Threads of Stars

June 26, 2007. I am listening to my current favorite song, curled up in a room with all the lights except for the computer switched off for the night. I’m motionless, lost in the music, arms wrapped around myself as if for warmth even though it’s in the upper 90s outside– Texas summers are unrelenting, even in middle of the night. Under the black t-shirt sleeves I’m lightly holding down with my fingertips, I’m wearing nearly 70 fresh wounds. I’m 16 years old, and I’m trying to decide when to die.

June 2007

***

Lie to me, convince me that I’ve been sick forever
And all of this will make sense when I get better.
(Evanescence)

Some sicknesses are hard to trace, hard to pin down to cause and effect and point of origin. I can’t track everything, but I know I exhibited the first noticeable signs of anxiety at age 8 (initially triggered in response to relentless bullying at church) and the first definite signs of depression around age 10. I didn’t know the words for either illness then, but I knew I had feelings that sometimes took over my ability for rational, collected thought in terrifying ways. I also knew that this, in the extremely conservative religious culture I existed in at the time, was something to be punished rather than healed.

I was 13 when a vital relationship in my life fell apart and I felt shadows start to move from something lurking in the corners of my mind to my defining identity. I became addicted to sadness, using it the way I imagine some people use controlled substances: just one more hit of this awful memory. Just one more reminder of how broken I am. Just one more review of the fractures in my spirit.

I always believed in God. There was never a moment of my life in which I couldn’t see beneath things, have this unshakeable sense that there’s more to the world than what I feel and taste and hear. But although I believed that God was interested in me, I didn’t ever have the sense He particularly liked me. I wanted Him to, desperately. I wanted to feel like we were allowed in the same room together. But everything I felt I’d been told to do to get there seemed to leave me coming up short. If God was real, as I believed without a moment of doubt that He was, then I believed this with equal strength: I was not good enough for Him.

When I was 15, after two years almost entirely without friends, I connected to a group of teenagers very similar to myself and hesitantly allowed them to befriend me. But the waters were dark in some of their hearts too, and I didn’t have any of my own light to help them see. I scraped together what I could of myself to try and save a few people I loved tremendously, and learned in the process that we can never save anyone from themselves– no matter how much of ourselves we sacrifice on the altar of their pain. This felt like my worst failure yet, like a promise that there was no such thing as relationships that didn’t leave me irreparably damaged. This was my final cold, black-inked statement that I was not worth anything. One day it became too much, and I used scissors on my arm. And it felt like relief. It felt like finally wearing on the outside the silent truth of who I’d always known I was.

***

I may seem crazy or painfully shy,
but these scars wouldn’t be so hidden
if you would just look me in the eye.
(Plumb)

Cutting became like creating gills in my skin whenever I started to drown in the deep waters of my stormy spirit. I hated it, and I loved it, and I couldn’t stop. My inability to control myself added to my shame, affirmed over and over my failure. I’d lie awake at night for hours listening to my sisters’ breathing, my heart pounding, fist clenched, a knife always hidden under my mattress just in case I needed an escape hatch from the hell in my head. When I did sleep, I had nightmares about demons that had me waking wide-eyed, breathless, sick.

My anxiety became so bad that many days I couldn’t even go into public places like grocery stores without hyperventilating and blacking out. Sometimes the noise in my head got so loud I felt like I lost myself entirely, but the wounds on my arms could pull me back to reality in an instant: this is who you are. This is all you will ever be.

Some days, I fought back. One day I screamed into my pillow until my throat ran raw. Another day, I took one of my pillows and slashed it to pieces, stabbed through my mattress, destroyed anything immediately in reach to try and stop my own inevitable descent. It was a little after the time I stopped doing schoolwork that I stopped eating.

