I ran a half marathon last month.
There were around 40,000 of us making the trek around downtown Nashville– some of us just to the 13.1 finish line, others to complete a full marathon. We filtered down the city streets en masse like something from a movie, like the part where the soundtrack swells and the main character has compelling, cathartic flashbacks while enduring the chaotic climax with surprisingly perfect hair.
This was a rare moment where Hollywood stylings were actually apt for me. Except for the hair part– I’d attempted to contain mine under a blue bandana (the choppy layers all through my blonde, black and blue hair won’t be contained any other way). But I had a playlist going of songs that had been part of the story of getting here, and I had the tattoos on my wrists (love and grace) constantly in view, and I had an awful lot of time to think.
***
Sometimes I find it hard to communicate, when I’m talking about a long, hard run I just accomplished, or when people are noticing the fact that I lost 80 pounds, that that is only a fraction of the story. The story for me begins in a much different, much darker place, in a web of starving and bingeing and purging and always, always lying– to myself and to anyone who would listen. I was 16, and I had been called fat and ugly since my metabolism rebelled on me in cruel coordination with puberty. I believed those words, and even more dangerous, I was in a place where I was absolutely desperate for some kind of control.
Eating disorders have a way of making you feel invincible at first. You start to feel like you have transcended human limitations, like you finally have control, like you have conquered your greatest enemy (yourself, your own ugliness). At least I certainly felt that way. I was relentless, I was all-powerful, I was… sick.
It was around the time about a third of my hair fell out that my then-6-year-old youngest brother said innocently of something he was playing with “it’s a robot, like Mary– it doesn’t eat.” And my body started to turn on me, like lights going out one at a time.
I caught a virus that my body had no ability left to fight, and it quickly became severe pneumonia I couldn’t seem to recover from, for months. I lost the ability to climb the 8 stairs to the room I shared with my little sisters. I lost the ability to carry anything heavy. I started having fainting spells, random black outs at the least convenient times.
It took a very dear friend speaking some very hard but very true words for me to make a decision to let go of those particular unhealthy cycles, by which point I had become so non-functional I knew I was legitimately endangering myself. But it would take another three years for me to decide to build healthy cycles in their place.
***
There is this general idea that having a significant other/spouse provides validation in your body image issues. Maybe this works for some people, but for me it had the opposite effect of dragging every single insecurity, flaw, failing and doubt I had ever had about myself into the light. It’s awfully hard to ignore how broken you are when you’re having to let someone else into the hurt you’ve always reserved sacred to yourself. Every time Jordan told me he thought I was beautiful for the first years– often even still– it hurt with all the fiery hell of truth grating on lies. I knew he meant it, which made it worse. It was in such severe, agonizing contradiction to everything I had ever known to be true that it often led to me completely shutting down and shutting him out.
So when I graduated college, when I had more time and space and mental processing room during my year living in Colorado, I decided I would try to get healthy. My weight had been very up and down in the years since being so sick, and it had settled at “up.” But I knew– or at least was telling myself I knew– I couldn’t approach it in terms of numbers.
Things started with some basic ground rules: I would try to walk every day. But if I was going to walk, I had to eat three meals. If I didn’t eat the full three meals, I couldn’t walk. This was made much easier by the fact that I was living with my friend “Mangy,” who knew me well enough to work past my usual games. I’d be “too busy” to make food– so she’d make a fabulous meal and set it down by my computer, knowing I’d be too polite to refuse it at that point. I’d put off eating because other people were in the room (a longtime anxiety trigger had been eating in front of people)– she’d make a plate and tell me I could go eat in her room.
Somehow healthy habits started to develop just as part of my daily lifestyle. I was walking between 6 and 12 miles a day, eating well, and becoming more and more able to tear around at the playground or have a dance party with Mangy’s two precious kids. I was getting healthier every single day, moving forward emotionally in areas I had never dreamed of.
But about halfway through my time there, I hit a wall. I realized I was still categorizing “healthiness” by “weight.” And I’d plateaued with losing weight, but even worse, I’d realized that even losing weight was nothing more than an extremely transient comfort to me. There would be momentary elation at each loss followed by all new anxieties– if I gain this back I’ll be worthless again. Every compliment, though offered with good hearts, only fed my fear. They’re saying I look good now, so will they not believe that anymore if I don’t keep going?
I realized I had just replaced an old master with a new one. The place of authority I had once given my eating disorder tendencies to speak into my worth I had willingly given over to a certain list of fitness requirements, what I thought “healthy” had to look like. I was still placing my worth in a certain kind of ideal and mentally self-flagellating if I didn’t reach it.
