Completely Surrendering

I'm feeling so small I'm standing here weeping as I'm coming clean of the secrets I'm keeping cause I've caused so much pain to the ones I love most and I'm falling apart as I carry my heart to Your throne I am completely surrendering finally giving You everything You're my Redeemer I run to the cross because You are more than enough Lord, complete me cause I'm Yours completely

These lyrics from the song "Completely" by Among the Thirsty perfectly describe where I am with my life right now.

If there is anyone who actually follows this blog, you would have noticed that for the past few months I have gone silent. I left things looking like my life had fallen into place and I was on the road to recovery. The life I described was what I was longing for and I tried so desparately to live up to it. I finally had everything in place, a great job, I was back in school, I had good friends surrounding me. Everything was perfect. Except it wasn't.

My eating disorder had full control of my life. It was there but not in the obvious ways people are accustomed to seeing eating disorders as. There was this constant voice in my head reminding me of what a complete and utter failure I was. I wasn't being "good" at having an eating disorder because my weight was higher than I would normally be ok with. If I really wanted to lose weight I knew how to do it, and quite frankly what I was doing wasn't working. So what was I doing?

I was eating semi-normal some days. Restricting some days. Binging and purging other days. I was juggling a lot of balls at once. I couldn't tell you when the last time I actually made myself a real meal was. I was doing a dance somewhere between recovery and eating disorder and I made it look like everything was alright. No one knew the war that was going on in my head underneath all the makeshift lies of a happy life.

I would tear myself apart, criticizing everything about myself. Except it wasn't just the way I looked, it was how I acted, what I achieved or had not achieved, it became about who I was as a person. And the answer was obvious. I was not good enough,I was a failure, a disappointment. Every day I would pick apart all of the things that I had failed to do and think about what I could have done if only I had tried harder.

I became very suicidal. I had thought that I would never let myself fall into that trapped way of thinking again. I knew that God had a bigger plan for me, I knew how much it would hurt those who love me and I had sworn to myself that if I was ever that deep into it I would check myself into a place so meds could be adjusted and I could return safely back to my life. Instead I was involuntarily held in a hospital for 72 hours which I know saved my life. I was left ashamed of how I landed myself in that predicament which is something I am starting to make moves to amend.

After I got released from the hospital I retreated into bedroom and stayed there buried underneath the covers snuggling with my fabulous dog Patches,

wishing the world would disappear. Thankfully I have some pretty amazing friends and family who have really helped to pull me through those dark days. With some changes in my meds I am finally feeling the fog begin to slowly lift itself from me.

As the mist clears I am seeing what allowed the depression to grow into the dark cloud that it was. For instance, when I was deep into my depression, I did not seek out God. Rather I hid ashamed of what I had become. Instead of leaning on his grace and mercy I questioned my faith. I knew I was hanging onto the eating disorder and not surrendering that to Him. I had no logical reason of doing so and knowing that made it even more frustrating that I wouldn't just let it go. I had given Him everything else in my life but that, I wanted to keep as my own.

As I write this today there is still that little part of me that wants to hold on. Why? I don't know. It's been a part of me so long I don't know what I would be without it. It has been my safety net, my go to thing when the world wasn't working out right. And for what? It drained me of what makes me me. It fed me lies and cut me down every chance it had. More importantly I started to drown out the voice of my Creator, the one that was saying that "I am made in His image." (Gen 1:27). I wasn't hearing that I am worthy and loved by the King of all kings because I was too busy listening to the lies the eating disorder told me instead.

Starting in January I will be checking myself into a residential program here in St. Louis so I can finally start taking back the life that is mine. I know it is going to be hard work, I'm not always going to feel so positive about it, but I have decided to put my foot down, to kill the lizzard once and for all. (C. S. Lewis "The Great Divorce reference there.) I have spent far too long listening to the wrong voice inside of my head that would tear me apart any chance that it got. At my church this weekend my pastor Greg Holder reminded me of the line "You're not the boss of me." So that is what I am going to say to the eating disorder voice. Instead will I choose to listen to the word of God.

