The thing about life being really, really shitty for a really, really long time is this: it gets better.
Which doesn’t seem like much of a consolation, I know. But I don’t think it’s meant to be. It’s not the consolation, it’s the reward. It’s the everything-after.
It gets better. And that better is a delicious and meaty sort of that thing.
It. Gets. Better.
I say that with a deep exhale of relief and exhaustion and joy.
Like collapsing onto a bed at the end of a very long and very good day.
It gets better.
Shame recedes like the waves at low-tide. And gratitude rushes in. For everything. For the whole of your life. Not a part of it, but the whole messy lot. And for the grace that is that mess. The perfect ordered chaos of it.
It gets better and good becomes a flutter in your chest. A constant hum. And you become aware of the musculature of the heart—how it pulses and expands and grows. And to be privy to the physical experience of that.…Everything begins to feel like a prayer. One of gratitude and wonder and a delicious sort of blooming. Every action an act of faith.
Faith.
I don’t think of myself as a religious person. And yet. And yet and yet…faith, the word that wets my lips and sits on my tongue and fills what once was empty.
Faith.
The thing that rolls out like the proverbial yellow brick road. A path before you. And you don’t know where you’re going, but you know you’re on your way.
Faith.
Which makes fear beside the point.
Which lays waste to timelines.
And makes tributaries of loneliness and sorrow and grief—small streams leading to a larger body of water, important and necessary but not the point.
Which disappears loneliness—transforms it—makes it sweet in its impermanence.
Everything worthy and good I learned through the lens of an eating disorder. Which is something I struggle to explain—it’s not exactly an easy lead in at a cocktail party.
Now standing firmly on the other side of the thing, the question of how I got better is one I’m often asked. And the answer is a simple and complex as this: I had faith I would. And so I did.
And faith is what I move forward with. That nearly overwhelming stretch of time succeeded in distilling everything dark and complex and seemingly impossible into that one thing—that one word. And that one word broke me open—made me sturdy and soft and so very human.
Faith, the invitation to my very own ever-after.
It gets better.
It really, really does.
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{more on the subject}
(for any new readers out there
this post deal with things i've previously
written about in much detail.
more information to be found in the food +health
tab)