Browsing Tag

anorexia

Guest Posts, Eating Disorders/Healing, Eating/Food

My Food Obsession

October 18, 2020
food

By Sarah Losner

On a Saturday morning the local Whole Foods is stocked with shipments of fresh produce. A myriad of canned and boxed foods line the shelves. Delightful smelling breads from the bakery section, and the aromas Indian cuisine from the open buffet make their way to the noses of shoppers, ready to stock their panties and refrigerators. The store is bursting with color and life.

Without a shopping cart or basket, I scan the aisles meticulously. I’m not looking for anything in particular, rather, you could say that I’m looking at everything. I run my hand on the outside of an avocado, feeling the grooves along the peel with my fingertips. I put a lime beneath my nose, smelling the rind and imagining what scents the insides will yield. A bag of chips makes a crinkling sound as I hold it in my hands. The bag is light and airy. In the candy aisle, I pick up bars of chocolate and turn them to the back, examining the label in the same way that a researcher analyzes a science experiment. Taking notes, paying attention to detail, absorbing the information. I decide to buy a chocolate bar.

Upon leaving the store and returning to my car in the parking lot, I remove the chocolate bar from the paper grocery bag. I turn to the nutrition label on the back of the packaging. There are 370 calories in a serving, and two servings per bar. Since there are twenty squares of chocolate in one bar, a single square must contain 37 calories. I pride myself on being good at math.

I carefully open the package and separate one chocolate square from the remaining 19. The chocolate sits in the palm of my hand for many minutes. The more I stare at it, the more it looks like God – something that exists beyond my comprehension. Metaphysical. I bring the chocolate square to my mouth and stop. I’m not ready for this. I put it in a ziplock bag that I brought with me from home. I write the number 37 in a note on my phone so that I don’t forget, and throw the ziplock bag into the back seat of my car. Then, I return my attention back to the remaining chocolate bar.

With the wrapper on, I put the bar in my mouth and chew, trying to imagine how my tastebuds would perceive the sweet taste, and how my tongue would embrace the smooth texture. I chew a few times before the packaging rips and an inkling of chocolate goes into my mouth. One calorie. Probably. I throw the chewed up chocolate bar out of the car window and begin to cry. It’s almost noon. I have spent my entire morning immersing my senses in food, and yet I am starving.

People with Anorexia love food. We love food so much that we consume it all day. We watch Tasty cooking videos and the Food Network for hours in a single sitting. We look through pictures in cookbooks. We bake and stir and fry and steam and make others eat the food we concoct. We put food in our mouths to absorb the flavors, then spit out the chewed up remains into a nearby garbage can. Food occupies our minds all day long. We can’t get enough of it; we just can’t eat it either.

I suffered from Anorexia during my college years. It stared out with small restrictions. Instead of eating desert every night, I limited myself to once a day. Coke and other sodas were replaced with the zero calorie versions. I stopped using oil when cooking and swore on Pam spray instead. Soon, I stopped going out to dinners with friends and family. I refused to eat while anyone was looking at me. Somewhere along the way I stopped eating meals altogether.

I was in denial about my eating disorder for a long time because of my weight. It’s a common misconception that people who suffer from Anorexia have to be thin. In reality, anyone, of any size could be suffering from the illness. Anorexia is a mindset coupled with restrictive food behaviors. Not everyone’s body will become thin from restriction. Some bodies even gain mass in a restrictive state because hen a person is starving, the body has a tendency to hold onto calories and fat, not knowing when it will next receive nutrients.

Starving people are often obsessed with food. These obsessions don’t take form overnight. They are brought on by a void. Something that is missing in a person’s life that he or she is longing to fill. In some cases, the void is filled in a healthy manner. In others, it’s done dangerously. I think that for me, that void was uncertainty. Back in college, I didn’t now what grades I would get on exams, the kind of firm that I would end up working for, or if I would have enough money to move out on my own. I was insecure in my friendships and didn’t know if I would get invited to parties or events. I realized that one of the only things that I could control and was certain about was what went into my mouth.

When I first started to restrict my food intake, I felt powerful. I made lists of the foods that I would eat on a specific day well in advance. I calculated the calories and fat grams in each food I ate to ensure that I knew the exact nutrients that were going into my body. I knew exactly what my mornings, afternoons, and evenings would look like concerning food and other eating disorder related-behaviors. The uncertainty that I had once felt was removed from my life completely. I couldn’t focus on anything other than food.