Psm. 139.14

I leave you with another lyric, this one from "Whom Shall I Fear" by Chris Tomlin:

And nothing formed against me shall stand
You hold the whole world in Your hands
I'm holding on to Your promises
You are faithful
You are faithful

I know who goes before me
I know who stands behind
The God of angel armies is always by my side
The One who reigns forever
He is a friend of mine
The God of angel armies is always by my side

If you want to listen to the above songs here they are: 

A Very Abbreviated Version of My Story

Recently someone who is working on their master's project approached me. He is working on his master's project which entailed writing a book and forming a class around it. He choose to do his project on mental disabilities from the view of people who actually have to live with them. He asked me to write a piece on what it was like to live with being bipolar and having an eating disorder. The following is what I gave to him. It is a very brief outline of my life that leaves out a lot of major things mainly for the sake of keeping it relatively short. 

I have not done an actual story of my life blog on here, mainly because it's not something that can be written about in one post. But for now this is the closest sum up version there is. 

Growing up my life was fairly average. I liked trying out new things and I started with dance, dabbled a little in soccer, but found my true love was gymnastics. My parents were always encouraging me and drove me around to practices and meets. I excelled in school, and with very little effort I was able to maintain straight As. In fifth grade I quit gymnastics partly because of a reoccurring injury and partly because of the management and coaching staff that had now taken over my gym. I began to hang out with people from school instead of only having gymnastics friends. I loved having this new group to hang out with and it certainly made school more fun as well now that I was actually becoming part of the group.

 My body was used to working out six days a week for at least four to five hours a day. Now I was lounging around on couches watching TRL and Boy Meets World snacking on Doritos and homemade chocolate chip cookies. Needless to say, I gained a couple pounds. I was not ok with gaining weight, so I started to cut back what I would eat. Eventually that became hard to do without people thinking I was weird for not eating so I found myself another solution, purging.

My bulimia soon had a life of its own. Once I got my driver’s license I was binging and purging constantly. I blew off friends to spend the evening driving around from drive through to drive through, stopping at gas stations to throw up along the way. I paired my bulimia with not eating for 3-4 days at a time. My weight dropped significantly.

Senior year is supposed to be the best year of high school. For me it barely even existed. On Thanksgiving my senior year my parents told me I was going to get help for my eating disorder. So while my friends were out shopping on black Friday, I was sitting in room with a therapist and my parents who were trying to assess just how much help I needed to get this under control. It was decided that I would start the night program which meant that I would be going to group therapy three nights a week and on Saturday mornings. I would have to bring a meal to eat with the other patients before participating in groups. I was less than thrilled. This meant I had to cut back on my hours of work (I was a hostess at the restaurant Red Robin) and I had a lot less time to hang out with my friends. The whole thing seemed completely ridiculous to me. I had zero interest in recovery and I thought that besides my eating disorder, I was perfectly fine.

 Looking back now I can see the fluctuations of moods even then. I remember going several nights in a row with barely any sleep, instead staying up binging and purging and playing around online. And I remember the lows that followed although at that point they were just a tiny dip compared to what was yet to come.

Night therapy didn’t prove to go so well for me. I continued to lose weight and my resting heart rate plummeted into the mid 50s. So in January, a few weeks into the spring semester I was admitted to the hospital where I stayed for two weeks. There I was forced to eat and was watched after to make sure I didn’t purge the food I had just consumed. I was on bed rest and hooked up to machines that made sure my heart was still working semi-properly. Once I was considered stable enough to leave I was put into a day program, which meant I had therapy from 8:00am to 8:00pm Monday-Friday then a four hour group on Saturday. All of my meals and snacks were given to me while I was there. When I was at home I was responsible for sticking to my meal plan that had been given to me.

 My friends didn’t really know how to handle all of this and my distant behavior and sometimes irritable moods left them not coming around at all. Occasionally they would answer my calls and invite me along but I always felt out of the loop, so eventually I stopped calling.

