REWRITING THE FUTURE
When I was 19, up until my early thirties, with the exception of a few years here and there where I managed to opt out of it, I was making myself throw up up to six times a day.
I wasn’t bulimic! Oh no, not that! I just … seemed to have this need to mainline block after block after block of chocolate, mainly, or any sort of easily downed junk food I could get my hands on, really, and then purge it back up again.
I knew I wasn’t bulimic because I still ate healthy meals, and kept them down, and so therefore I clearly just had some kind of minor binging issue, right?
Right?!
It’s hilarious (said with an eye roll) that how all this started was simply that I one day needed to go workout and I’d pigged out on Pizza Shapes.
Pizza Shapes, for my non-Aussies, are a staple and essential food to any decent upbringing in Australia. A delightful gluten-ous snack (baked not fried!), with pizza flavoured topping on them.
I don’t know why it was Pizza Shapes, BBQ Shapes were always my preferred flavour (does ANYBODY actually eat the Chicken ones, seriously?!), but I guess we didn’t have any around that day.
Anyway,
My stomach was too full to workout, and it was annoying me.
A few years earlier, when we’d been living in Germany (until I was 16), I’d done my school work experience at the State Library in Darmstadt. I wanted to be around books 🙂
One of my tasks was filing about a gajillion copies of old American ‘Seventeen’ and ‘Glamour’ magazines. I read them as I filed. And I remembered reading a few stories about girls who stayed really skinny by making themselves throw up. Apparently the trick was to eat a carrot first because when the carrot came out it meant you’d brought everything up.
I’m not sure if this is true … and having binged and purged for 13+ years of my life off and on I’m mildly embarrassed to say I never got around to testing it. I was always in too much of a hurry to get the food down and escape the anxiety, the stress, the panic, to go looking for carrots.
Anyway.
That first time wasn’t about a need to escape, to get my head above water in a life which was off the rails, to BREATHE, it was literally – my stomach was full, and I wanted to work out.
I did it in the gym toilets where I worked and worked out, and God damnit it was hard! Not as glamorous and easy as Glamour and Seventeen had made it look or sound … which they had done, whatever their intention was!!
It hurt my throat.
It rubbed skin off my knuckles.
I was sweating and red.
It wouldn’t come up properly.
It was gross.
But eventually I was done, and I went and worked out.
I don’t remember when the next time happened, but I think for a little bit it was just – “oh, I ate too much and now I need to workout, that’s inconvenient”. I don’t say ‘just’ to make light of this or imply that’s okay, by the way! But I am differentiating between doing it for that reason, and what it later became about.
What it later took my LIFE over about.
When I was 23, my first serious boyfriend, who I later went on to marry anyway … as ya do … or at least as the me of 16 years ago did … told me he had cheated on me.
Weirdly, he wrote it on a napkin even though we were sitting right there together at the kitchen table. He told me he had something to tell me … I thought maybe he’d planned a surprise trip … he started writing down something on this napkin and bizarrely I decided he was drawing some kind of crossword puzzle where I would have to guess where we were going.
Instead when he passed me the napkin I read – “I have cheated on you”.
In that moment, my entire world imploded.
It’s only recently I’ve acknowledged that it then wrote the future for me for about, well – hmmm, 15 or so years after that. Aka until I recently cleared it, in preparation for the new and OH so fuck yes relationship I know I am now calling in.
Before he told me he’d cheated on me, I’d never entertained such a possibility. It didn’t even exist in the realm of possibility for me. It absolutely floored me, left me gasping breathless ON the floor, and then running in my pyjamas down the street, barely able to breathe I was crying so hard, run run running back to my parents house which wasn’t far from where we lived.
Anyway –
This is not a post about THAT.
After a few days of being apart from him, I couldn’t bear it anymore. I loved him so much. And –
I was terrified of nobody else ever loving me.
I went back.
Because he’d been so honest with me I decided to be honest too, and I told him about the not-bulimia-just-throwing-up-thing.
Maybe I am grateful now for what he did (of course I am, I’m grateful for every thing in my life as it has brought me the learning I needed and also CALLED IN), because had he not have then maybe I would never have set on the recovery path which I did.
Well, I guess I would have eventually!!
Anyway. He found a medical doctor who was also a psychologist and an eating disorders specialist, and he booked me in.
The day of the appointment I decided I didn’t need to go. “I don’t need to, I don’t have a problem, I can stop anytime!”
