"Courage"

(by Superchick)



“I told another lie today
And I got through this day
No one saw through my games
I know the right words to say
Like "I don't feel well"
"I ate before I came"

Then someone tells me how good I look
And for a moment
For a moment I am happy
But when I'm alone
No one hears me cry

Chorus:
I need you to know
I'm not through the night
Some days I'm still fighting to walk towards the light
I need you to know
That we'll be okay
Together we can make it through another day

I don't know the first time I felt unbeautiful
The day I chose not to eat
What I do know is how I changed my life forever
I know I should know better

There are days when I'm okay
And for a moment
For a moment I find hope
But there are days when I'm not okay
And I need your help
So I'm letting go

Chorus

You should know
You're not on your own
These secrets are walls that keep us alone
I don't know when but I know now
Together we'll make it through somehow
Together we'll make it through somehow

Chorus”

[PART TWO]
{originally posted 4/21/09}
Towards the end of high school, this could have been my theme song. I felt out of control due to abandonment issues, financial instability at home, body image issues, and other normal teenage feelings. I took the one thing I thought I could control and ended up abusing it in the form of an eating disorder. I felt that if my own mother and father could reject me, then there must be something wrong with me. I felt I wasn't as good as my brother, didn't have enough money, and wasn't pretty or thin enough. I tried to be on my best behavior, got a job as soon as I was old enough, worked at trying to look pretty, and I did what I could to be thinner. By the time I went to college, I weighed what I had in middle school. I gained the typical “Freshman Fifteen” after arriving at college, and got my weight got back up to where it should have been. I considered the weight thing a “little problem” in my past, and tried to go about life as usual.

One weekend, in the Fall of 1994, my life changed forever. I had a friend who was bold enough to confront me about my eating disorder. Jason saw right through the lies I was telling him and myself. He made me realize that my “little problem” in the past wasn’t little and it wasn’t in the past, and it was sin. I knew that I had to take steps to get past it. What I didn’t know at that point was that within 24 hours, I would not only find out the real reason for my parents divorce, but I would also stupidly step on the scale alongside my brother and discover that the “Freshman Fifteen” had become twenty, and I was eight pounds heavier than Kerry. I know that finding out that my mom had been involved in a long and drawn out affair with our former next-door neighbor should seem worse than the fact that I had gained a few pounds; but at the time, both of those things were equally devastating. I was an emotional wreck and I wanted to go back to starving myself to deal with the pain; but I knew I couldn’t resort to that old tactic. I went to see a counselor on campus, and over the past 14 ½ years have made many steps towards being set free.

[to be continued...]