Everywhere I Look, I See Gold

A story of recovery, surrender, and the final 15% that couldn’t be measured.

“I’m going to level with you using numbers.”

The psychiatrist slid five papers across his desk until they were within my reach. I looked at him quizzically.

He pushed his black-rimmed glasses up his nose and leaned forward, his hands resting just beneath his chest. His white medical coat was mysteriously absent from any wrinkles, yet his desk was in disarray. The mess of folders and paperclips bridged the gap between person and physician.

Outside, a bird was singing. I peered through the windows to my right, but could see only the treatment center’s garden bed. The rows were barely perceptible in the dirt, although the staff promised vegetation somewhere below the surface.

Steady rays of sunshine bore down on every square inch of the office. The psychiatrist’s gaze bore down on me.

“I know you trust science. You like to understand what’s happening on a physiological level, so I’m going to tell you exactly what’s happening in your body.

And I have proof, Lauren. We can see it in the numbers.”

I tried recalling the intake form, but couldn’t. I scanned my memories for a question about my studies at university, but came up empty.

I picked up the first paper and digested words like “creatinine kinase” and “white blood cell count.” On the next page, I read “bradycardia” and “murmur.”

“You don’t think you belong here, but your blood tests say otherwise. Your white blood cell count resembles an AIDs patient and should call for hospitalization. I won’t hesitate to send you there if your numbers don’t improve.

The labs are also showing problems with your kidney functioning and other organs. Your body is breaking down its own muscle to feed itself, including the tissues around your heart.”

For three weeks, I recoiled and rebelled. I refused meals and ignored treatment protocols, as if continuing to starve myself would prove the absence of an eating disorder. As if my anger was more punishment to them than poison to me. By the fourth week, the treatment team decided that blunt honesty was the only path forward.

The psychiatrist drew the lucky ticket. Opening my eyes was deemed his Herculean task, and he succeeded. Somehow, he cracked it. The part of me that still believed I wasn’t sick.

I slowly read each page of the lab report, asking him about terms that I didn’t understand until I was fluent in anorexia-induced pathologies.

My stomach seized. “Fuck.” I looked outside and fought the tears pooling at the corners of my eyes. I could throw the papers back across the desk. I could storm out of the office and ignore the calls from the nurse’s station. I could find a corner of the residential facility and hide until the next group session. But what would any of it accomplish? Does denying the truth make it any less the truth?

I searched for the bird, begged for its distraction.

That night, I stood underneath the shower and let my tears mix with its spray. Rivers ran down my face, with no telling where the water ended and the tears began.

If the bloodwork was off, then something was wrong. If something was wrong, then maybe I did have an eating disorder. And if I did, I’d have to change. But what if I didn’t want to? Worse, what if I couldn’t?

Reading those papers shifted the question from “Do I belong here?” to “Do I want to live without an eating disorder?” As my dietitian would attest, my answer to either question was the same, “No.”

At least, for another four years, when my long walk toward recovery would really begin.

Now, eleven years have passed.

I sit on the floor of my sunlit living room, birdsong drifting through the window once again. It’s soft and bright, singing of spring and fresh beginnings.

My seven-month-old son nestles beside me while the rest of our little family sleeps soundly upstairs.

He turns his doughy body toward my lap and wraps his arms around my thigh, wordless in his request. I scoop him into my chest and close my eyes.

My heart beats steadily against his, our warmth passed between one another. The very thing that once revealed my sickness is now the thing pulsing with life, and its strength didn’t come from science.

It wasn’t sourced through data and numbers, charts and indisputable facts.

It came from surrender.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking to understand and started asking to feel. Then, last year, I stopped asking to feel and started asking to trust. Feeling carried me through 85% of my recovery, but it was trust that unlocked the last 15%.

Feeling led me into the work: Internal Family Systems, Hakomi, EMDR, and psychedelic-assisted therapy. I re-integrated after years of dissociation. I learned how to live in an awakened body; not one that held all of the answers but one that was experiencing the spectrum of human emotion and sensation without anorexia’s haze.

I opened rows of file cabinets stored away in the recesses of my mind, and brought my body through years of repressed memories. I felt my way out of freezing and fawning. I kept feeling until I had befriended my inner child, buried my skeletons, and found closure.

I stopped running, hiding, and numbing, and I finally allowed roots to stretch down from my feet and entangle me in the lives and the love of the people surrounding me. I found myself again.

And all of this was good. This was right. This was the first step and 85% of my recovery. This, too, was unmistakably God’s hand.

I spent the past eleven years reconciling my first twenty, working through emotional healing and spiritual formation like a potter works with her clay. This season restored my heart’s brokenness and reopened my eyes to the truly miraculous goodness of this life on Earth.

And still, it wasn’t everything I needed; just everything that I could gain without giving up control.

85% of my healing was built on reclaiming my body, recovering the power I’d lost during the hours, days, and years I felt helpless inside it. So, what an ironic twist of fate the final 15% presented.

For in this 15%, I had to give up control, admit that I was in many ways powerless to what was happening in my body, turn away from the data once and for all and turn to God. I gave Him my hopes, my fears, and my future; and learned how to rest easy doing so.

Recovery is a relay, after all. And crossing the finish line requires handing over the baton.

Science once told me that my heart was failing, and faith is how it learned to beat again.

And now, I am listening.

Like kintsugi, God filled me with His grace until the cracks shone with gold. Now, everywhere I look, I catch glimpses of that golden warmth reflected back to me.