Body image & dating: some raw thoughts

A couple weeks ago I was interviewed by a family friend for his podcast. After I shared my eating disorder story, he asked if I could talk about what it’s been like navigating the dating scene in college while going through an ED. I took a deep breath, preparing myself to lean deeper into vulnerability than I normally feel comfortable. This is the experience I shared:

I was laying in bed on a Saturday morning. I had a date in 2 hours. I was ready to write out affirmations like I do before dates (or exams) when I’m nervous. Sometimes nervous means a loose butterflies, excited, anticipating kind of nervous. Other times, like this one, it was a I think I'm actually going to throw up kind of nervous. Writing out affirmations has a way of calming me down and grounding me during moments like that. My list usually includes things like:

You can do this
Take deep breaths
Focus on being present
Be yourself
Everything will work out how it’s meant to
etc.

I usually write and write until I take up the whole page. But not that morning. As I lay there in bed, I realized something. At the end of the day, all of my pre-date stresses and worries could be boiled down to one. single. affirmation.

If he doesn’t like me because of my body, I don’t want to be with him anyways.

That was it.

Here’s some context leading up to this groundbreaking moment for me:
When I was in the trenches of my eating disorder, even sicker than my physical health was my mental health. Any ED behavior I engaged in was fueled by this one belief that my brain simply could not shake: You will never be good enough until you change your body. That was it. From age 16, that one belief sabotaged my relationship with food and my body and subtly bled into every aspect of my life, at its worst convincing me that any chance I had at finding love would be hopeless until I lost weight.

Let me illustrate with a few stories.

A month or two after getting back from my mission I was going on dates with a guy I really liked. On Valentine's Day he surprised me with roses and told me he wanted to date me but in that exact moment, reality set in. I could fake it on dates but on the inside I was miserable. I was “failing” at the pursuit of weight loss and feeling completely out of control with food, my body, and my life. I knew I wasn't capable of being in a relationship and even if I were capable, I figured it was just a matter of time until he realized our bodies didn’t “go together.” So instead of telling him what was really going on, I pulled an easier excuse: I’m just not feeling it. And we broke up.

You will never be ready for a relationship until you fix your body.

One summer, a year and a half later, my roommate planned an outing to go tubing down the Provo River. What I thought was going to be a big group ended up just being 5 of us, including a cute guy from our ward. That night after tubing my friend decided she couldn’t keep the secret any longer: the real story was that cute-guy-in-the-ward had asked my roommate about me and if I was single so my roommate had orchestrated the whole tubing trip to indirectly set us up. I instantly felt sick to my stomach. I buried myself in the couch and moaned “no, no, no, no, no,” spiraling into an anxious mess.

It will absolutely never work. You’re too big for him and he’ll never like you.

Six months later, I matched with a guy on mutual before Christmas break and we ended up FaceTiming for hours over the course of a couple weeks. He seemed like exactly the person I had been looking for and I couldn’t stop thinking about him. But as the break drew to a close, the excitement of meeting up in person was quickly overtaken by an intense sense of dread. I lost my appetite for days. I remember breaking down in tears on the futon bed of our home office, trying not to wake up my family as I mourned the loss of something I was sure wouldn't last once he met me in-person.

Your body still isn’t good enough yet.

A few months later, for the first time ever, I had overcome all the mental hurdles my ED threw at me in the early dating phase enough to commit to a relationship. A month into dating we were at a wedding reception when a slow dance came on. I went to put my left hand on his shoulder and my right hand in his, but he put both of his hands on my waist. I tried to stay calm but everything in me wanted to run out the door and never come back. I don’t remember anything about our conversation or what song was playing or how the bride and groom looked or the decorations at the venue, nothing. All I remember is that feeling of crippling anxiety; not because of him... because of my waist.

You will never be good enough until you change your body.

Year after year, no matter how much progress I made in recovery, my brain kept defaulting to the same relentless, defeating rhetoric yet it made perfect, logical sense to me. How could it not be true? The evidence was all around me. Thin girls got more attention and more dates. In every relationship I observed, the girl was smaller than the guy. Thin was beautiful, worthy, happy, enough. Society preached it, social media preached it, and every couple in Utah County seemed to be a living, breathing example. The pattern was just too undeviatingly consistent to my ill, eating disorder-stricken mind. Clearly there was only one way out: change my body and then I’ll be good enough.

It was a long road fighting to eradicate that belief system that had consumed me since I was 16. A really long road. But it gets better.

