clay birds.

when i was in honduras, a couple other women and i joined a mi esperanza founder on a short road trip to a pottery co-op on the el salvador border to restock the pottery we sell in our store.

the pottery is made from natural clay derived from the banks of a nearby river and fired in clay stoves behind its makers houses. the co-op with which mi esperanza partners is comprised solely of women. i spent the day getting to know them. they are golden.

although i had not previously seen its place of origin, i've been viewing/purchasing the pottery ever since i began work with mi esperanza, so i knew which pieces we needed.

as i sifted through a floor full of pottery, searching for the bowls and cups and vases we typically carry, i saw a different piece i'd never seen. it was a small bird with a rounded head and a sloping neck that widened and shallowed into a triangular body. it sat a cool smooth weight in my palm and stared peacefully from two dotted eyes on either side of its rounded head that preceded a barely protruding beak. it was striped with off-white lines that swirled down its neck and around its body and across its back.

a honduran woman had artfully drawn each of the swirls with her hands. the bird was one of a kind. there never had been, nor would there ever be, another like it.
I looked at the bird and smiled. I would absolutely be taking one home.

When we'd gathered all we were planning to buy, the stocky Honduran woman in charge of the business smiled warmly, lifting her forearm to wipe the shine from her brow before beginning to count our number of pieces.

While we waited, the girls and I made our way behind the house, startling black speckled hens with our steps. The ground below was dusty and rough with rocks and twisted roots; but the dust, as if pouring itself forth into regeneration, led into lushness upon lushness. First was green grass, followed by dew-dripping crop rows from which black tree trunks rose, the fullness of their green leaves like an open curtain. The leaves gave way to rising grey mountains which stood in untouchable friendship, as if they protected the lenca potters and their houses and the woman and child across the street scrubbing clothes on a washboard.

I breathed a moment and looked, then stepped to shed on the left. The floor was smooth concrete. The roof overhead was held up by four posts, the walls open. Aside from a small path that'd been cleared, piles and tubs full of yet-to-be finished pottery lined the shed floors. There were thousands of pieces, all of them light, wet looking grey.

I came to a yellow tub and leaned forward to see inside. The bottom was filled with birds like the one I'd held moments before, none of them with vibrant designs, but identically empty-eyed, each of them the same, murky grey as the pieces surrounding.

The birds stared blankly from their sides. To look at them was to lose sight of what they were, to understand them as a pointed pile of grey inside a plastic yellow circle. If not for remembering their future as polished cordovan individuals with designs of hand-drawn ivory, to look at them would be a minor heartbreak.

I considered the vastness of difference between the finished birds. No two were alike, but all were equally beautiful.

I considered the facelessness of the birds at my feet, and I remembered the dull monotony with which I lived each day in my disorder. I wanted to make myself exquisite and unique and beautifully alone; i wanted to be special and unordinary and above; but my very attempt at redemption reduced me to a diagnoses, a single number out of nearly 10 million females in my country alone who were waking up and thinking the very same thoughts. I stripped myself of me. I was empty-eyed and grey, a clay bird in a pile of identicals.

When for a moment, I understood what I'd done, understood what I was missing, and stepped into the fear, it was as if a kind Honduran women in dirty, black Mary janes and once-white apron reached into the tub and pulled me out. She dusted me off and rinsed me in water. She painted me with stripes and swirls and shapes- a design no other bird would ever have. She made me beautiful.

But to set the designs would require a time of firing inside the hot kiln behind her house. Once emerged from the flames, the designs would no longer be painted, they would be an irremovable part of me forever.

In many ways, recovery is like a hot kiln. It is uncomfortable and sweaty and sometimes it burns. But recovery, if maintained, will make each of us the person we are- the person we thought we would find in the grey.

Love,

ea

please accept my deepest apologies...

