part one: something tragically beautiful happened today...

written yesterday (friday) afternoon...

i was cleaning out my closet and came across a couple pairs of pants...size * pants.


i flared my nostrils at them, wishing that my heart hated them as much as my face appeared to. one pair in particular- the jeans of course- were heavy with painful memories and emotion. i picked them up and thought i'd give them a try.


i won't go into further detail of the failed process that followed, but needless to say, the only part of my body that actually got to see the jeans from the inside was my ankles.

there were two times during my eating disorder in which my hatred towards my body reached an intensity that i could no longer endure. it was these two times that i prayed and asked God to please just take me from my earthly shell, because the fight was too painful to be worth it.


one of these two times was during high school. i was sitting in the pants i held this morning on a pew in the sanctuary of my church. i was sitting in God's house, supposedly the place where truth is close, but i'd held my disorder closer, and the peace that surrounded couldn't get in.


i remember sitting in those jeans, lose-fitting as they were, thinking i was the fattest person at church. the pain was hot and it spread like flames. i closed my eyes for the prayer and hoped they would never open again.


as i relived one of the most difficult memories of my life, something truthful began to make sense...

if i was the fattest person at church when i was wearing the pants that i am now unable to pull up past my ankles, then i've now reached a point of such obesity that i will likely die of a heart attack before i am thirty.

i know i still see myself bigger than i am, but i no longer see a person anywhere close to obese in the mirror, and if i can trust my nutritionist and other honest people in my life (which i can), i am actually in the smaller range of healthy-sized people.

in other words, i had to be skinny when i wore the now ankle-only pants. skinnier than skinny.

for a moment, i basked in the newly shed light illuminating the dusty corners of my mind. when i finally lifted the size * waistband eye-level, a pit formed in my stomach.

i had no idea i was this small.

at last i've been liberated from the most binding insecurity of my disorder: that i was never actually thin, just normal, and my eating disorder existed only in my head.

for a second i thought i'd keep the pants around- that maybe they'd fit at different time of the month.

but when that fleeting second was over, i knew i had to let them go.