 I moved to Tampa, FL the following January to go to school at The University of Tampa. I was starting fresh and everything was going to be fantastic. However, the eating disorder was completely out of control and I was starting to see that my moods were too. I had been diagnosed with depression when I was 17 and had been trying to find an antidepressant that would fix it ever since. Prozac, Celexal, Cymbalta, Effexor XR, Paxil, Lexapro, Seroquel XR,  Wellbutrin, and Zoloft. None of them worked. What they would do was initiate a hypomanic episode which was followed by a huge crash. And the lows started to get really low. I would lie in bed for days at a time, getting up only to go to the bathroom and that was when I really had to go. Doing everyday things such as brushing my teeth and watching TV took SO much energy.

 It became exhausting to simply exist. I would get so frustrated with myself because I knew I was a smart person, perfectly capable of not only completing daily life tasks but excelling at things. I had always done well at school but now I didn’t have the energy to get out of bed, much less go to class. I stayed locked up in my room for days on end. Behind the closed doors life seemed to be a little less daunting. I thought maybe if I stayed in there long enough no one would notice the colossal failure I had become.

  Soon enough my mood would switch and life would suddenly take on a whole new purpose. I felt a constant need to get things done and started project after project giddy with excitement. My roommates weren’t entirely sure what to make of sudden thirst for life. While they were happy because it seemed the real me was back they questioned where all this new found energy had came from and urged me to get some sleep. But I didn’t have much time for sleep nor did I feel the need to do so. My friends all laughed as I dragged them along for spontaneous road trips, dancing till dawn, and whatever other ideas I could come up with. Before long though, my energy levels would start to drop. And with a heavy sigh I would retreat back to my room, curled up under the blankets, hiding from the world.

This up and down pattern made it hard to accomplish any of my major life goals.  I had to drop out of school because I couldn’t make it through a semester without a depressive episode leaving me unable to complete my work. I had a hard time holding a job because my work performance and attendance often depended on my mood. Eventually I had to move back to St. Louis because I couldn’t support myself in Tampa. This continued on until I was twenty three. At that point I decided to finally seek help for my eating disorder which had never been under control aside from a few forced stints in treatment.

Off to San Diego I went unsure of how I really felt about recovery but well aware of the fact that if something didn’t change soon, I was going to wind up dead.

           

After being in treatment a few months my psychiatrist told me the reason the antidepressants weren’t working was because I was actually in fact bipolar. I welcomed the new diagnosis happy to finally have an explanation for what my life had been like in the years leading up to that moment. Now I knew what was wrong. I could find the right medications to balance me out and hopefully live a more normal life. My ride on the emotional roller coaster was now at an end. Or so I thought. Turns out finding the right mix of meds and getting insurance to pay for them is a little easier said than done. And of course I didn’t help matters by foolishly thinking I could use the meds only when I was depressed, and still be able to enjoy the highs that came along with being bipolar.

 I actually tried to do just that until my first real manic episode hit. This wasn’t the fun loving life and getting crazy amounts of things accomplished that I was accustomed to. Instead my thoughts were racing so quickly that I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I blew through money that I didn’t even have. I tried drinking to get myself to fall asleep since it had been days since the last time I even took a nap but that only ended up with me being blackout drunk and making a complete fool of myself.

 After almost a month of complete insanity my parents and close friend tried to get me to go get help. At that point I wanted nothing to do with such things. I crawled out my bedroom window and ran away in hopes they wouldn’t make me go. After tracking me down they took me to talk to someone at a psychiatric hospital the next day. Somehow I managed to convince this person that I just needed group therapy and start my medications up again and I would be fine. They wrote me a script and let me walk out the door with the promise of returning to group therapy the next day. My parents reluctantly dropped me off at home with instructions to check in with them frequently.

At some point that night I got the incredible urge to go on a road trip. A good friend of mine was shopping for wedding dresses in Tampa that week, how fun would it be if I showed up to surprise her. I made it to Atlanta then my parents who were beyond frustrated at this point told me to turn around and come back home. At this point I was running out and money and I was starting to feel myself come down from my high. I made it back to Tennessee before calling a friend who sent my parents to pick me up at the cheap motel I finally crashed at. Needless to say, outpatient wasn’t an option this time, and when we returned to Missouri our first stop was the psychiatric hospital.