...as i've taken more than the brief hiatus i promised two posts ago. 

i was not relapsing, as i fear some of you may have suspected. i was recovering from a case of stubborn honduran diarrhea/fever which was followed by vacation bible school which was accompanied by a terrible cold (who gets a cold when its 120 degrees out?).

anyways...i'm back now.

my mom has kind of a terrible back that likes to wedge itself out of place time-to-time. it decided to wedge the other day and in an effort take better care of herself than usual (this stuff runs in families), she's actually staying off her feet, and asked that i help her by running a few of her errands today. for whatever reason, she didn't like when i referred to it as "doing her bidding".

one of the tasks scratched onto the post-it she gave me was to run by her place of employment (which happens to be my former high school) and pick up a few papers.

i always feel a little bit like i might have a nervous breakdown when i visit the old campus. it's just hard to reconcile my present self with my eating disorder's old stomping grounds.

i attempted to mask my discomfort from myself by defiantly swerving my car into a handicapped parking space. i'm an alum, i thought, i can park where i want.


i walked inside to the office and peaked down the hall, searching for the familiar face with access to the papers i was getting for my mom. moments later, her large brown eyes appeared from a small back office and we greeted one another.

"you look great!" she said knowingly.

to my pleasant surprise, i found myself happy that'd she'd said so. to my pleasant surprise, i felt my mouth turn upward into a smile and thank her, as if her words were a nice addition to a day with which i would otherwise have been perfectly content.

as i walked to my car with a manila folder newly tucked under my arm, i realized what people were really trying to say all those times when they said i looked "better" or "healthy" or "beautiful" or "glowing".

no one was trying to tell me i'd gained weight or that i was looking chubby or fat or any of the other irrational things i thought.

i thought about seeing a person after a measure of time and noticing that the person had gained a substantial amount of weight that they did not necessarily need. i thought about how dumb it would be to tell someone that they looked great if they'd gained a whole bunch of unnecessary weight and how most people would just say nothing.

in other words, the countless number of "you look so much better"s i've gotten and resented would never have formed as thoughts in any of their speakers' minds if i had been fat or an unneeded number of pounds larger when they said them.


what i took as flaming arrows that seared my heart and twisted my thoughts were really just people who loved me wanting to say, "hey- you didn't look so good for awhile- but now it doesn't hurt me to look at you- i see that you've experienced some victory and i wanted you to know that i noticed because i'm sure it's been hard."


fellow strugglers- if people are relieved to see us "healthy", so much so that they speak it aloud, then we must have looked worse than we knew before, and we must look far better than we know we look now.

it's good to be back.

love,

ea

some lovely facts.

1. i changed my plane ticket and therefore, am still in honduras

2. mi esperanza's awesome jewelry designer is here this week. we are collaborating on several projects and im learning lots from her.

3. tomorrow, some cool people and i are visiting a beautiful place full of artesian shops known as Valle de Angeles.

4. i have successfully incorporated a number of new words into my working spanish vocabulary.

5. my hondo-mom {lori connell: the woman in charge of mi esperanza} made banana walnut pancakes with nutella for dinner. we ate them outside and enjoyed them immensely.

of one mind.

im currently sitting in "my" bedroom in my missionary friends' house in honduras, listening to early birds chirp outside my open window and taking comfort in the humming breeze of the large white box fan at the right-hand foot of my bed.

beneath me is a patchwork quilt of a hundred different colors and behind me is a stack of feather pillows. i am exceedingly happy.

ive spent the past twelve days working again with mi esperanza, designing a couple of new products, loving the women we work with, and spending lots of time with the founder of mi esperanza, one of the very best people I know.

i can't excuse the past 12 day's lack of blogging with the fact that ive been busy. although I have been on somewhat of a constant go, i would be lying if i said that i haven't had plenty of time for writing at night; this is a third world country and im a young female- there's not a whole lot i can safely be up to after dark.

