I wrote this going into Memorial Day Weekend, and ended things with my dietician a few days later. I am back to my daily calculations and low key hysteria, but at least this time all the number crunching involves more carbohydrates per day than I’ve ever consumed in my life.

I guess TW if hearing about my unwellness roils thine own.

Stop me if I’ve told this one before, but when I was about 21 years old, I was healed by divine intervention. 

I may have lost you there, and I don’t care how crazy it sounds. It’s true. 

I was working a human directionals shift, dancing my ass off with a giant “Now Leasing” arrow sign near Howell Mill Road in Atlanta, probably listening to Lady Gaga, when I experienced a sudden feeling of absolute clarity. The cosmic weight I’d been carrying since I was 8 or 9 years old was pulled up and out of my chest and there was no thunder or lightning except in my mind, but I was free at last. 

When my shift ended, I celebrated my new lease on life by shopping at Filene’s Basement. I bought myself an incredibly Abby-coded diaphanous sleeveless top with a knit green decolletage and a groovy pattern dotted with sewn on sequins here and there. I was staying with my friend Erin, and I went back to her cottage to tell her my great news, and she didn’t even think I was bonkers—because she speaks in tongues.

~

The entire year and a half or so leading up to that miraculous day, I’d been in weekly therapy sessions with a sports psychologist who worked with the athletics department on campus. She was an incredible person and helped me through some heavy stuff. I’ll always think of her fondly, despite her once telling me that I reminded her of an exposed nerve-ending.

The thing is, nothing we did in therapy had any effect on my disordered eating and body image concerns. I was honest about how I wanted to want to change, but I did not have the desire. I wanted to want a different way of seeing and thinking, but I did not have the innate compunction. I don’t know how else to describe it, but I assume addicts probably grok with that. 

Nothing changed until my divine intervention. 

Like when Jesus spit in the dirt and smeared it on that blind guy’s eyes to bring back his sight, my spirit was miraculously transformed in an instant, and about a decade of cage-free living followed. 

~ 

I’ve been with my current therapist for over a year now. She’s playing a very long game that I believe in, but I mean, I may be a very old woman before we get anywhere with it. I want to live while I have a skosh of relative youth left in me. 

As a final hail mary, I threw some more money at the problem and recently started working with a sports dietician who specializes in helping athletes with disordered eating and body image. I was assured the methods would be completely individualized and that as messed up in the cabeza as I am, I was not beyond help. She was up to the task. We would not just be looking at slides of recommended performance plates together (easily found for free via google search). 

I really like her. I want her to help me so badly. But the sessions are going by so quickly and I’m feeling worse instead of better. I’m feeling more confused and overwhelmed and increasingly scared to go out to eat or make a wrong move. You can call them guidelines, not rules, and talk about addition rather than restriction, but I need kid gloves on steroids, I guess. Because my real life doesn’t easily fit into these kinds of templates. 

Long runs, like this morning’s, are a good time for crying, especially now that it’s time for sunglasses. During my 12 miles, I think about where I was exactly one year ago—quite a bit lighter and closer to a sense of body euphoria, but miserable and deep in a calorie deficit. My circumstances have flip flopped, but at least I am still miserable, a ping pong ball being flung back and forth to opposite ends of a personal hell. 

Anyway, the point is, I felt a flicker of bizarre hope this morning, as a delusional idea drifted towards me. 

Divine intervention. 

More rare than being hit by lightning twice, but…it seems like my best bet. I no longer have a clearly defined “relationship with God,” but I sure do feel desperate. I have begun my prayers, and if you want to help, you can pray them for me, too. Let a miracle come, in whatever form it may. You know I’ve been putting in the work, and I continue to everyday. But I need that spiritual fireball to animate my offering. Change my heart, change my body, change my perceptions, change it all, or change just enough. Whatever it takes to remove the anguish.          

xo

AMC