Once stable again I returned home to pick up the pieces of my life I had so carelessly thrown around in my manic state. I was mortified at the way I had acted, the things I had said, and the way I treated the people I love the most. I knew then I never wanted anything like this to happen again. I found a cocktail of medications that worked well for me Lithium and Latuda. They don’t give me very many side effects which is a blessing since most of the drugs used to treat bipolar come with very unwanted reactions.

 I quickly learned that it isn’t as simple as just taking your meds every day. Highs and lows will still come and adjustments will need to be made. As much as I like to live on a whim and be spontaneous, routine is better for me. Getting into a regular sleep pattern is crucial to avoid slipping into hypomanic or manic episodes. I have to upfront and honest with a good core group of people who I trust in order to ensure the bumps in the road I inevitably encounter don’t throw my whole life off track. This means sharing the parts that I am most embarrassed of which isn’t the most exciting thing in the world.  

This also helps with my recovery from my eating disorder. I have found that I need to make a conscience effort to eat three meals a day regardless of how hungry I may or may not be. I have to make the choice not to purge every time after I eat. I have to focus on who I am as a person and not pay attention to what I look like. Certain foods I know I will end up binging on so I don’t allow myself to keep them in my house.

When I left for San Diego I thought recovery would mean I could package all these parts of myself up leaving them in my past and that besides taking a few different medications each day I would be totally fine. ‘Normal’ even, whatever that is. Now at twenty seven I know that is not the case. Recovery is instead a choice I make each day, sometimes I make each minute. The fact that I am bipolar and have an eating disorder will forever be a part of me, but they have shaped me into the person I am today. Without them I never would have realized my strength to overcome whatever it is life throws at me nor would I have the compassion that I do today without these things. Although they are a part of me, they do not define who I am as a person. That is something that is entirely up to me.

So there you have it, my life in a tiny, teeny package or at least as close as you will get to that. 

Be The Change

 

Since I have posted my blog on facebook there have been a few people who have questioned why I would put such private aspects of my life out there for everyone to see. I started this blog because there is a stigma attached to mental illness that shouldn't be there. It stays there because people are not educated about what it is like to live with a mental illness. All too often people only hear about it when someone is having an issue with it, not seeing all of the people who keep their mental illness in check every day of their life. People are afraid to reach out for help because of the way so many people still view things which just leads to things getting out of control, when if they had felt it was safe to ask for help, the out of control part could have been avoided. For many years I sat in silence. Afraid to speak up because I didn't want to be judged. But I wished that people would speak up so that maybe this stigma can go away. 

One day I realized that by me sitting in silence, I was only adding to the problem. Being ashamed and afraid to speak up only gave the people who were judging more power. So I decided to say something. If I wanted things to change I needed to make myself part of that change. I understand that not everyone feels comfortable sharing their story and that's okay. I have to say, sharing your story can be pretty wonderful though. Since I have started this blog I have talked with several people who shared their story with me or have thanked me for telling mine. It's a pretty great feeling. Sharing your story doesn't mean you need to make a blog and tell the world, that was just the way I chose to go. You can simply tell a close friend or someone in your family. Before I was so afraid of being judged, but it turns out I judge myself I a lot harsher than people judge me. I have had an incredible amount of support shown since I started sharing my story and when tricky times popped up, people were more than willing to help me get through them. Had I stayed silent, those bumps in the road probably would have been much more difficult to handle. 

I try to use this approach to life not only with speaking out about mental illnesses but in every aspect of my life. If I want there to be more good in the world, then I need to be out there doing it. If I want people to treat everyone with compassion, then I should be leading by example. This world will stay the same unless we go out and make it different. 

And besides....

Mania: The Maddness of the Mind

 You rapidly tap your hand against your leg. Thoughts fly through your mind so quickly you have to strain to grasp onto one long enough for it to make sense. A brilliant idea suddenly strikes and you jump to your feet in excitement. You skip to the cabinet and hastily pull open drawers, tearing through their contents, searching for what it is you were looking for. It's not there. You swear it was there just earlier today but now it's no where to be found. Frustration bubbles up in you and you kick the items that are now scattered all over your living room floor. Cursing you move on to another room to look for it. Your thoughts are racing quickly again and now you can't even remember what it is you were looking for. Another idea pops in your head. Air. You think. I need fresh air. You scurry off to your bedroom and throw open your closet doors. The outfit that you are wearing simply won't work for this occasion. You change into a new, better, cuter ensemble, throw on a hat and some lipstick for the final touch. You burst outside and spin around, lifting your face to the sun. The fresh air softly kisses your skin and you sigh happily as you wander off down the road. You have no idea where it is you are going or what you plan to accomplish but right now, in this moment, you have never felt more alive.  