Fast forward to that earth-shattering Saturday morning conversation with myself just recently: “Christine, at the end of the day, all of your pre-date stresses and worries can be boiled down to one. single. affirmation: If he doesn’t like me because of my body, I don’t want to be with him anyways.”

Earth-shattering, let me tell you. For the first time in my life, I was standing up for myself. Instead of worrying about what he was going to think of me and my body, I realized that if my body is the reason he walks away, then I don’t want to be with him. I can say that (now) and stand up for myself (now) because I’ve finally rebuilt the relationship that should’ve come first the whole time: the one between my body & I.

One of the quotes my therapist shared with me that changed my life was this:
"And I said to my body softly: I want to be your friend. It took a long breath and replied: I’ve been waiting my whole life for this."

Three years ago, my body and I were not friends, We were so far from friends. But I wanted to be its friend. And eventually I started to believe that we could get there.

Here’s a look into how that process went:

It started with respect.
Hey body, I don’t like you and you’ve caused unimaginable heartache in my life, but I think I can respect you.

Then focusing on its function over its form.
*On a hike* Hey body, this is uncomfortable and I really wish I had [insert thin friend]’s body right now, but thank you for helping me up this mountain. I appreciate the miracle of my legs lifting one after the other.

Then honoring it and its basic needs.
Hey body, I still would give pretty much anything to change you. But I also know you deserve food today and you need it as fuel. So I’m going to feed you.

Then observing the slew of critical thoughts that would come in every day and just observing.
Ahhh, here we go again with the comparison and the belittling and the criticism. We’ve been here before. It’s okay, let’s just take a moment and sit with this.

Then, over time, upgrading from observing the thoughts to challenging them.
Ok so you believe no one will ever love you until you lose weight. Wait... who says? Where did that belief come from?

Then from observing and challenging to exercising gentleness and compassion.
Hey, it is okay to feel this. You are worthy and you are enough. You are so much more than a body.

Then from gentleness and compassion to considering the possibility that maybe, just maybe, my body is enough exactly the way it is. And starting to feel at home...

And then to the level I reached only recently on that Saturday morning, when the familiar wave of pre-date crippling body image came crashing down and I said:
Hold up. I did not come this far, put in this much work, show up to therapy for that many months, shed that many tears on my bedroom floor, take leaps of faith dating [ex-boyfriends], heal my relationship with food, and stand up for myself a thousand times against my ED voice-- I did not do all of that just to make it to this moment, about to go on a date, and recoil into my all-too-familiar fetal position of body shame. Nope. Not gonna do it. Not gonna happen. I am going to fight for myself and I am going to defend this body.

And that, my friends, is a summary of months and years of tough, painful body image work.

It was awkward, it was unfamiliar, it was messy and at times so unbelievably hard (and still is), but it has also become the most empowering and healing work of my life.

I went from believing that my body would hold me back from everything I wanted in life, including love, to fighting for and defending this miracle that enables me to do everything I want in life, including to love.

Dating is a rollercoaster. It’s all over the place. Guys may come and go and relationships may begin and end but at the end of the day there is one, constant, forever relationship that is depending on me. Breaking up is not an option. We’re in this for the long haul.

My body & I.

Thoughts on heartbreak

It was an afternoon in early June. I had spent 7 hours crying, starting with the moment when I woke up at 6am and remembered it was all real. 7 hours later, there I was back in my bed; but this time I wasn’t crying quietly to avoid waking up my roommate. This time it was a breathless, anguished cry as I brought my knees to my chest and laid there in actual, physical pain. 

I called my dad again for the second or third time that day. A couple hours earlier my parents had comforted me on FaceTime, repeating over and over again how sorry they were, reassuring me that everything would be okay. But a couple hours passed and my roommate left the apartment temporarily and suddenly I was alone. And I was not okay.

I think my dad could hear the desperation in my sobs on the other line. “Dad, it’s so painful... It’s just so, so painful... *long pause to calm down enough to get out the words* I don’t think I can go on. I wish I could go back and reverse everything. I wish I had never met him. It is not worth this pain.”

I don’t agree with that statement now, but in the moment the grief was so shocking and the pain was so deep that there was just no way in my mind that 6 months or any number of happy months in a relationship would be worth that kind of pain. 

The rest of that week is just fog in my memory. Food had absolutely no appeal. I almost failed a final. My eyes were permanently swollen and my hands shook from the anxiety. My friends, my brother, married friends and their spouses all took turns coming over as I re-told the story over and over again and broke down with each re-telling.