I hope that no one takes this wrongly, or assumes what i am about to say as anything more than temporary, but the reason that ive chosen to neglect the blog for nearly two weeks is simple: i haven't wanted to think about eating disorders.

my eating disorder was such a measure of who i was for so long, that when I went into recovery, I found myself wondering who I was supposed to be. for a time, i think it was necessary and i think it was healthy to just know myself as someone in recovery from an eating disorder. the absence of my disorder left me with little else to which i could cling. i thought just as much about recovery as id thought of my disorder- both were full time jobs- and both required constant care and maintenance.

ive often wondered about the distant future- when my recovery will be a fact about me, rather than the core of me. I used to fear the time that those days would come true- subconsciously imagining myself suspended in space with nothing to ground me, nothing solid to grab- when I though of them.

but here in honduras, i am wondering if those days are still so far away.

when im soaking in this time with some of the most precious souls I know, ive found that to divide my attention, to anchor a portion of my thoughts to my own recovery, to recovery in general, would not solidify who i am as one might think, but would dilute the kind of focus I want to give.

I am forever shaped by the road that ive walked, but im beginning to see that it is not where ive come from nor where im going that makes me worth being where i am right now.

i have not blogged for two weeks, because although my actions have continued to mirror that of a recovered lifestyle, my thoughts and my heart have been on the work here.

i am no less passionate about recovery from eating disorders. in some ways, i think i've found a new level of passion for recovery in my desire to separate my thoughts from recovery itself.

this is by no means the end of my blog. ill be back next week, but until then, i hope no one minds if i simply don't think about it.

ill still be me {if not, ill be more of me} when i get back.

love from Honduras,

ea...p.s...see a picture of mi esperanza's newest product below:

i've got a lot of things i want to say...

..so it's going to be hard to narrow them all down into one cohesive post, but i suppose i'll try.

i've spent this past week at the beach with my family. i always think a lot at the beach. i think its because my family is one of those families that likes to keep a lot of things the same. so we've essentially enjoyed the same basic beach vacation in the same condo on the same beach since i was 14. living the same week over and over, one time each year, is quite the thought-provoking tradition, as i can consolidate all the past year's changes and growth into my thoughts and feelings and responses and behaviors of this one week and compare it to its past versions.

i was walking down the beach early yesterday morning and talking with God. I found myself thinking that this was the best feeling in the world- communing with my father and best friend- hearing the heart-swelling whispers of His spirit inside me alongside the waves that He created, crashing at my feet.

my mind shifted, as it often does, to my disorder. and i thought that sometimes it felt like the best feeling in the world too. i spent a lot of time attempting to cater to my disorder and my life simultaneously- living ** or so pounds underweight, taking downward dives every so often, only to pull myself out for another few months' until i could stand it no longer and i gave in to the compulsion to dip down into worse danger again. each slip deeper into my disorder was a thrilling sense of rightness with myself and with the world. each lowering heart rate i counted, each grave look on my doctor's face when i was in high school, each walk up to my college dorm my junior year that i wasn't sure i was going to be able to finish gave me a feeling like i was holding a kite and it had suddenly caught wind- i was doing what i loved and i was doing it well. it was the best feeling in the world.

as lovely a feeling as immersion in one's greatest downfall can be, and as unpleasant as life so often is, I began to wonder how it is that anyone ever makes it out of anything. i concluded that the best way to describe the journey to recovery {from anything} is as a realization of how much one loves the thing one is supposed to hate; an admission that there are two "best feelings in the world". the one of them is real and true- it is a summation of all things felt and experienced- it allows and celebrates the feeling of all feelings- it is imperfect and it is human but it is life. the other, though safe and unpainful and avoidant, is a phony, hollow existence that if not death itself, is a direct route to it.

i'd been looking at the houses up the sand banks as i thought. my mind stilled and i shifted my gaze straight down the shoreline. The sun was barely out of the eastern most horizon. It shone low and bright on the morning waves. They were luminescent like molten silver, rising to a bright boil and crashing into the glittering sand. the stacks of distant high rises were a foggy, majestic gray, standing against the sky like a holy city, its only road the silver shore.

i turned and stood with my feet wide apart, facing outward to the endless ocean. to my left was the unearthly beauty of the rising sun on sea- a momentary manifestation of divine promise- what i will forever believe was in some way, a preview of my eternal home. to my right was a beach- it was a watercolor palette of blue and sand with white caps and a brushed blue sky. it was lovely. but compared to the regal sight to my left, to turn and to walk to the right would have been an utter waste.