When I was sick I also had an extreme fear of losing control. Food seemed to be everywhere. It was always following me. I know now that I was hyperaware of food in the world around me because I was starving. Every aroma smelled more potent. Colors were more vibrant. When people around me were eating food, I could hear every bite. The sound of teeth crunching potato chips sounded like the waves of the ocean. It brought me peace and calmness to see others eating knowing that I had the will power to resist.

The more I controlled my food intake, the more I was sucked into the grasp of my eating disorder. I felt a sense of gratification from using food to fill a void in my life, and that gratification was addictive. I restricted more and more until I was in a state of starvation. My starving brain went to extreme lengths to obtain food. One of the ways I tried to fill my need for food was by visiting markets and grocery stores. Walking the aisles of the grocery store on my leisure time was one of my many ways of consuming food without having to eat it. Food was the number one priority in my life.

One day a friend called and told me that he was “breaking up” with me as a friend. I was never there for him anymore. I seemed distant and distracted. I missed his birthday party a few weeks earlier and didn’t send a card. I was devastated. Later that day I typed the question “Do I have an eating disorder?” into Google. One of the top results was an advertisement for a clinic near where lived. I booked an appointment for later in the week. During that appointment I was diagnosed with Anorexia.

While some are obsess over Instagram, or sex, or material things, others are fixated on basic necessities that are needed to live. Obsessions aren’t inherently bad, but they should be checked when they start interfering with health or relationships. In recovery I have been working hard on creating healthier obsessions for myself. I obsess over the spring with all its vibrant flowers. I obsess over my friend’s birthdays, the color purple, or a great book. I obsess over a really good milkshake. I just don’t let that milkshake obsession permeate into other parts of my life.

Sarah Losner is from Long Island, NY. She loves reading and writing essays and poetry. Her poetry has been published by Indolent Books.

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Guest Posts, eating disorder, Young Voices

Ana

January 22, 2018
control

Note from Jen Pastiloff, founder of The Manifest-Station. This is part of our Young Voices Series for Girl Power: You Are Enough. We are always looking for more writing from YOU! Make sure you follow us on instagram at @GirlPowerYouAreEnough and on Facebook here.

by Rachelle Cameron

Ana was my best friend. She was the one there late at night when everyone else was sleeping, the one there who always had faith I could meet each goal of mine, and the one always telling me how proud she was of me. We were inseparable for over a year. In October of 2017 I officially laid Ana down to rest, it was one of the hardest decisions of my life, but also one of the best decisions of my life.

Ana and I met when I was twenty-one, we were friends for a few months before she ended up leaving. I thought she was gone forever, but in January of 2016 she came back. I still remember the moment I realized she was back.  I realized it in May, I was standing with my back against the kitchen counter talking about if I was going to eat dinner or not with my grandmother. It dawned on me as I told her that I was going to skip dinner tonight that Ana was back. It was a comforting moment in my life, a calming moment in my life and an exciting moment in my life. My best friend was back. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Eating Disorders/Healing

How To Get Over An Eating Disorder

August 25, 2017
cookies

By Sarah Simmons

It’s 3:58pm, known around the parenting world as the witching hour.  Babies and toddlers are terribly whiny and you’re not sure what to do about it. It’s too early for dinner but it’s also too late to plan an outing.  For me it’s a time where I restlessly walk around the condo past the accumulating crap of life,  pile of laundry and the kids because I should and could be playing with them or folding the clothes or even getting to the closet that needs to be organized but I don’t. Instead my mind keeps wandering to food.

My dinners are the same every night.  Some sort of vegetable with ranch dressing. The same so I don’t have to think about it. It’s light enough where I’m not full and then can go to town on what I really want, which are the cookies.  But it’s not just a woman sitting down with 3 cookies on a plate daintily munching whilst watching Modern Family.  It’s a woman shiftily going back and forth from living room to kitchen, like an alcoholic,  to reach under the cabinet where one of the several 2 pound bags of animal crackers lie open,  to grab handful upon handful until most of the bag –okay the entire bag- is empty.  I crave these things all day long  and try to plan it so I might possibly eat less. Like, maybe if I eat dinner late enough then I will be too sleepy to eat?  It doesn’t work.

