EMOTIONAL ANOREXIA 2

Years ago I went to a birthday party for a friend. After we sang Happy Birthday and ate the cake (this was a westside of Los Angeles group and probably half the crowd had given up sweets), we went around the room, and took a turn saying what my friend meant to us. I remember how calm she was, taking it all in, and I thought to myself I couldn't bear to be the recipient of all that attention, that loving attention. I thought, I would rather die.
     It's strange to remember a time when I couldn't receive compliments or hear anything good about myself. Very strange...I was desperate to shine in the world's eyes and yet I'd do everything I could to deflect the good things people said about me. It was a kind of extreme embarrassment but something more - there was an ocean between the compliment and what I thought of myself. I knew the muck inside, the doubts and fears, the pessimism, so I couldn't sit still for  anything good said about me.
     And something even more. One day I was brushing my hair, looking in the mirror, when a voice inside me said, "I want, but I can't have." I knew instantly this was a voice from the deepest part of me; I knew that at rock bottom I believed I would always be denied, could not have all the things I wanted, would always live with frustration and despair. It was the voice of my emotional anorexia, my perverse inability to take in all the kinds of nourishment every person needs. I lived on the razor's edge, ravenous and self-denying all at once.
     Reader, I've changed. I can trace the path to change, the watersheds and landmarks that made me willing to see what was inside me, and gave me the courage to look. I can feel the many moments I was forced to surrender self-loathing and -denial bit by little bit. I can feel all the times I had very little to go on except the faith that if I didn't run from whatever truth I found inside, I would somehow be all right. I had been covering up so much fear and lacerating beliefs about myself and I'd been terrified that if there was one little chink in my armor the whole facade would collapse. But I learned the opposite was true: in Leonard Cohen's words, "there's a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." That's how the light gets in.
     The light has come in, slowly, so slowly that sometimes I've thought nothing at all was happening. But many wheels inside were turning, are still turning, and I've learned to walk the braided path of willingness, surrender, faith and courage. Each of the strands is crucial and takes its turn at the forefront of my being. The more time passes, the more I see that braided path is the only one I can walk now, and more and more it's the only one I want. 
     To find a way to come out from under self-loathing and fear is the greatest gift, one I receive over and over. I unwrap the gift with gratitude and humility and sit quietly so that more light, and even more light, can keep coming in.