Music began to serve as one of the only non-harmful emotional releases I had. I was not technically allowed to listen to contemporary music of any kind, but I started finding it on YouTube, deleting browser histories afterwards. I was not always careful; I was caught a few times, and it was made clear to me that my draw to rock and roll was just the influence of the devil. But to me it was the first time I’d heard what was inside of me named and called real.

The door of my heart and mind shut to everything except songs. I burned bridges with those who tried to reach me and then claimed it as proof that I was, in fact, meant to be alone. Somehow, two people managed to endure the cycle of self-destruction that defined me and find out about my secret habits. One was Tiana, a fiercely loyal girl four years older than me who refused to give my defense mechanisms even a moment of authority, marching past them like they were nothing. She was the one who first took my scabbed-over wrist in her hand, turned the wounds toward the sky, looked me in the eyes and said gently but firmly “this has to stop.”

The only other friend who knew what was happening was a boy my age who lived several states away. We would talk through messages and emails nearly every day that year. When our rare chances to hang out together in person occurred, he had an uncanny ability to make me entirely forget the inside of my head, to live like I wasn’t scarred. He was in some ways endearingly innocent, at times obnoxiously opinionated, but always somehow steady, as if peace and faith came to him effortlessly. His name was Jordan, and he’d tell me he was praying for me even when I was incapable of doing the same.

Neither friend had any clue how to deal with my self-injury, with my eating disorder, with my depression and anxiety– but they kept showing up anyway, praying, fighting, and in the process, they became something of a miracle to me.

But not quite enough of one to stop my descent. As I already knew, we can’t save each other, not really. The cutting kept escalating, finally reaching the point where I cut around 70 times in a span of 48 hours. I’d finally reached the end of my desolate heart. I had the suicide plan perfected, even through the lingering fear: I didn’t know if death would be the doorway to heaven or more hell.

***

June 28, 2007. Yesterday, I left the house for the first time in days and ran into Tiana. She asked me to meet and talk. I said yes before I had time to think, and then stayed up late into the night agonizing over the decision. It was only a final prayer in ultimatum form that allowed me to sleep last night: God, if You still want me alive, here’s Your final chance.

I’m sick with nerves as Tiana pulls up in my driveway in her parents’ car. When I get in, she suggests we go to the chapel on the college campus my dad works at, where she’s currently a student. I’m surprised by the suggestion since we’ve never gone there before, but I say yes because I know it’s rarely occupied.

When we get inside, we sit on the front row of the creaky wooden pews. She lets a moment of silence pass before gently asking me how I’ve been. And I tell her– honest and ugly. I roll up my sleeves to show her layers of scabs on my upper arms, slide the beaded bracelets off my wrist. I don’t cry as I tell her: “I just know that I am utterly, completely worthless.”

There’s another slow, steady quiet. An ancient wooden cross hangs at the front of the chapel; the afternoon sunlight is casting shadows over it, and I watch the patterns to avoid looking at Tiana’s face.

Slowly, she starts talking. She’s talking about Jesus, but she’s telling it differently than I’ve ever heard before. It’s all human and raw compassion and empathy and love, a steady-gazing grace. It’s about Him, the way she’s talking, but somehow about me too. She talks about how at the time, the world measured His life worthless, but they could never make that true. She says no one could make it true of me either– and He was proof.

I realize I’ve been crying now, but I don’t know for how long. Tiana goes quiet. I’m sitting beside her covered in my wounds, utterly broken open. Finally I choke out a question: “and what do you think of me? I mean, after all you’ve seen…”

She doesn’t hesitate. She takes my tear-soaked face gently between her hands, turning my head so I have to meet her eyes. “I love you, Mary. And nothing you do will stop me from loving you. But I promise you, Jesus will always, always love you more.”

Tiana moves her hands from my face, still meeting my eyes. I put my head down on her shoulder and weep. She holds onto me, saying softly “you are so, so worth it.”

And for the first time in my life, I believe it.