Eating has represented more for me than hunger. Food=control=suffering=filling a void.  I don’t know how these things come to be or why I can’t just have a healthy relationship with food but I do know this: Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, depression, Eating Disorders/Healing, Writing & The Body

A Tale of 19 Wet Towels or How I Failed to Shed My Skin

March 23, 2017
towel

By Ella Wilson.

1. Birth

Every time in my life that I have had the opportunity – that is to say I have been in the presence of a huge coming or going or leaving or starting, a massive adding on or taking away – every time I have had the chance to step out, to leave behind, to shed, to transform, to butterfly, to snake – every time I could have showered off the detritus of some time in my life that lay heavy on my skin. Every time I could have grown, instead I wet-toweled.

2. Starting school

Here is how you wet-towel. You take the thing you might have stepped out of, a skin, a time, a loss, a tiny pair of pants, a hit in the face. You take that thing and you wrap yourself in it.

3. Suicide attempt age 12

You shiver at first because the wet towel makes you cold. The weight of it makes you slow. After a few days you start to smell old and nothing seems like a very good idea.

4. Puberty

Shame is sticky and the antidote to transformation.

5. Losing my virginity

Shame tells you to hide, unfortunately the tools it gives you for hiding promote shame on shame. Shameless self promotion.

6. Leaving school

When you would rather not be seen it is preferable to hide in anything you can find.

7. Leaving home

8. Getting a job

9. My father dying

When my father died I did not notice. This is not because I was not paying attention exactly, in fact I paid so much attention, maybe too much. Nursing him from when I was 13 to 22. But something can become normal, like someone being ill, like thinking someone won’t really die. So I slept on his hospital floor for months. I swabbed his throat with little pink sponges. I knew the nurses names. He died. I wanted to stay on the floor. I wasn’t ready not to have a father. I wore his clothes. I didn’t cry. I did not become fatherless. I just became personless.

10. Moving to America

11. Being hospitalized for anorexia

12. Getting married Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, Eating Disorders/Healing, Young Voices

Eight Years Later And I’m Still Not Better

July 27, 2016
healing

Note from Jen Pastiloff, founder of The Manifest-Station. This is part of our Young Voices Series for Girl Power: You Are Enough. We are always looking for more writing from YOU! Make sure you follow us on instagram at @GirlPowerYouAreEnough and on Facebook here.

By Alyssa Limperis

I can still remember coming home from the doctor and hearing my mom ask, “Did he say you were better?” She was referencing my 9-month old eating disorder of anorexia. At about month 8, I’d decided that I wanted to start getting help. I wanted to start getting better. I’d decided I wanted to stop blacking out every weekend, to stop being freezing in the summer, to stop waking up at 5am to work out for 2 hours, to stop only sleeping for 3, and to stop dreading daylight because it meant the beginning of starvation.

I didn’t want to be possessed by a nasty dictator. I wanted to be free. I longed to take a bite into an apple without feeling disgusted with my weak self. I wanted to undo the damage I had done to my decaying bones. I wanted to be normal again. And so I went to get help. And a month later my mom asked if I was better. And in that month, I knew what that answer would be for a long time. I
quickly realized this wasn’t a cold. I couldn’t get a Z-pack and be ready for work on Monday. I had learned ugly truths. I had memorized specific details. I had lived in a frail body. Those are not strands of mucus that get blown into a tissue and
disappear. Those are pieces of knowledge that got lodged into my brain. My underfed, misguided brain. Continue Reading…

Eating Disorders/Healing, feminism, Guest Posts

You Really Should Be Skinnier

August 18, 2015

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By Jen Pastiloff.

There was this guy who came in the Newsroom, where I worked. Damn girl, they been feeding you. He actually said that as he reached for my stomach. He tried to touch me as he hurled that insult at me like I was some animal in a cage. Like I was someone he felt he actually had a right to touch. It was all I could hear for days: Damn girl, they been feeding you. As I put food in my mouth: Damn girl, they been feeding you. As I waited on customers: Damn Girl, they been feeding you.

This morning, a beautiful woman who attended my New Year’s Retreat in Ojai posted on our secret page. Yes, we have secret pages. We are super secret spies.

She posted this:

I had a man tell me last night as a “well intentioned tip” that if I wanted to get serious about making a living selling healthy food, I would need to lose weight.
I was once a size 16. Now, I’m a size 4.
When does the insanity stop???

