A few months ago, my sister called to tell me that a close family friend had been hospitalized. We headed to Vanderbilt that evening and much to our surprise learned that our friend hadn’t eaten for almost 3 weeks. She’d been anorexic for most of her teenage years and we never knew it. She told us how angry she was that her life had been displaced because of her eating disorder – how it had controlled her and ruined her “best years.” She’d bounced from hospital to treatment facility to private school to home school and just when she thought life was finally “normal” again, she relapsed. She laid in that hospital bed, hooked to a feeding tube, unable to change her situation.
My heart broke. I climbed into her story – replaying the things we’d talked about, trying to figure out why or how this could happen to such a sweet, kind-hearted and beautiful girl. I think most women can relate to the pressures we internalize about our bodies, image, and self-esteem. In one way or another, we never quite feel pretty enough or thin enough or perfect enough to just accept the way we’ve been created and be happy.
Being skinny had always been an inconvenience for me – an open wound that became easily irritated by a snide remark or someone trying to give me a compliment in a backward kind of way. I didn’t weigh 100 lbs until I was a senior in high school and had been accused of being anorexic or bulimic since the 1st grade. In Jr. High, my mom would pick me up for lunch so I didn’t have to deal with the taunting. She’d take me to Dairy Queen and I’d order malted milkshakes in a futile attempt to bulk-up. It didn’t work. To add insult to injury, I was so small and my legs were so long that the only two options for pants were Wranglers (the kind without pockets) and the homemade kind.
It’s all quite comical in retrospect but I spent too much of my adolescence crying and wishing I could gain weight or be beautiful like the other girls. I didn’t comprehend the devastating affects of an actual eating disorder until much later in life. As bad as I thought having a high metabolism was, I was far too naïve to understand what the pressure to be thin had caused women around the world (and some of the dearest women in my life) to do to their bodies.
When I moved to Nashville, the church I was attending had a special section of pews for a group of girls from Mercy Ministries. I took an interest in the non-profit and read the founders memoir, Echoes of Mercy. The book detailed the lives of several young women who’d endured years of sexual abuse or drug addiction or an eating disorder and often times, all the above. However, each of the women overcame their darkest realities. Through faith, they came to believe there was a purpose for their lives and that they were beautiful. I was deeply moved by their stories – for the first time, I could grasp the emotional complexity and severity of an eating disorder. It broke my heart. So, I wrote about it. The song never materialized but the sentiment never left me.
My friend was transferred from Vanderbilt to a treatment facility specializing in eating disorders. A few days before she left, I was writing with JP Williams and told him her story. My perspective had shifted just enough to take the idea – a thread that had been woven through my life – and with JP’s help, turn it into something greater. We wrote this for Elise and for all of the beautiful girls in the world.
