my deepest secret
My deepest secret is becoming less secret.
This makes me feel a lot of things – fragility, fear, and an impulsive urge to run back in time so I can shove everything back under the rug and exist alone with my “thing” in darkness. Buyer’s remorse so to speak.
But with each passing day, each therapy session completed and support group attended, I feel myself moving further away from that rug. Like the ocean’s tide pulling me away from the sands of a shore I’ve come to know and love. The shore I’ve built my life, body, and brain around for as long as I can remember.
“I have an eating disorder.”
“I can’t feel hunger.”
“I like feeling hungry.”
“I never realized my extreme fatigue was connected to my food intake until I got treatment.”
These are things I’m hearing other women say in my weekly support group. Other women that are also me. They’ve given me words to describe my experience in ways I’ve never been able to do for myself. They’ve given me the courage to say them out loud.
I hear myself stumble over the words. Choked by the size of the letters and sharpness of the sounds they make on vocal cords that aren’t used to speaking about the unspeakable. I stutter through it, barely recognizing myself, and notice how good I feel once I finish. Like how unbuttoning your jeans after a big meal makes more space to breathe, I feel like that.
I didn’t realize I was holding so much in, on the brink of bursting from pressure, until I started letting the words fall out.
The women in the group look like me but I don’t know their names. I don’t know anything about them except that they have an eating disorder. Meaning they know more about my human experience than every other person in my life.
That’s the power of support groups, right?
If you’ve lost a child or survived cancer and you meet others who can say the same, the shared experience somehow means more than the name of the person sitting in the circle beside you. It’s the club you never wanted to belong to, but the club that sustains your next breath, and the one after that.
My deepest secret is becoming less deep; small shovels of dirt uncovering more of the box I’ve spent my life burying and reburying for reasons I know and reasons I don’t. They say you have to thank your eating disorder because it helped you cope with something hard, it developed for a reason.
I’m not there yet.
I’m not far enough away to see it as something separate from me, but maybe that day will come.
My deepest secret is becoming less secret. This terrifies me because it means that I am losing control (and I really like control, or the illusion of it anyway). But when I sit with the terror and with the angst, I notice a tiny corner of relief peeking out from behind the shadows.
I don’t know what’s next, and I don’t know anything about how to get there, but I do know I could use some relief. Shedding secrets is sacred, and exhausting work.
With shovel in hand, and women by my side, I excavate.
Love,
Justine
Reflection
Ask yourself, what is your deepest secret?
Are you carrying something that is ready to come into the light?
What does “the light” look like? (i.e. putting words on a page, speaking with a therapist, painting, asking for help, etc.)