Then this:

And I know I should get over it and move on. But see, I don’t fucking want to. I want to harness this pain and shame and embarrassment and create a safe haven for people who just want to be WELL. Who just want to be ENOUGH. Thank you again, Jen, for providing this little tiny safe haven in this big bad ugly world. It’s so hard to do all of this alone.

That is all I ever want to do, create a safe haven so someone, maybe one person, does not feel so alone. Watch the video below and post your thoughts on this topic, if you would. I am so passionate about us embracing our beauty no matter what. Those last words are key.

No.

Matter.

What.

This work I am doing with Girl Power is so important. It’s important for all of us, but my God, I want to start in on them young. A couple years ago I was having lunch with a guy friend and he said, “With a few tweaks, your body would be perfect.”

Another guy, “You only have a little layer of sweetness on you.”

A manager, from my “acting” years, “Lose ten pounds. You have nothing right now but how you look and so you need to look as perfect as you can be.”

These things have gotten stuck. I get it. I do an exercise that you know of if you have attended my workshops. The one and the one hundred. If you have a hundred people in a room and they all love you except one, who do you focus on?

Most say “the one.”

This is why I created this quote:

It's a huge honor to have another card up at Emily McDowell Studio. Click to order.

It’s a huge honor to have another card up at Emily McDowell Studio. Click to order.

Continue Reading…

Don't Be An Asshole Series, Eating Disorders/Healing, Guest Posts, Jen Pastiloff, Jen's Musings

I Can Grab My Belly Fat & Make It Talk. I Am Enough. PS- This Shit Is Hard.

June 25, 2015

By Jen Pastiloff

Hi! Gotta make this quick because I am packing to leave for Italy. I am leading a retreat there starting Saturday. I am not packed and I leave in two hours. I rule.

So, the demons have been back lately. I have been struggling. Who knows why? Free floating anxiety, not-so free floating, the kind that latches on and pulls me down real low to the earth, the kind that sits on my chest and won’t get off like a little bitch. Even when I call it a little bitch, it won’t get off. I have been watching Orange is The New Black and I’m all prisony. And yea, I too have a crush on the new girl on it. Ruby Rose. But I also have a crush on Pennsatucky and Black Cindy and Poussey and Taystee. And the whole show. I want to marry it! I am five years old. I love it so much that I want to marry it.

Anyway, the little bitch that is anxiety won’t get off my chest so my breathing is shallow and  I feel ungrounded, like I am floating, except that sounds kind of nice, and anxiety is not nice, so less like floating and more like a walking dead person. A walking panicky dead person. I hide it well. Probably not, actually. Ask any of my friends who get crazy texts from me.

In case you are new to my blog or my work, I had a severe eating disorder. It still haunts me at times. Anorexia and over-exercising. Like 5 hours a day exercising. Meh. (I probably could do that again if I could watch Orange is The New Black the whole time but nah. Gross.)

I can grab my belly fat & make it talk. So? I challenge you today to love your body. No matter what.

I posted this video on my instagram and challenged women (and men if they want to play too) to post a picture or video of their body using the hashtag #iLovemybody and #girlpoweryouareenough. My friend Maggie tweeted me this:
@JenPastiloff I think she’s just saying that you are awesome to accept yourself exactly as you are, when she can’t do the same.

Continue Reading…

Eating Disorders/Healing, Guest Posts, Jen Pastiloff, Jen's Musings

The Struggle Is Real: Body Love.

June 1, 2015

beauty-hunting-jen-logo-black1-300x88

By Jen Pastiloff

Body image. Self-love. The struggle is real. Or can be. I keep seeing that hashtag everywhere. #Thestruggleisreal. In this case it is.

But it doesn’t have to be.

What if we embraced our bodies? What if we loved our bodies, belly rolls and wrinkles and grey hairs and our butts and our teeth (even the one that’s missing because you never got an implant, Jennifer.) What if?

The struggle is real. Especially for me, having dealt with severe anorexia and exercise bulimia (I used to work out for four to five hours a day. Really.) But maybe it is for you too. I shared this video on my Facebook (the one below) and it got over 70 thousand hits in a few days. So I guess the struggle is real for more than a few of us. I’m not that special. (Isn’t that just a wondrous epiphany- when we realize that we aren’t that special? It’s so freeing! Weeeee! I am not alone in my fucked-upedness.)

