One messed up girls journey to peace.

When I first decided to share my testimony with you all I opened up the file on which I literally flooded my heart onto and began to edit. I took out all that I was ashamed off, all that showed that I don’t quite have it all together – because telling you all everything would be making myself very vulnerable through my eyes. But as I edited I realised that not only was I breaking my own top tips, I was just taking away from the story that god wants me too tell, and that our scars and our stories are what makes our walk with Christ our walk with Christ. So I am going to sit here tonight, and be as honest as I possibly can, because gods walk with us is about him meeting us where we are at, and accepting that its okay not to be okay.

So, I grew up in a non-Christian family, with very little Christian influence in my life. But for a child who was never really taught much about god I was still desperate to know him. I would pray the same prayer every night, asking for his protection and thanking him for his care – but that stopped eventually and I seamed to loose touch with the god that I had managed to somehow build a relationship with.

When I was 14 I became friends with a group of people who really weren’t good for me, and I guess this is where my road to Christ really begins. I was so excited to be part of a friendship group, and to be considered normal within that group that I would do anything I could to stay friends with those people. Even if it meant taking drugs and drinking, just because they were – I wanted to be valued; to me I was nothing without that group of friends. I was young, well younger than I am now, and I admit it naive – and it is not until now that I can actually see that everything was so very wrong and that it was all damaging. But when you are involved in it, and are right in the middle of it – it is very hard to see through the barrier you manage to put up between you and the truth.

Even from a young age I have been a complete perfectionist and to me nothing I did was ever good enough, so that coupled with being bullied at school left me with a pretty low opinion of myself. To me life has always been about being perfect, striving for perfection, but in reality it is a very well grounded person that feels like they have reached perfection. A few years ago I saw not being perfect was a symbol of my lack of control, and display of my weakness and foolishness. I felt like I was out of control of everything in my life, everything good I did seamed to lead to something bad and I was desperately trying to seek something in my life that I could control and that no one could take away from me.

So that was where the whole problem with eating began. It was something I could control on many levels. Not only could I control what i ate, but I could control how much weight I lost, how I ate and weather what I ate stayed inside me. The problem with eating disorders is that no matter how much you are controlling yourself it is never enough, and no matter how much weight you loose you always feel like you can afford too loose more. It spirals so out of control that you can hardly remember what life was like before, and what it feels like to be normal, I some how managed to convince myself that this was normal, this was self-control.

Its hard to hide an eating disorder for long though, and eventually no matter how good you get at deceiving people, people begin to see through the lies. I think my mum was in denial for a long time before she finally accepted what was happening. I was the good one, the one that always got glowing reports – the overachiever. How could something like this happen to me? But in all honestly I fitted and still do fit the profile of someone likely to develop Anorexia Nervosa, a perfectionist. Even now, years later I still wake up in the mornings wondering why on earth I am doing this, absolutely terrified that I am human and that I am not perfect and never will be. But now I have god in my life, he is a light and where there is light there can not be darkness.

Eating disorders, depression and the ritual of self harm that I was soon involved in seamed to strip me of everything that made me, me. I was not me, I was a danger to myself and I knew it, but didn’t care. So eventually doctors got involved, and around that time I was generally surviving on less than a meal a week, and a few sips of water each day and it wouldn’t be long before I would stop using toothpaste, convinced that there were calories in it, or drinking water, convinced that it would make me fat, but sometimes things have a way of needing to get worse before they get better.

I cant even remember what I looked like, I was too consumed with the distorted image of myself and the struggle for control. But it can’t have been nice. One of my best friends said, I looked like I was about to keel over any second, and I did - many a times. But this is where Christianity came into my life, and this is where god bestowed his grace upon me, by placing people in my life that could lead me to him.

My RS teacher was a Christian, and around the time all this was going on she took me under her wing. Treatment for an eating disorder is possibly one of the hardest things I will ever, and have ever done. It’s un-dignifying and terrifying, it feels like you are loosing everything that makes you, you. Imagine loosing all control of your body, you cant even lift a finger, that’s what it feels like. I remember one night being sat down with a slice of toast and not being allowed to move until it was gone. It took from 7pm until 3am for me to eat it.