***

You don’t heal from an addiction to cutting in a day, but you can certainly make the decision that you want to in one conversation. That day I understood what Jesus actually looked like for the very first time, and it changed everything about me. I know my experience isn’t universal, and for some people the recovery process isn’t a spiritual one, but for me the two have always been inextricably intertwined.

The first year was the hardest, especially since my eating disorder was still raging mostly unidentified at the time. I had no church around me, no access to counseling, and little to no support system. Recovery was unbearably hard, and at times because of this, even the core close relationships I did have became incredibly rocky. The only way I could sleep through the nightmares every night was curled up around my MP3 player, these words on repeat over and over for hours until dawn:

This is the last night you’ll spend alone
Look Me in the eye so I know you know
I’m everywhere you want Me to be.
The last night you’ll spend alone,
I’ll wrap you in My arms and I won’t let go.
I’m everything you need Me to be.
(Skillet)

I started discovering songs that didn’t just affirm my pain as real, but introduced the reality that I could navigate through it. On the days I was sure this new version of Jesus must be too good to be true, the days the impulse to harm myself became like a fire inside, I’d lock myself in the bathroom with knives spread out on the counter in front of me. But a favorite song would invade those moments, and I’d hold my wrists behind my head, singing the words over and over through sobs until I believed them:

I will love you after the rain falls down,
I will love you after the sun goes out.
I’ll have My eyes on you
after the world is no more.
(Disciple)

It was after some of these days that I swore I would do anything to help people like me connect to music that met them like that.

The process of choosing to truly live for the first time felt like crawling up an endless cliff with my fingernails sometimes. I had to build relationships in my family. I had to figure out what Christianity really was, if it wasn’t what I’d been told (a difficult process that continues daily). I had to learn methods for managing my anxiety, depression, and eating disorder so they didn’t dictate my every move anymore. And overcoming cutting would prove to be one of the hardest things I have done in my life. I still feel the impulse almost every single day, and I’ve relapsed occasionally in the last ten years. But after I’d started recovery, I found giving in to the old habit surprisingly unsatisfying. My resolve strengthened.

I still have nightmares often, and many of them are about the past. Lying awake at night sometimes isn’t any better, as I have memories as bad as any nightmare: using fingers slick with my own blood to trace terrible words over my reflection in the mirror. Shower water running red down the drain. Every detail of my first suicide plan, still forever stored in a cobwebbed corner of my mind. And I have dozens and dozens of scars hidden all over my body, reminding me of the roads I’ve walked and exactly how much healing I’ve needed.

But sometimes I feel even those scars are a gift, because not many of us get to wear the marks of grace where the whole world can see them. I don’t believe that suffering by default enobles us, inevitably makes us better, but I do believe that sometimes– not always, but sometimes– it can. From that first day in the chapel, I walked out wanting every scar on my skin to make me more compassionate. I took every ugly thing I’d seen and been and had done to me and, trembling, told God that He had my permission to let it drive me into the truest love, the most irrational kindness. I didn’t know at first how much that would really cost. No one ever does, when they pray that kind of prayer. But when loving others and trying to learn to accept love become a whirlwind of doubts and terrible pain, I run my fingers over all the silver-white memories and repeat: it’s worth it.

There are a lot of other stories from the past ten years: stories of the unlikely ways I found true church at rock shows. Stories of how two professors and a rock star would stop a faith crisis from breaking me in college. Stories of all the beautiful people I’ve met and how they’ve changed me. The story of marrying Jordan in that same chapel six years later. Stories about the job I’ve ended up in. Stories of so much unexpected heartbreak and healing along the way, of the long, slow process of getting well. Those tales are for other days. But today? I simply wanted to go back to the beginning, to trace the threads of stars that led me through unfathomable black night into grace, into love, into life made new.

Maybe redemption has stories to tell,
Maybe forgiveness is right where you fell.
Where can you run to escape from yourself?
Where are you gonna go?
Salvation is here.
(Switchfoot)

Photo by Liz Schanke