Mania is a funny thing. Sometimes it brings with it a type of happiness that fills you up and leaves you overflowing with excitement. Other times it turns your mind into a twisted cobweb of thoughts that blend into each other, racing by too quickly for you to grasp hold. This leaves you feeling frustrated, useless, and slightly insane. No matter what you do, you can't seem to gain control of your own mind. It can be a terrifying feeling. The rest of the world seems to go too slow and you find yourself easily irritated at the smallest of things. This irritation only feeds into the racing thoughts and lack of control you are feeling. Which in turn bumps up your level of frustration. You want to scream. Or throw something. I instead normally close in on myself, digging my nails into my arms, wishing I could crawl out of my skin. 

There are times when I am manic that you can tell by taking one look at me. I'm pacing around; there is a desperate need to be constantly moving. I'm babbling on about something, using my arms and hands to make gestures to emphasize the incredible passion I feel about that particular subject at the moment. Other times I'm sitting off to the side, fidgeting incessantly, mostly or completely silent. This is because I can't concentrate enough to make sense of anything to form a semi coherent sentence to add to a conversation. 

Leading up to full blown mania, I usually have a decently long period of hypomania. This is the part of being bipolar that I actually enjoy. When I'm in this frame of mind, I get things done. I normally find very little need for sleep, taking a few long naps here and there rather than getting a full nights rest. This leaves me with extra time to accomplish all of the projects that I coming up with ideas for. My most creative work is usually a product of this time. I clean like crazy. And organize. Oh how I love to organize. I also tend to spend entirely too much money on completely unnecessary things. But in the moment they seem like I absolutely need them. And I have to get it now because if I don't get it now then I won't be able to finish this brilliant project that I just came up with and who knows how long I'll have this much energy and motivation to do things so it needs to happen now. That can get me into a bit of trouble. 

While hypomania can be productive and actually rather enjoyable, it cannot be maintained. (Trust me I have tried.) Eventually one of two things will happen. I will either come crashing down into a period of depression or it will suddenly start escalating into full blown mania, which at that point things get messy and completely out of control. I make embarrassing choices that reflects a person that is completely different from who I am and what I believe in. I blow through crazy  amounts of money. (I don't have a credit card in my name for this reason.) I act impulsively and put myself into sometimes dangerous situations. It wreaks havoc on every aspect of my life. When I come crashing down from my high, picking up the pieces of my life that I so carelessly tossed around leads to shame, guilt, and anger towards myself. Full blown mania is not fun. You may have some fun times while you are in it but when reality sets back in, it is not a fun place be at. A few days of mania has the potential to completely ruin everything that I have worked so hard these past couple of years for. That terrifies me. 

Luckily I am learning how to prevent myself from getting into a full blown manic episode. Meds of course are crucial. Keeping myself in somewhat of a routine also helps. (This I'm not super fond of. I've never been one to like doing a consistent pattern of things day in and day out, but like it or not it's what's good for me so I'm doing it.) On days where my mood is kind of all over the place I will get a water instead of a drink when I'm out with friends. Having a couple drinks now and then is fine, but there are certain days where I know adding alcohol into the mix of my life would not lead to good things so I have to say no for that night. Taking notice of when the hypomania starts to sink in and talking about it with my psychiatrist and the people I trust around me helps to hold me accountable as well. If it starts to escalate and is getting to be completely out of control I know I would at that point need to be in the hospital while meds are being adjusted. That hopefully will not need to happen but I am aware that it is a possibility. 

