In the early part of 2021, I wrote a slew of brutally honest letters to my future self. I thought of it like a journal, though in hindsight, I think the instinct to seal my thoughts in time capsules for myself stemmed from both loneliness, because it was the height of the pandemic and I didn’t have many close friends, and uncertainty about the future, especially since I couldn’t see past graduation and often wondered where I would end up going to college.
But I also desperately needed to talk about my rapidly deteriorating mental state. For the first three months of 2021, I was both blindly and consciously digging myself into an eating disorder. I say blindly because the lie of an eating disorder―that losing a little more weight and becoming a little more pretty will make you happy―is dangerously persuasive. But I also say consciously because, in many ways, I understood perfectly well that I was acting irrationally. I had read about the dangers of eating disorders before; I had witnessed friends wasting away because of anorexia. Still I wanted what would kill me.
At that point in my life, I felt truly trapped. I didn’t even want to get better. If knowledge is half the battle, I wrote, why am I here? “Here,” like a physical place, like a narrow, contracted space without light or exit. “Here,” as in,
this is where I am: pitifully unable to look past myself, frozen in a mindset that will only cause me harm, unwilling to change because I would rather see a number on a scale go down than be happy. I’m afraid of not caring about my weight anymore. I’m afraid of letting myself become happy and ugly. I suppose that is the crux of it. I would rather be pretty than happy. Somehow I think the happiness I will derive from being pretty is better than the happiness I can get elsewhere. I don’t want to even think about how unbiblical that is. It’s wrong when you hold it up to the Bible, and it’s wrong when you hold it up to common sense.
This is why I am beginning to wonder if it’s hopeless. If I cannot even hold myself to common sense, how am I supposed to dig myself out? If I’m fighting myself, how can I win?
It’s an odd experience to read this now, more than two years later. It’s been long enough that I can distance myself if I so choose. Yet I can also easily access the headspace I was in when I wrote this to myself. I’m not sure if I’ll ever really forget the feeling of recognizing myself to be utterly, frighteningly, self-destructively sinful. Helpless and hopeless.
I wish I could reach back in time and tell my past self that she was not the first person to feel this impossible conflict, to despair in frightening lucidity and register it in writing.
Last spring, I read Augustine’s Confessions, where I found words to describe my conflict: “Yet I was not doing what with an incomparably greater longing I yearned to do, and could have done the moment I so resolved. For as soon as I had the will, I would have had a wholehearted will” (147). Paradoxically, we can long for a thing without willing it. I knew, even at the lowest points of my eating disorder, that it was a condition engendered and sustained entirely by my own will. Once I stopped willing myself to starve, I would cease to have an eating disorder. So how could I simultaneously long to recover and yet refuse to do so?
In City of God, Augustine describes the wicked as “a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but―what is far worse―the slave of as many masters as he has vices” (139). For in physical slavery, one may escape or resist, but for a soul enslaved to vice, there is no possibility of resistance. His will, the very instrument of resistance, refuses to do so. Who can escape his own desire?
This is the insanity of sin―that it is so inexplicably desirable despite being so destructive and enslaving. My past self asked, If I’m fighting myself, how can I win? The answer: you can’t. Augustine’s Confessions, again, uses better words than I: “The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance” (147).
In this utter deprivation and despair, this realization of my depravity, I began to pray. I did not pray that I would recover and be freed from my eating disorder, for “I was afraid you might hear my prayer quickly” (145). But at the end of myself, I pleaded with God to at least bring me to the point at which I would want freedom. I prayed that I would want to recover. Or that I would want to want to recover.
And the Lord, in his grace, listened and answered. He changed my desires. He made me want to repent. As the psalmist says,
I waited patiently for the Lord;
he inclined to me and heard my cry.
He drew me up from the pit of destruction,
out of the miry bog,
and set my feet upon a rock,
making my steps secure. (Ps. 40:1-2)
But I did not know, as I wrote this letter to some future version of myself, that the Lord would deliver me from myself. I wrote into the hazy future without knowing where I would be in a year. I didn’t know whether I would still be starving myself or if I would find the courage to recover, whether I would look at my past self with contempt or shame or pity or envy. I didn’t know if I would be alive.
By now, I know a lot more than I did back then. I know the Lord to be far more kind, merciful, and sovereign. But I also don’t want to forget what it was like to not know, to be uncertain and afraid and desperate. I want to remember, for remembering makes me incredibly thankful: thankful that I was wrong, thankful to be alive, thankful for my God.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on my testimony these days. There is, of course, a danger in hyperfixating on the sinful past and neglecting to tell of the Lord’s gracious, redemptive work. But it has been good for me to remember how hopeless I would be if not for him. It has been good for me to remember that I deserve nothing, that I am worthy of nothing, that without him, I am wretched and doomed, enslaved by my own foolish iniquity. And in light of all of that, to remember how sweet, how generous, how free is the grace of the gospel.