I believe it was Chesterton who said that false idols always break their worshipers’ hearts. My eating disorder broke mine, and then my fitness ideals broke it all over again, and around that time I realized I didn’t necessarily have an eating problem. I had a problem with worshiping all the wrong things, desperately looking to any tangible, controlled habit that I felt could give me life.
To be well then began somewhere very different than I’d ever tried before. I was not working my way to being lovable, to being worthwhile. I was changing habits because I already was lovable and worthwhile, because the infinite value inherent in simply in being human was worth treasuring, protecting, nurturing. I personally believe that this value is set in immutable reality by the heart of God, though I believe it applies no matter what people believe about Him.
Working out had once been all done in line with the concept that to be strong, healthy, and toned were the ultimate good for me as a person. Before that, starvation had been done to affirm the concept that being thin was the ultimate good for me, that I would not be valuable until I reached it. But a curious transformation began to take place as I became aware of my flawed thinking. Running became something I did in line with the belief that I had been given innate, incalculable worth by the gracious Creator God, affirming the reality that nothing I did could add or detract from that, but that caring for myself was a way of saying I believed what He said about me and about Himself.
I think worship is an awful lot about what reality you affirm, what authority you answer to. And as a result, running has become worship– affirming with every step, every mile, and every rest day in between that what He says is true.
I also developed along the way an understanding that societal concepts of what “beautiful” is are mostly narrow, culturally constructed crap anyway, and I’d have to ditch them entirely if I actually wanted to see myself and others as they really are. But that’s another blog for another time.
***
All of this made training for a half marathon, after moving to Nashville and losing the rest of the weight, much more complicated for me perhaps than the usual struggle of simply being motivated to get out there. I have to exercise constant caution in how I engage these things. Sometimes legitimately the healthiest thing for me, the thing that affirms the truths I want to be echoing, is to rest for a day. Or three.
But the kind of mindset I am trying to hard to foster makes that possible. It makes it possible to eat a messy, sugar-filled cake with my family in celebrating a birthday, because being part of that moment is healthier than the absence of carbs would ever be. It also makes it possible to knock out brutal 11 mile trail runs in the Colorado sun because I know so well that this body is a gift, this strength is a gift, and none of it is to be taken for granted.
In all of this, I have had to be incredibly careful about how I talk about my story, how I spin it. I get a lot of comments from people who see me for the first time in a while, people noticing that I’m about 33% smaller than I was. And I’m grateful for their recognition of this battle I’ve fought, even if they don’t know the details because it has been so far from easy.
But I’m careful about talking about “before” and “afters,” sliding into the all too common societal narrative of “I used to be ugly and now I’m not.” I wasn’t ugly. I was different before, but not ugly. I was, however, terribly unhealthy, inside and outside. So if I am telling my story abridged, I simply say it this way: I was awfully sick for a very long time, and I decided I wanted to be well. All this weight lost is just a side effect of that.
And I should say this too: when I finally hit a healthy weight range in a healthy way, my mental struggles in this area weren’t over. I wake up with them every single day and have to choose how much authority I give them over my life. My perspective in the mirror is still radically skewed, and I know it.
And the thing is, skinny by itself will never be enough. I have found this in the way the old voices in my head clamor constantly for more– for me to lose more, or to correct other imperfections with my skin and hair and on and on the list goes. If I in any way worship the false god of societally constructed physical perfection specific to our one moment of history, I will never, ever feel valuable or beautiful or lovable. How could I? Our souls are immortal, impossibly vast, imbued with the peculiar radiance of this one precious life we’re given. How on earth could the value of something like that be described by numbers on a scale or a tape measure? To try is like spending the rest of your life scrambling to use three words to capture something a whole language couldn’t describe.
But to choose to act with this impossible belief that I’m already valuable– already loved– and as a result I get to be strong, get to be healthy, get to get better… well. That shuts the eating disorder voice up pretty fast.
***
I had tears burning in my eyes when I crossed the finish line of my race. I was playing in my head every single word of strength and encouragement I’d been told by the people who had walked with me in this journey, 8 years long, and I was thinking about how incredibly impossible this would have looked to me at 16. But I was also feeling, stronger than I could describe, the reality that this was a milestone, not an end point. I’m going to keep getting better. I’m going to keep aligning myself more and more with the truth.
And man, to even be able to want that? To want to be soul-healed, to be truly well, above wanting the counterfeit of just being skinny? That feels even better than a finish line. That feels like redemption.
P.S. – I ran this race with my friend and fellow rocker Stac, who has encouraged me every single step of the way. She, along with my friend Liz, are a lot of the reason I was able to fight through and do this. I cannot possibly express enough gratitude for both of them.
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