I think Carrie Fisher describes mania very well: 

When I am teetering more towards the manic side and I am waiting for my med adjustment to start working I have found it helpful to surround myself with people who will not judge me but instead help me work through those frustrating few days. By staying with people I trust I am prevented from acting as impulsively as I would on my own. I have found it's good to have a few different people you can rely on because when I'm in that frame of mind I am kind of exhausting to be around. Plus I get bored very quickly so switching things up constantly keeps me from getting aggravated over the little things I would normally never care about. When my thoughts are rapidly spinning out of control I close my eyes and say to myself:

Saying that doesn't always mean I get a reprieve from the maddness of my mind (Although sometimes He does give that to me). And a lot of the time when I am saying it I am certainly not sitting still. But it reminds me who is in control. And I trust that my God will make everything work out just the way it should be. I don't always get an immediate answer, and sometimes what I get is not what I was expecting. But I have found that He can take even the messiest of situations and turn it into something good. So no matter how fast my world may be spinning I will cling to Him because He is the only one with the power to truly slow it down. 

            

That Girl In The Mirror

Disgusting. Flabby. Gross. How did you let yourself get like this? You pick apart every part of your body finding flaws everywhere. It doesn't matter what other people say. When you look in the mirror this is what you see. 

Society today has come up with this ideal image that is nearly impossible to achieve. There are ads everywhere pointing out your flaws and telling you they can fix them. It's absolutely ridiculous. 

I think it is safe to say that everybody has their own body image problems from time to time. You feel bloated and don't like how a particular shirt fits you. You saw a picture someone tagged of you that was not the most flattering. Your jeans fit a little tighter than you would like. You aren't happy with your body. But you know you can't immediately change it so you move on with your day. 

Some people with an eating disorder don't suffer quite as much from poor body image. Or at least some claim not to. For me personally this has always been one of the hardest parts. 

Throughout the time I have had my eating disorder my weight has widely ranged. Sometimes I was very underweight. Other times I was decently overweight. A lot of the time I fell somewhere in the middle. It didn't matter what weight I was at, I absolutely hated the girl in mirror staring back at me. Most days, I still do. To look in the mirror and see yourself looking so disgusting and then have to get dressed and go about your day can be incredibly difficult. All you want to do is crawl back in bed and hide under the blankets where no one can see you. Or run around your apartment like a crazy woman in some lame attempt to get rid of all of that unwanted fat on your body. 

Other people will not understand this. Especially if you aren't overweight. But even then they will tell you, "You look beautiful you're overthinking it." "You have the best body....I wish I had your body." "You look fine, relax." People will think if you say anything hinting at your warped perception of your body that you are just looking for attention. Which is very frustrating because the last thing you want at that point is attention. People will tell you that you just have to believe what other people say. And they are right, you do, but that doesn't mean all of those horrible feelings that come along with looking in the mirror go away. They are still very much right there. And that little voice inside your head that points out your every flaw follows you around all day. Picking and nagging,  "Suck in your stomach. Stand up straight. Don't you dare think of eating, have you looked in the mirror lately?" 

I can't begin to tell you the number of events that I have missed because of how much I hated what I saw in the mirror that day. And not just social events. I've skipped class. Called in sick to work. All because I felt like a 500 pound whale that day. That's ridiculous. I know how incredibly stupid that is. But sometimes the shame and negative voices win, leaving me paralyzed to do anything but curl up in bed where I mentally beat myself up for missing whatever it is I'm missing. The mental scolding normally goes on to reach pretty much every aspect of my life. Not exactly a healthy way to spend the day. 

I have learned that on some days I have to avoid mirrors. Because I know the mindset I can so easily get into if I look to long. I also have started to do something that at first felt very strange. I started to thank God for giving me my body and for all of the amazing things that I can do with it. I may hate my legs, but with them I can dance. My arms can reach out to help other people. I found the more that I looked at what my body could do for me, the easier it was to hate it a little bit less. 

I also know that God made me. And God doesn't make mistakes. 

Beauty is fleeting. What is more important is the type of person you are. To have a beautiful soul is far greater than having the perfect body. (Some days I need to remind myself of this quite often.) So even when I don't like what I see in the mirror I can look at myself for the kind of person I am becoming. That helps me to feel a little bit more beautiful. 