What if our bodies became our best friends? As my friend Wren Thompson-Wynn wrote here on this very site, “My body. It’s the only one who has been with me and experienced everything with me through my entire life. No one knows me like my body does. She really should be my best friend. So why don’t I let her be?”

I realized that in writing Girl Power: You Are Enough, and in leading these workshops, that I have to be held accountable. I have to walk the talk, as they say. whoever “they” are, the powers that be, the ones who watch over you and call you out for being full of shit. I can’t sit here feeling my stomach fall over my waistband and have it send me into a panic induced slump of feeling worthless. That rabbit hole is hard as hell to emerge from. I lived in it for years. I wore platform shoes and waited tables on concrete floors as I secretly grabbed my fat rolls and vowed, “Tomorrow I will not eat. Tomorrow I will be good.”

I saw a video last week that broke my heart. This 37 year old woman, Rachel Farrokh, was begging people to help her raise money so she could get treatment for her anorexia. She weighs 45 pounds, her husband has to carry her up and down the stairs because she is so weak. As I watched it, I said, “I was never that bad.” And I wasn’t. But it’s not hard to imagine. That rabbit hole. There it is again. Just a little more and I will be happy. Just a little more and I will be in control. Just a little more and I will be perfect. Just a little more and I will be enough. <<< BULLSHIT.

You never arrive at the destination of “Yes, I am finally here. I finally love myself,” by starving yourself. NEVER.

I hope she gets the help she needs, I really do.

28EC042D00000578-3090351-Plea_Rachael_Farrokh_from_California_who_has_been_battling_anore-a-5_14322094324322902147E00000578-3094067-image-a-25_143239084465228EC182C00000578-3090351-Shocking_In_the_footage_she_explains_how_her_condition_has_sever-a-1_1432209432380

 

So I made this video on set (aka my living room) and people went crazy for it. I wanted to barf a little as I was making it and immediately after but I posted it anyway. You can watch below right here.

 

Do you love your body?

Continue Reading…

depression, Guest Posts, Truth, Video, Vulnerability

The Truth About Depression. No Bullshit.

May 11, 2015

beauty-hunting-jen-logo-black1-300x88

 

By Jen Pastiloff

I just got back from leading a beautiful retreat for Mother’s Day. I feel hung over today. From love. Is that even a thing? It is now. I’m in bed trying to process it all. One of my favorite writers came, Christa Parravani, who is a dear friend. She wrote the book Her. If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend it highly. I also partnered with Christy Turlington Burns’ Every Mother Counts and gave away a free spot. It was a remarkable and heart-mending weekend. It is truly a great honor to support Every Mother Counts.

At one point, we were talking about depression and I mentioned an essay I had written last year on my own depression and how I had gone off of my anti-depressants. I said to the group, “I wrote this essay about going off my meds. I’m back on now and I haven’t written about it because it’s no one’s business.” It’s not. I am not ashamed of it but it’s not my job to alert the media of everything. So I said that and then decided that maybe I should make a video about it. Who knew my videos were going to be such a thing. Must be the high production value. (Not.)

So I had a beautiful lunch and went out to sit in the cacti and I couldn’t do it. My hands were shaking and I started to sweat. I started and stopped it five times. I couldn’t do it.

I never get scared to make videos or write. Except when I do. And when I do, it’s usually something that I have to do.

Like I always say, I am afraid I a lot. But I do it anyway. I buy my fear a cup of coffee (or wine) and show it how it’s done.

I thought that making a video about being back on my anti-depressants was like a who the f*ck cares? kind of thing. I mean, I am not curing cancer or saving babies. Who cares that I take meds? But after I shared that I was back on and I was not ashamed five people in five minutes came up to me to thank me.

I had hired a sound therapist to give a sound concert for the people at my retreat with Tibetan singing bowls and a gong. Her name is Fawntice Finesse and she’s magic. For real. Anyway. We went into the yoga studio for the concert. Everyone was lying on their mats with their eyes covered and their socks and I shot up. I knew I had to make the video. I quietly stepped over all the bodies as the sun was setting and, with still shaking arms, made the video below.

I am not ashamed of being on anti-depressants. This is not to create a debate about whether you should or should not be on meds. This is not to discuss which meds I am on or how many milligrams. This is to create an honest discussion about depression, about how it does not define us, about how we must do what it takes to get out of bed. How it does not define us. Just like if you have cancer, you are not your cancer. You are not your job. You are not your depression.