it isn't often that we're allowed a black-and-white sort of picture of the choices we have in life. many times, we know little more than what's good and what's best, and we're afraid to choose what's best because we only know that the people we admire and God and everyone else think its best, and we're afraid that we'll give up what we know and love, only to find that what was supposed to be better isn't better at all. 

but as i stood there, staring out, turning my head to the left then to the right, i felt i was experiencing the way that many of our choices would look if we were able to see their consequences beforehand. 

but the thing is, we aren't able to see the outcome of our decisions before we make them. to really gain anything in life, (no pun intended) we have to submit ourselves to a measure of risk. we have to risk losing what we think we love, risk feeling what we thought would kill us to feel, risk doing what we thought would destroy us in order to find that for which we were really made to live. 

i suppose what distinguishes one "best feeling in the world" from another is identifying what we really want our lives to mean. i could refuse to eat another bite for the remainder of today, and i could put on my shoes and make my way to the elliptical and i could stay there and let the euphoric numbness mount and it would feel like the best feeling in the world. but i'm not living for numbness and i'm no longer living to be thin, so as good as immersing myself in my disorder may feel, it couldn't possibly be the best feeling in the world, because it is a path completely opposite from the one that i've chosen to take. 

sometimes, it's hard to face life without our downfalls, but it'd be harder to walk their shores knowing somewhere deep down that we were making the mistake of a lifetime.

love,

ea

a short {angry} rant.

i'm fairly sure that the majority of my posts serve as evidence of the fact that i am a selectively religious follower of grammar/punctuation rules.

although i disregard capitalization and find it simply unnecessary to avoid run-on sentences, i try my best to use its and it's in their correct contexts respectively {i've probably erred by sheer carelessness in a number of posts}, and i do not and will not end sentences with prepositions.

a preposition just before a period disgusts me about as much as another branch of grammar atrocities- the kind that fill female facebook walls and sorority girls' text messages- the kind involving unnecessary repetition of letters and exclamation points, obnoxious abbreviations and overuse of the words "sexy" and "girl" {the gym shorts and uggs combination of the english language, if you will}.

as much as these atrocities make my skin crawl by themselves, what brings me to a boiling anger- the kind so frustrating it's uncomfortable- is when these degradations of the english language are used to congratulate a girl on her recent weight loss.

i'm fully aware that there plenty of people whose health depend on them losing weight and that these people deserve to be encouraged when they succeed with healthier lives. but this morning, when i saw a photo of an alarmingly frail version of a friend of mine with comment after comment beneath it, i found myself clenching my jaw and both my fists.

"OMGGGGG my girl you look PERF!!!!!!!," one of the comments said. as horrible a version of english as the quote is, what's worse is the fact that "perfect" {or "perf" as the individual behind the quote has chosen as her means of conveying that her friend looks flawless} is something that young women in today's culture are taught to believe is achievable on any level, particularly through starvation and over exercise.

"sexxxxxy!!!!!!" another comment said. what isn't sexy at all is that the type of thin the girl photoed has reached, the type of thin our culture embraces as attractive is also the type of thin that disables a woman's estrogen production- virtually shutting off her reproductive system- disabling menstruation and poising her for premature osteoporosis by sucking calcium from her bones.

what's worse than any of the heinous abbreviations or abuse of exclamation points is the fact that the commenters continued throughout the facebook album's remainder to marvel over the photoed girl's weight loss, without realizing that their encouragement was much the same as telling an alcoholic to keep drinking- that they'd grown more successful, lovable and worthy since they'd taken to the bottle.

when i started losing weight, i remember the influx of congratulatory remarks that quickly became my daily sustenance. i lived for each one of them. family, friends, friends' families, teachers and people i barely knew all seemed to notice and all seemed to suddenly hold me with higher esteem than before. i thought i must have been doing something right, and as behavioral psychologists always say, behaviors that elicit reinforcement will be repeated. in other words, the comments made me feel really good, so i kept doing {and not doing} the things that got them coming in the first place. i do not blame any people or their attempted encouragement for deepening my dependence on my disorder. i blame our culture, rather, for being one leads its people to seek redemption and worth in physical appearances and obtainments rather than in things that actually matter.

