Although I can trace the beginnings of it far back into my childhood, the manifestation of my eating disorder began in December 1979 when I was 14 years old and lasted thirteen years. Around 1992, just before my first son was born, I entered a process of "recovery," as in actually getting better. Today, in 2000, I am not perfect; I still overeat sometimes, but I don't purge. My height and weight are proportionate, I'm physically fit, and I feel great. No longer do I constantly obsess about my appearance every minute of the day, nor is my self-worth measured by a scale or how little I've eaten. I am confident that as I continue to walk with my Lord, day by day, I will experience greater and greater victory, until the devil can scarcely tempt me in that area at all. Jesus is a mighty God, a mighty deliverer. I wisely place my trust in Him.

The path of a bulimic is full of pain and insecurity. In my case, it was mostly brought on by myself. My parents divorced, my dad committed suicide, and Mom remarried all before my third birthday. Unfortunately, my stepdad and I did not have a good relationship from the time I was 11 until my mid-twenties. Aside from that, I had a pretty "normal", happy childhood. My parents were very family oriented and I remember doing a lot of fun activities together. Though things were strained between Dad and me for many of those years, I felt greatly loved by my maternal grandparents and sister, and especially by my mother. Unfortunately, I was raised in a home where my mother was a Christian and my step-father was not, and the church my mother, my sister, and I attended didn't teach us properly. Church was something we did on Sunday. None of us really got to know Jesus, nor did we learn what the Christian life was all about. I didn't know that I was actually important to the Creator of the universe, the Creator of me, or that He would unequivocally take care of me if I put my trust in Him. Oh, I'm sure the words got said somewhere along the line, but I don't think the Holy Spirit was ever around to impart the Word to my heart. We left the church when I was about 16 in the midst of a church split and never found another. The pace of my downward spiral picked up speed right around then.

Satan began setting his trap for me early. By the time I was old enough to be learning to write, the earliest stages of my eating disorder were beginning to show, and I had nothing in place in my life to stop it from progressing. We were all so ignorant! My first story I proudly wrote in school was about a one-inch princess who was so beautiful that all the men in the world desired to marry her. So she divorced the man that she had and married the others and lived happily ever after. That type of fantasy wound up coloring my life for the next 18 years or so. Being beautiful was my strongest desire in life, because I wanted the security and love I'd been deceived into believing it would bring.

I was tall and skinny as a kid. My Mom was overweight, and I don't recall there being many restrictions on my eating. At holiday celebrations, I remember stuffing myself until I couldn't move, just because it was fun. My "Papa" and I used to see who could eat the most. But the next day, I was always still my skinny self, so no-one, least of all me, had any strong incentive to lay down some law when it came to eating.

When I was 3 years old, my next door neighbors' daughter, also 3, became my best friend in the whole wide world. I loved her so much, and we did everything together for years. As far as I was concerned, she was all I needed for friendship. In the 5th grade, she separated herself from me for a whole school year, and then again in 8th grade she said she didn't want to be friends anymore, and the separation lasted nearly 3 years. Those were two of the saddest, most painful experiences of my life.

I was lonely when I wasn't with my friend Jennifer. Very introverted, I spent hours by myself doing solitary things. I wasn't athletic because I was afraid of getting hurt and terrified of ridicule and failure, and I didn't really like to play outside. In school, I was extremely shy and never popular. Inwardly, I thought I had some good qualities and I believed I was a neat person, but nevertheless I always was afraid other people wouldn't like me, and believed that they didn't.

All throughout my childhood, I had a very active fantasy life. This was greatly contributed to by the fact that I began reading adult novels when I was about 9 or 10 years old, and many of them were sexually explicit. I also recall, at a very young age, finding pornographic magazines in my house. At first, I acted my fantasies out with my Barbies, but then I began writing them down as stories. They always involved an extremely attractive, sexy woman who was able to totally transform a cold and distant, or even an abusive man, by the sheer power of her beauty and love. I typically romanticized violence and dysfunctional relationships. Even though I never cast myself as the star, the woman was always an example of what I longed to be. The stories always went into incredible detail about what she looked like and the effect she had on men. Not surprisingly, by the time I reached Junior High, I wanted to wear tight, revealing clothes and my favorite color was black. Exotic make-up, long nails, and dyed blonde hair became my trademarks. People sometimes referred to me as "Barbie", and I just ate that up!

At 14 I apprehended my first real boyfriend and fell in love. I sought to spin a web around him by giving him the best sex a virgin knows how to give, although physically-speaking I enjoyed none of it myself. What I did enjoy was seeing him fall in love with me and the feeling of security I got when I was certain he was mine. Like an addict with her drug, I repeated this type of relationship again and again. Although I loved each of my boyfriends intensely, in my own sick way, each one only lasted about 2 years, and then frustration with an unhealthy relationship and the need for a new fix drove me to start all over again.

Also at 14, during my eighth grade year, I experienced my first unwanted weight gain, and I panicked. I hadn't really paid attention to my eating habits before, because it wasn't an issue for me. Other girls were using starvation as a means of controlling their weight, so I tried that. This quickly became a binge/starve cycle, which was totally ineffective. I not only never lost the original weight I'd gained, but my weight in general just kept creeping upward.

Socially, I was experiencing a lot of pain in Junior High, but managed to even convince myself it was water off my back. Because of the sophisticated way I dressed and my extreme shyness, the majority of my female peers rejected me, often with very cruel words. I was labeled stuck-up and a "slut," for instance, even before I met my first boyfriend. Fortunately I had a small group of friends who were really great to me, who respected and even looked up to me. I was often their "Dear Abby."

My Story - Pt. 2
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