenage years, the focus on me slipped and vanished. Everyone assumed I was the perfect daughter, who was always happy, had no problems, and didn’t need someone to talk to.

And maybe that was true for some short time, but clearly it didn’t last. As I already said, I can’t quite to this day pin down why or when I decided to eat less. I think it partly came from some desire to be “healthy” as I entered high school and slowly spun out of control from there. As I realized I could control the food I was eating amidst everything else around me that felt out of control. Here was something I could grasp onto. At the time, at the age of 14 and 15, I didn’t recognize what was happening. I never would have guessed I would be a girl with an eating disorder. I myself held a certain stigma about eating disorders at that time, and believed I was too “smart” to develop an eating disorder.

But of course intelligence has nothing to do with an eating disorder, or any mental illness. My anorexia was not something I chose. It was something that happened to me, something that clung to the darkness and uncertainty in my mind as a young teenager until suddenly I was swallowed whole, confused and frightened but unsure of how to save myself (and partially also unwilling to do so).

I had many ups and downs in those early years of my eating disorder suffering, until a truck completely hit me in 2009. I still to this day often feel guilty about how sad I felt (and still feel) about dear Nick’s death. We weren’t the closest of friends, but his presence, his smile, his unimaginable enthusiasm for life meant so much to me. I genuinely could not understand how I deserved to remain on this earth when a soul 1000x more beautiful than mine was taken so young.

And so I fell deeper. Those days today seem so frightening to me, to remember how sick I was. To remember that 6 years ago, I didn’t really want to live anymore. I didn’t want to die, either, necessarily, but I had lost all hope I think. And so while I clung to my eating disorder as a way to control my life and numb my grief, I can’t deny that in some way it was also a distant hope that maybe I could go somewhere else, outside of this world.

The scary thing about eating disorders, really, is that they work. My eating disorder served me so well for a long time, numbing my grief, allowing me some semblance of control when it felt like my life was falling apart, and giving me the confidence to stand in front of the world. Why would anyone want to leave that behind?

Ultimately, it was because I realized it was killing me, and it wouldn’t stop until it did. I knew in fact I did not want to die. I am so lucky and so grateful for the fact that in September 2010, some hands reached out to me to pull me out of that dark place. They had faith in me while I still had no faith in myself. They braved my bone cage and the burning fences I put up to protect me from any hurt, reaching in to bring warmth back into my eyes. They taught me that sadness and grief were OK. That it was OK to not be OK. That I could navigate this earth without my eating disorder. That I, in fact,couldn’t really navigate this world with my eating disorder—not for much longer anyway.

OK, I am now realizing most of this post has been sad and scary for many to read at this point. BUT, I want to clarify that I wrote all of that to really show how far I have come. To illustrate that it absolutely is possible for anyone to rise from that dark place and come out alive and thriving.

I have developed now from a sad young girl trapped in a bone cage to an emerging young woman. Graduated high school, graduated high school, moved from Colorado to Hawaii to Florida. I am still discovering myself, I am still not sure of who I am or who I want to be, but I am alive. I am still anxious and still scared and unsure of myself, but even amidst all of that I have learned to revel in the beauty of being alive. Life is happiness and friendship but life also cannot be complete without sadness and uncertainty. It is all OK and it is all wonderful and you can survive. You must survive.

I also wrote that because I do want to bring so much light to the fact that eating disorders are never about the food. My eating disorder certainly never ways. I mean, yes, you often see most visibly the fact that an eating disorder patient is afraid to gain weight, is afraid to eat more food, thinks they will die if they do, etc…But that’s never really what it is about. Those fears come from somewhere deeper. From fears of not being enough, from fears of being out of control. From a desire to gain control over something—in this case, food and weight.

So, yes, food plays a part (hence why they are called eating disorders), but they go so much deeper than that. It’s time for us all to realize that and talk about that and begin to treat the deeper parts of eating disorders. We do need to treat the body, because eating disorder are just as much physical illnesses as they are mental illnesses. But after that we need to all discuss everything else. The fear, the hurt, the pain, and the reality.

We need to reach out to each other, hold each other especially in the darkest of times. And together we all can rise above. No one is alone in this. And no one should be without hope.