But my RS teacher supported me through all of this. She showed me in her behaviour that she was Christian, I saw how content she was with her life, how no matter what happened she knew someone was looking out for her. I desperately wanted that in my life. So I started going to the lunchtime group which she ran for the Christian members of the school. So, after a couple of years of going to the Christian group and after I had ‘recovered’ from all that was going on in my life and in my head - I was in a state where I could understand what I was feeling. I went through a long battle with myself, part of me wanted to believe – the other part wouldn’t let me. I couldn’t understand how a loving god could let me go through so much pain, and I wouldn’t allow myself to believe in something that I couldn’t justify.

I can pin point the night I became a Christian. I went to midnight mass with the best friend who would later become a god parent and came home so over whelmed by what I had experienced that I sat there all night and just prayed. I prayed for everything, and for once in my life I feel like there was someone there who had seen me at my lowest, and still loved me for everything.

But god didn’t stop there; his grace is so amazing and so freely given that he continued to strengthen me in him building me into a much stronger and content person. In his grace he placed more people around me, people who would help me develop my faith, he gave me the opportunities to spread his word and the wisdom to know how to do so.

I wish I could say that I have never turned back, and for a long time I didnt, god was my rock and my mighty saviour. But at that time my view of god was nieve, I expected that my life would be plain sailing from then on, thinking that god had saved me from my pain, and that i had had my fair share of it, but I couldnt have been more wrong. A few years after all of this had happened I had just finished my GCSE's, a year late but I was predicted excelent grades and my faith in god was so strong. I had managed to piece my lifeback together and get on wth what I had always wanted to do, everything felt like plain sailing.

So when I started feeling depressed again, and anxious I fought it for a long time. I told myself that god wouldnt let this happen to me again, because I believe in him, and he loves me and will save me likehe did last time. But you can only fight with yourself for so long, and it wasnt long before the stress of it all began to cause me to crack. I slowly sank back into old coping mechanisms cutting down on meals for weeks at a time, and then going back to normal, self harming for a few days and then not doing it for another few weeks. The changes I saw in myself scared me, and I begain to loose my faith in gods love and goodness.

Thats the problem when you think with the narrow view that god will not let anything bad happen to you, when something does it shatters your foundation of faith. Like the man who build his house on sand, not rock. I never stopped believeing in god, or loving him, but I begain to question his love for me, and in time my prayers turned from prayers of pleas for healing to prayers of hatrid. People would say 'God knows what he is doing' or 'Its all hapening for a reason' whilst in my head I was thinking 'I dont care if there is a reason, a God who allows this is not a god I want to follow'. The foundations of my faith were wrong, it didnt take me much too loose them.

So after I stopped praying, and started cursing God, I lost all faith in him, adimant that I would not get a repeat of the help he gave me last time. Along with my loss of faith in him i lost my hope in him, and so I turned to myself to sort it out. Thats when things started getting messy, within a few months i had quit 6th form too depressed and anxious to carry on, a few weeks later I was mainly confined to my house, too scared to leave. It wasnt soon after that I started sellf harming again and stopped eating.

I felt deserted by god, and I wasnt only angry at myself, but at him. I didnt care what happened to me, and I felt like if he did care then he didnt care enough to sort it. So I started being really self destructive harming myself to make myself feel better and hopefully hurt god in the process. I wanted him to hurt like I was hurting. Selfish right? But the foundations of my faith had been knocked away, and I was left thinking - what now?

By the December I was getting close to breaking point, I was loosing weight rapidly, some weeks I would loose a pound a day, and i was constantly suicidal. I figured that hell couldnt be much worse than what I was feeling right now, so if I went there who am i to care. I thought that rock bottom was as low as you could possibly go, that it couldnt get anyworse, but when i wasnt expecting things to be able to they did.

I realised that things could get worse, so I either had to get it over with and end my life, or try and get better. So I started praying, praying that god would sort out my treatment so that I could get some help, rather than just a doctor who was at his wits end, but it didnt come. To me that was the final straw and in the Feburary I took an overdose and ended up in hospital. The day I took that overdose I was at my wits end, i had had enough of life and of living. I felt deserted by god, and let down by whatever system was there to help me.

After that things started looking up, i started trusting god again and slowly with the help of some amazing youth leaders and friends I started to rebuild the foundations of my faith. I started reading the bible more, praying more, asking others to pray for me and I started to gain a better understanding of where my faith let me down. God didnt let me down, my faith and its foundations did.

Im still working on it now, building my life back up, and my faith. But this time I am building it on rocks.

If you feel trapped by your food addiction, there is hope and help available. Whether you struggle with binge eating or another eating disorder, find support at heartsupport.com.