the heart of the problem that's going to cause the photoed girl to read the comments on her album and continue doing {and not doing} whatever it is she's been doing {and not doing} is one with a long and difficult fix. changing a culture was never something that one person could do in one lifetime.

but helping one person with an eating disorder means as much as to me as helping a million, so i hope that this short {angry} rant will open at least one pair of eyes to the importance of cautiousness with weight loss comments.

you never know to whom {or what} you're talking.

love {and a little frustration, perhaps},

ea

one-year anniversary.

two days ago, i watched the sun rise from a plane that was 12 hours delayed. my dad and i made our way into the house, dropping our luggage inside the back door and rubbing our eyes as we stumbled up to our beds.

i woke up a few hours later with no sense of direction or purpose for the day other than to lie on the couch and watch crime shows on tv.

it's rare that i resign myself to the television for an entire day, but i was too tired and dull to really accomplish anything, so i thought it was fitting that i remain worthlessly on the couch and watch other people who hadn't spent the night in an airport terminal solve crimes.

it's also rare that i go a day without looking at my computer, but i was so tired that pulling my computer out of its sleeve in my backpack seemed like some unreachable task, so i let may 25, 2011 slip away without even realizing that it was may 25th.

i'm actually really good at going a fair number of days without ever knowing the actual date of any of them. i've managed to make it through life without ever missing any huge deadlines or events (not to say i haven't come close), but unfortunately, as i lay there watching CSI on wednesday, i let the first birthday of the blog go unacknowledged.

i don't suppose it's the blog's birthday that holds so much significance as it is the fact that it's been one year and two days since i let everyone know i was starting, "the rest of my life." this is the longest period of time since 2005 that i have lived life outside of my disorder, the longest period of time since 2005 that i have maintained my body weight within a recommended healthy range, and the longest period of time since 2005 that i have experienced consistent joy and peace.

{click the links! they are old posts :) )

on may 25, 2010, i wrote the first ever post of this blog. i wrote that i was mourning the loss of my disorder, but that i was persevering with the hope of a new morning- one that would be worth all my tears.

i was mourning the loss of my skinny body, of my size 0 clothes, but i tentatively embraced new sizes and months later, found myself basking in the morning glow of accepting my new self.

i was mourning the loss of what i felt made me worth something, but i awoke to a brilliant morning light, the light of Christ, and i learned i can't make myself worth anything, but He is worth everything and it is only in Him that my life can have meaning at all.

i was mourning the loss of my protector, but i awoke to a morning in which i felt strong enough to feel, to seek Christ's healing through the pain rather than my disorder's numbness outside the pain.

i was mourning the loss of the ease of restriction to combat bad body image, but i found myself thankful for the morning of my last final of college when i was able to succeed because i fought body image, instead of fighting my body itself.

i was mourning the loss of my "eating disorder foods". it's taken awhile, but i now celebrate morning after morning, each of them starting days during which i choose foods because i want them, not because i'm not afraid of them.

i now find myself mourning the sweet life- the morning- that this past year has unfolded. i'm going to miss my friends being next door and down the street, my apartment and my school.

but i look forward to the morning to come:

the morning when my friends and i adjust to living in different cities and fall into a rhythm as easy as what once was- the rhythm in which we stay close through phones and computers and girls' weekends- the rhythm that will result in our kids meeting each other one day.

the morning (the morning i was traveling last weekend to confirm): when i've grown accustomed to life in denver, colorado, where i'm moving in august to obtain a master's in counseling from denver seminary.

and all the mornings to follow. i've got no clue how they'll look, but i know how they won't look, and how they won't look, i've realized, isn't something to mourn.

it's something to celebrate.

thanks to each of you, whether you've been reading for a year or for a week. i can't describe what it means for caring people to walk beside me in this journey.

love,

EA