Control.

I wish to grow in my faith 

I wish to slough off this exoskeleton of my fallen nature and allow my raw self to be bruised with the pain of life and struggle, knowing that my God will give me that which I need when I open myself up to receive it. 

I don’t want to hide behind the façade of self-chosen identities or align myself with a cause that is ultimately devoid of Love. I don’t want to destroy myself with rumination of my mistakes or imperfections, rather, I want to strengthen my soul, with repentance and acceptance of my failures and soften my heart towards forgiveness, believing that though I will never be worthy, I am because He loves me. I believe that I am loved and desired by Him who has fashioned me in the secret place. 

December 31, 2022

I thought that I had learned how to let go. I thought that I had learned how to be more gentle with myself. I thought that I had mended my relationship with my body and how I view myself. I feel half-finished. I feel like my sketches; half of a face, partially shaded, un-colored, un-painted. I feel like all of my half-written songs; ideas that linger, going somewhere but never arriving. I know that my art stays unfinished due to a fear of ruining an image that I had worked hard to create. I know that my music is a collection of abandoned personal contemplations because I’m not sure how to create what I hear in my head. As I write these words, I realize that I have never noticed the parallels between myself and my art and my music. It is so frustrating but I stay in that in-between out of fear of becoming. Because sometimes my mind reminds me of the feeling of water on an empty stomach or the allure of maintaining a mysterious presence or the engrained need I feel to punish myself for human error. Sometimes the nostalgia for that era seems safer than the uncertainty of becoming and acknowledging that I am truly loved and desired by God. Sometimes I still feel like I am so unworthy and undeserving of His love and forgiveness, though, I am learning that these feelings come from my fallen nature and incorrect understanding of God’s love and mercy. With that, I have been considering the depth of my need to control and the affect that it has had on my relationship with God and consequently myself.

“But my sin was this, that I looked for pleasure, beauty, and truth not in him but in myself and his other creatures, and the search led me instead to pain, confusion, and error.”

-Saint Augustine of Hippo

This quote exemplifies my problem. In everything, in my struggle and pain, my existential dread, I have always looked to everything, anything, besides Him. When I sought after beauty, I tried to figure out what the world thought was beautiful and exemplify it. I didn’t look to Him. When I chased perfection, I determined my own expectations of myself, and I didn’t acknowledge His. In all these things I looked for comfort and relief by arbitrary means. As a child I turned to my parents; appropriately so. This changed as I grew older and the natural consequence of living in a fallen world took root. As I grew older, I tried to turn to my friends but I felt alone. When I felt out of control in life, I learned that making a decision for myself to restrict my food, felt empowering. I slowly started to turn to my eating disorder for all of these uncomfortable feelings because I didn’t know how to manage them. When I felt isolated from everyone I turned to my eating disorder. When I felt shame, I turned to my eating disorder. When I made a mistake I turned to my eating disorder. When I couldn’t measure up I turned to my eating disorder. I had made an idol out of my eating disorder and out of the self-chosen identity I had fashioned. More on this in subsequent posts.

My struggle right now is that I am trying to sort through all of this while remaining very much involved in the eating disorder world through my work. It’s been difficult to admit that I have these things to sort through. But I have been slowly learning how to give up control and let things go.