I remember when that essay of mine went viral. I made the mistake of reading a few comments before I realized I was never to do that again. Maybe you should reconsider leading “inspirational” retreats, lady? Maybe you should stop taking people’s money? Maybe you should do more yoga?

I never call my retreats inspirational just like I never call myself an inspiration. If someone says that about me, well, I have no say in that. I do my best to share about my own journey and to have a sense of humor. And to love. That’s it.

My workshops are not woo-woo although Kaisa McDonnall Coppola, from my Mother’s Day Retreat said this, “Loved loved loved the retreat. I can’t imagine how you even describe your retreats other than kumbaya-badassness-where we get to say ‘fuck’ out loud and in our journals. Thank you, Jen…you are sending out ripples of coolness all over the world.”

We do (a little) yoga, we share, we listen, we let the snot fly, we sing, we pay attention. I am certainly not preaching “Positive thinking.”

But there was a little part of me that was afraid that I was shooting myself in the foot by talking so openly about this stuff. I realized, however, that this was precisely why I had to share. I want to take the stigma away from this. I am not encouraging you to walk down the street vomiting your secrets or over-sharing. But I realize there is so much shame and misunderstanding surrounding mental health and depression that perhaps I would be doing a great disservice if I wasn’t forthcoming. After all, I am not ashamed, so why not speak of it?

I have been depressed since I can remember. Then my dad died and that nearly took the life out of me. I left NYU with one year left after being a scholar because of my severe depression and anorexia. And yet, I never did a damn thing about it. When I finally had another breakdown years later at the restaurant I had been working at for thirteen years, I finally went on anti-depressants.

And they saved my fucking life.

Did they make me “happy?”

No.

But they threw down a rope into the well I had been stuck in and I began to climb out, little by little. And my life changed. And I didn’t want to die anymore.

Cut to about a year and a half or two years ago. My life was “amazing” by any standards. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get pregnant but I knew I couldn’t with the particular meds I was taking so I began to ween off because hey, my life was amazing and I maybe wanted to have a baby. Maybe.

The truth: It was terrible being off. My life was amazing amazing amazing just look at her amazing life and yet, I couldn’t even get out of bed to brush my teeth. But still, I stayed off. I weened off slowly.

I would get hundreds of emails a day (yes, a day), and lead retreats and I had a great husband and yet.

I felt flat and like a nothing person.

All the amazingness does not matter when you have something chemically awry in your brain or you are dealing with depression. I don’t need to remind any of us of Robin Williams, do I?

I finally was completely weened off (I went very slowly as I couldn’t afford to go through any serious withdrawal.) The minute I was 100% clear of my meds, we tried to get pregnant. Once.

And it worked.

It was an emotional roller coaster, to say the least, and then, the pregnancy ended up being ectopic.

Here I am, off my meds. Pregnant and then no longer pregnant. I am slowly slipping father and farther drown the rabbit hole. Then, I break my foot.

You would have thought I was dying. It affected me so profoundly and I fell into possibly the darkest place I have ever been in. Continue Reading…

eating disorder, Eating Disorders/Healing, Guest Posts

Losing My Soul Sister To An Eating Disorder

April 6, 2015

beauty-hunting-jen-logo-black1-300x88By Jessica Lucas.

Some of this content may be triggering to anyone who has struggled with an eating disorder.

It was the day of the Leeza talk show taping. The topic: eating disorders. I walked into the Hollywood studio prepared to talk about the one thing that tormented and tortured me every day, anorexia, and I had never felt so overwhelmed, frightened, and ALONE – even as I was surrounded by hundreds of studio audience members.

“No one understands. No one gets it. No one can relate. No one will care. I’ll sound crazy. I’m not sick enough. I’m not smart enough. I’m not articulate enough. I’m not thin enough. I won’t make any sense. I am all alone.” The all too familiar harsh criticisms and relentless fears ran through my mind more quickly than I could slow them down or resist them.

As I began to feel like a deer in the spotlights – visibly shaking, paralyzed with fear, drained of all color, wondering what I’d gotten myself into and ready to turn and run away – the studio wrangler led me to my seat near the stage.

Immediately, I was drawn to the woman with the comforting smile, Bo Derek-like braids in her blonde hair, and big blue eyes sitting in front of me. I knew her, but I didn’t know her. I loved her, but I’d never met her. I related to her, but we’d never spoken. We were best friends, but I’d never seen her before. Continue Reading…