So there are days when the mirror makes me feel unbeautiful. I know even as I recover from my eating disorder there will still be those days. But my worth does not come from my appearance. My true beauty comes from within. And the mirror has nothing on that. 

Keep On Pushing Back The Dark

This is one of the most frustrating parts about being bipolar. You finally start to feel like you are getting yourself into a good place and then all of a sudden you feel all of those good things and the progress you have made start sliding out of your grasp. You find yourself falling into the same black pit you just worked so hard to climb out of. It's like quicksand dragging you down and you are frantically reaching out to find something, anything to hold onto to keep you from going back in that hole. You know that you have the tools to get you out but your mind has become a little foggy and it's hard to remember what you need to be doing. The people around you get frustrated because they have seen this routine before. It's a vicious cycle and it needs to stop. You want it to stop. You want it to stop more than anything.

I was headed straight for that place a few weeks ago. I felt the switch turn. But for once instead of sinking into it and letting it control me, I got mad. I got really angry that this was happening right when all of the pieces of my life seemed to be falling into place. That darkness, had I not fought it, would have taken all of that away from me in one big swoop. I have worked entirely too hard to build myself up to this point to let that darkness win now. So I fought back. 

One of the things I have learned along my journey is that if you are going to win the fight, you cannot be fighting alone. People aren't mind readers. They aren't going to know you need a team of warriors on your side unless you tell them. This for me is one of the hardest parts. 

Lets take a minute to look at what the typical person's thoughts and feelings are when they find themselves in a bad place. You may have made a few mistakes that you were even warned to avoid making but you didn't listen so now here you are stuck in a kind of "I told you so" place. You grasp at straws hoping you'll find one sturdy enough to get you out of this mess before anyone realizes you are there. You quickly realize that's not going to happen. And soon that feeling of shame starts to sink in. And you are going to have to sit there with all your vulnerabilities on display for the world to see as someone helps you back up to your feet. It's not a fun place to be in. Nobody likes to admit their weaknesses.

For people who struggle with mental health issues it can seem like this is all you are doing. You start to feel like that person who always has something going on that is just a little too much for people who don't understand what it's like to live with a mental illness to want to deal with in their lives. People like people who are positive. They want to be able to go out with friends and forget about their stressful day and relax. You don't want to burden people with your stuff. You try to tell yourself you can fight this alone. But at some point you are going to have to set aside your pride and admit that you need people in your corner.

Once you have found those people who are going to be there fighting right beside you are going to have to start sharing some parts of you that you really would rather the world never see. You are going to have to tell on yourself, expose your weakest areas so those warriors beside you can have your back when the fight is too much for you to do alone. It sucks to admit to those things that you have tried so desperately to keep hidden from the world. Heck you tried to hide them from yourself and pretend they weren't there. But they don't go away by pretending they don't exist. So you share those ugly thoughts, those self destructing habits, you tell the people around you what you once swore no one would ever know. Because then those thoughts and those behaviors start to lose some of their power. Now you can fight them on a much evener playing ground. Sometimes you will win. Sometimes they will win. But somewhere along the line you start winning more. Those warriors you had gotten to fight along side you and sometimes for you, have now become your cheerleaders as you gain strength you never realized you had. You start to feel proud of yourself for fighting back instead of sinking in. 

That darkness does come back every now and then. Sometimes it tries to show up a lot. And each time you have to make the choice. Am I going to let this define me or am I going to fight back? I once thought I could never be the person that could fight back. I got mad at people who told me I should be fighting back. I felt like I was fighting. And in truth I was. My fight then was that I just kept surviving. That I made it from one day to the next. At that time, that was me giving 100% of my effort into holding back that darkness. I pray that I never end up that deep in the darkness again. I wake up every day and make the decision that today I'm going to fight. It's going to mean letting people see the messy, broken sides of me. As I have shared, so many people have in turn shown me their own messy, broken sides. We all have our demons that we fight with. It is only by embracing each other that we can fully conquer them. 