He literally picked me up kicking and screaming and biting him (he was about 105kg and BUILT; I had no chance) and locked me in the car and dragged me there.
I’m so grateful, for THAT!
Dr Mary, in many ways, saved my life.
I haven’t seen or spoken to her for a few years, but up until even not long ago I still went to see her every year or so. To keep the demon in check, so to speak … and also to remind myself perhaps of how far I’ve come.
Firstly she defined bulimia and that yep, what I was doing was textbook, so much for my idea that because I kept my main meals down I didn’t have a problem, but more importantly she helped me to understand why I was choosing this.
Feeling I needed it.
Feeling I couldn’t BREATHE without it.
See, by that point, it had become the one thing I knew I could depend on to get through the day. Everything I did was simply one minute closer to being able to be alone and go into the void, numb, escape, feel free.
I looked amazing, I was winning fitness comps, I was successful as fuck … and it was all just a cover. Inside I was slowly gently killing myself.
“You’re going to cheat on this man if you don’t leave him”, she told me, amongst other things.
“You’re not being true to yourself”
“You’re not living according to what you really believe, and want for yourself”
I don’t know if she used the word ALIGNMENT, but essentially that’s what it was all about.
In just 3 sessions, I was free of this thing which had ensnared me for YEARS, because I understood that it was my way of DEALING with a life fundamentally not.on.track.
Of course 3 or 4 years later, the very day that first marriage came to a horrifyingly messy and screeching end, 12 years+ ago now, I went STRAIGHT back to the binge.
It took me another 6 years to break free from the binge again after that night … clearly I had a lot to learn about alignment, and being true to me, and about being able to COPE, with life.
To this day, the book I wrote during that time, “The Secret Life of a Binge Eater”, is my most best-selling book (out of over 60 of ’em) on Amazon. I have never once re-read it, not even after the first draft. It feels so raw, bloody, painful still.
But I know it helps a lot of people.
Sharing your pain always does…
Here’s the thing.
For over a decade, off and on, I tried to stop binging through willpower.
Be better, be stronger, be a proper fitness person!
Or – do it for your abs! Lol.
In the end, it was never going to be possible for me to release that habit until I addressed the reason I NEEDED the habit.
I needed it because it was an escape from a life which was out of alignment and off track.
It literally allowed me to be able to breathe, to lean into the binge, it allowed me to put aside my TERROR that my life was slowly but surely going down the ABSOLUTELY wrong path, and it allowed me to mask my pain at not.being.me.
The real me, y’know?
It felt terrifying on the surface of it but really –
Not as freakin’ terrifying as continuing on in the wrong one!
You know?
Yes.
You know.
And so I decided to re-write the future.
I looked INTO the future and I saw what I was becoming, what I was creating, who I was choosing to be, what my LIFE was being formed of.
AND I DID NOT LIKE IT.
It was a shock, and a wake up call, to realise – oh fuck. It’s NOT going to happen unless I MAKE it happen and right now I’m NOT!
So, I stopped.
The binging, sure, but that was a natural outcome of stopping BEING THE WRONG DAMN PERSON first.
And how I did that?
I started to be the right one.
Slowly slowly, every day, taking a step in the direction of creating THIS life I now live, even though I couldn’t have told you any of the details of it, never mind the how!
All I did was – start doing little things here and there which expanded me. Lifted me up. Made sense on a SOUL level.
Like journaling more.
Writing.
Daydreaming.
Sharing my message.
And so on.
What’s funny is, I never set out to build an online empire.
This business and life is a product of me being consistent as fuck with my content, doing my soul work, creating from that place and putting it out into the world for 12+ years now.
But all I ever set out to do at first was save myself from myself.
By listening to that still small voice inside of me.
Letting it be heard.
And sharing what it said with the world.
Somewhere along the way –
An empire was built.
And an eating disorder gradually faded away. Thank you for your services and support … and goodbye. No longer needed.
And I wonder –
Don’t you?
Where you’d be a decade from now, or even a year, if starting today, you simply started to save yourself from yourself, by doing the one thing which has always been the ONLY thing that is needed to allow you ALL the things, namely –
Say yes to your soul.
Make no mistake gorgeous –
It’s ALL connected.
Is an outcome of your now.
Do the things you’re being desperately called for.
Start small, if need be.
But start.
Your life depends on it.
And no matter the path you’re on right now, there is ALWAYS still time to re-write it.
Until there’s not.
So may as well start now 😉
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