Grief.

My dad told me that every day would get better. I clung to that promise because I knew I could not go on if this pain didn’t go away. But a month later in July I wrote in my journal that it felt worse. It actually felt worse. (Don’t worry dad, you were right in the long, long run)

When summer came to a close, people would ask me how my internship in Oregon went and I wanted to tell them the truth: hell. pure, grieving hell. Going to work every day felt like a monumental task. I was present physically but never emotionally. When I couldn’t focus I would get out the yellow notepad in my desk drawer and write out what I would say to him and how much I missed him. Then I’d hesitantly tear the yellow pages into tiny pieces and throw them away, trying to let it all go. It was hell. 

The triggers would happen all the time. Driving in my car. Hiking a trail. A song. A scene in a movie. My younger siblings asking me if we’d get back together, not knowing how painful that question was to my fragile heart.

But the trigger that was most painful and probably most frequent was seeing families. A husband with his arm around his wife on the pew at church. A baby swaddled on his mom’s chest on a walk. A friend’s engagement on social media. Every time, it was like the pain was as fresh as that afternoon in June. And it wasn’t getting better.

It took a few months but I finally came to the pivotal realization that losing that boy was not just losing him. I had associated that relationship so closely with where it was headed—marriage and a family—that when it all fell apart, my future crumbled along with it (or so it felt like). The grief I felt actually had little to do with him—because I knew it had been the right decision to break up—and everything to do with my future and mourning the loss of the family that suddenly wasn’t going to happen for me.

I was stuck. When I thought back to the happy moments of our relationship, I felt sick to my stomach. When I thought about the present and how unlike myself and depressed I was, I wondered if things would ever get better. And when I thought about my now uncertain future, it was just too much to bear. I was quite literally trapped in my mind. There was nowhere to go. I was just stuck.

Maybe you relate to this on an intimate level, almost like my pain is yours. Maybe you have never experienced heartbreak or never will. Maybe it wasn’t heartbreak but you’ve grieved in other ways about other things. It’s okay either way. This is just a raw, personal example of a reality I had zero concept of before experiencing it myself. But now that this experience is mine (and now that I've had a year to come up with the words), these are my thoughts on heartbreak.

Let me fast forward from June Christine to December Christine. I was driving back from the movie theater with a dear friend, one of the strongest people I know, who had recently lost her dad. Our experiences were so different yet I felt my heart expand with this empathy I didn’t know existed. I felt bonded to her as I understood just a portion of her grief. In that moment, after months of the most reeling, uncomfortable, and what seemed like *unfair* rollercoaster of my life, I just felt this overwhelming gratitude. So overwhelming, in fact, (and at the risk of sounding irrational or insensitive) that I remember telling her:

I would ten out of ten recommend heartbreak to anyone and everyone. 

What a turn of events ladies and gentleman, let me tell you.

In June of last year I would’ve given anything to reverse that entire relationship and spare myself the heartbreak completely. But there I was in December resolutely recommending the whole experience to all mankind and *knocking on wood*... even willing to do it over again.

I can’t explain how those breathless, anguished cries of June turned into silent tears of gratitude in December. There is no logical explanation for it. But what I can explain, because I’ve seen it and felt it firsthand, is this:

“Surely he has borne [my] grief and carried [my] sorrow”

I want to share what it was like to watch the Savior bear my grief and carry my sorrow during one of the hardest experiences of my life.

It looked like angel roommates sitting with me and crying with me. It looked like an inspired priesthood blessing from a bishop who didn’t even know me. It looked like timely hymn lyrics and moments of respite and peace in nature. It looked like the constant support of my family. And perhaps what buoyed me up most were the gentle messages of encouragement and comfort that would come to my mind randomly, words that were most definitely not my own:

“You are loved”

“I will consecrate your steps”

“Move forward”

“You are growing”

“Pray for him”

“He’s hurting too”

“Trust in me”

I held on to those words so, so tightly.

I won’t pretend that I felt peace and comfort at every moment because I didn’t. There was a lot of emptiness, a lot of doubting God’s plan, a lot of pleading with him for any trace of hope that I would still have a family one day, and a lot of frustration at how painfully long it was taking to be okay. But those gentle whisperings carried me through.

When no one else knew what it was like, the One who was “sent to heal the brokenhearted”, did.

Surely, if he has borne every grief and carried every sorrow, then he could bear my grief and carry my sorrow.

And He did.