How I realized Broken was a terrible myth
A story told in parts in hopes you will find a stepping stone to help you cross from perceived Broken to fully Human. You are worth it.
Part 1
I was elementary when I realized I was not pretty and therefore, unworthy. I remember standing there looking at her. Her words cut me. They were sharp, painful, and true. I blinked back tears as she said again, You aren’t pretty enough for middle school. Her green eyes were so cold. I mean it would take a cold-hearted person to say such truth to the shy girl, the girl who never had a boy who liked her, any real talent, or athletic ability. I saw myself in her eyes- pale skin, oily blonde hair with a cowlick on the left side.
I looked at her, eye to eye. She dared to say those cutting words to me in my own bedroom. She…. my reflection in the mirror, she told me the truth that I hated to hear.
That was the first time I pulled my hair to get the anxiety to go away. One hard yank at the very bottom of my scalp. I felt the tingling urge, I reached back and found the few strands and yanked. The anxiety disappeared, and I could focus on reality. A little pain and the world fell back into a familiar pattern.
That would be my trick for the next few years when my thighs were too big, my skin too oily, my eyes bugged out from my face, my arms too long, and my personality as dry as the desert. Yank. I did this habitually until I realized I could also control my ugly, my anxiety, my world through food.
The way I coped with not being pretty (and therefore unworthy) was the shameful story I carried around for years. I kept quiet to avoid judgement. My tongue stayed stuck to the roof of my mouth. My shame kept me on mute when a guy who I thought was a friend in highschool tied me up and threatened to kill me. Correction, I told our school counselor who called our district police officer who said, Well honey why did you go over there in the first place? I actually apologized to them both for bothering them and then I shoved it all down. The shoving allowed my shame to morph into a full-on eating disorder.
I went to therapy, and as an adult, I would leak my story in bits and pieces to those around me. But I never shared it for the sake of processing it. I never fully processed the eating disorder, assault, my feelings about food, loving, living, or even me. One morning many years later, when I was married and had two kids, living became too much, and I counted to three, ready to end it all. But as I said three something inside of me, that I can only describe as the Spirit of the Universe, busted through my plan and my pain and stopped me. I remember thinking I don’t want to be this sick.
I wish I would have known other women who contemplated ending it all, who hated their bodies as much as I hated mine. I might have realized that my experience was a shared one and that I am not broken. I was experiencing something human, not something shameful that needed hiding. But instead I, yet again, shoved it all down because I thought I was very much broken.
But stories shoved down will slowly start to poison your soul. It’s like eating, but your body doesn’t digest the food. You get sick. Your body can only be strengthened by the food being digested, processed. Your spirit is made stronger when you process. Processing means breaking it into smaller pieces that enable you to pull out the shame, pull out what you went through, what you felt, what you learned, what was beyond your control. Then you watch them let dissolve.