So I challenge everyone who reads this (I'm not sure all that many people do lol) to expose some of your messy, broken pieces to someone you trust. Ask for help on some bad habit you want to break or something you have been struggling with. See what it is that they have been dealing with. Ask them what's going on in their lives and be prepared to really listen. To encourage. To bring hope. To shine some light into the darkness of their mind. Because if we want to be successful we have to be in this together.     

Just Because You Trip, Doesn't Mean You're Going To Fall

Throughout the course of my life I have learned that I am not always the most graceful person. I trip over my own two feet. I run into things. I drop things. I have been known to run into the occasional glass door. There is a running joke  in my family that I really should have been named Grace. Each time I trip or fall down a couple of stairs I get right back up, laughing at myself, and go about my day. I am beginning to see my journey in recovery is going to be a lot like that. I'm going to trip over those little bumps in the road and maybe not be quite as graceful as I would like. 

I have been known to look at situations with a very black or white frame of mind. In fact back in day when I was working at the dirty bird (a.k.a. Red Robin) some of my team members nicknamed me Mega; I was very extreme, one way or the other; I was all in or I couldn't care less. In school I had to be perfect getting all As or I simply stopped going to classes taking all Fs instead. If something was going to be done, it was going to be done perfectly or else I didn't want to do it at all. I took perfectionism to both extremes, excelling and failing. The concept of finding a balance was completely foreign to me. I knew logically there needed to be a middle ground. But for some reason my brain has always tried to tell me if I wasn't doing something perfectly it was worthless. It wasn't good enough. I was going to have to redo it anyways so I should just stop trying, accept the failure, sit in the failure, and  pretend I wanted to fail all along. Act like it didn't matter, or I didn't care. That became much easier to do trying to be perfect at everything 100% of the time. 

Since I looked at everything in my life like this it's no surprise that was how I approached recovery as well. But recovering from an eating disorder is not black and white. Living with bipolar isn't either. And if I took the black and white, perfect or completely fail approach, I was going to be failing. I did that for awhile. I would have spurts where I would put 100% into recovery, into being healthy, into life. But as soon as I hit a bump, I dove into that pothole. Thankfully God nudged me while I was laying down by my pothole, covered in cuts, bruises, and scratches because you know, I didn't half-ass anything; when I failed, I failed big. So there I was laying on the ground having given up any hope for my life to get better and Jesus shows up gently reminding me that this is not what my life was made for. He started to heal some of my wounds. It was fantastic. For the first time I started to feel like recovery from my eating disorder and managing my bipolar was possible. But then I tripped a few times. And when I saw the pothole, I let myself fall in. I sat there for awhile and even started to lay back down, but again I felt that gentle nudge.

This time I argued. I didn't want to get back up just to trip and fall again. I've had enough of that. It was exhausting. Not to mention humiliating. I mean it's not like I was sitting here stumbling around by myself. My family, my friends, people who didn't even know me were getting one heck of a show from graceful walk through life. I was tired. If I got back up, I wanted it to go perfectly. Jesus very kindly told me it wasn't going to work that way. I was going to have to find a balance, a middle ground. I was skeptical to say the least. I knew from experience I was not good with middle ground. Finding balance was not a skill of mine. What He was asking for was great in theory. But I couldn't do it. And that is when He told me while reaching out his hand, "You're not going to do it, we are going to do it."

Well with an offer like that I couldn't exactly say no. I already knew what it felt like when He had healed my wounds before. And living life laying by the pothole was not exactly the life I was hoping for. So I took His hand and let Him pull me back up. We were walking along quite well for awhile. Maybe that's why I didn't see the pothole. But this time the pothole didn't make me fall. Because I had Him right there to catch me. We started walking again. I was a little unsteady at first. It wasn't long though before we were back to our familiar stride. After awhile I tripped over a few rocks. And slipped on another pothole. And again there He was to catch me. I took a few wobbly steps but got myself back into our normal stride much faster this time.

I'm starting to learn to see the potholes while they are still a distance away. When I see them I know I need to watch my step, or maybe look for another road. I know each road will have rocks that I trip over and potholes that will try to make me fall. But I also know that I'm not walking this road alone. I have my Savior here to catch me when I fall and guide me back to the right path. And for that I am forever grateful.