 By Anita Haney
Last week while cleaning out my closet, I uncovered the dreaded envelope filled with photographs that have been carefully hidden now for almost eighteen years. They’re photos I hate to look at, yet I can’t bring myself to destroy them. In a strange sense, I need them – I need to refer back to them from time to time so I can remember, appreciate life and health, and offer praise to God. I opened the envelope and slowly fingered through each picture, one at a time, smiling at some which held memories of fun events, of my family and friends, but each representing secret pain and despair. From February to June in 1982, I was hospitalized with the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. Those four months on a psychiatric ward marked the beginning of my journey to find the real me – the person who had somehow become lost amid a lifetime of performing on many different “stages.” Wearing one mask for this person and then immediately switching masks for the next person, changing myself to fit into so many different molds, had finally taken its toll on my life. The pictures proved it. It was hard for me to believe the person in those photos was really me. I viewed each phase of the disorder’s progress as I flipped through the stack of memories. The tell-tale signs appeared – dark circles under my sunken eyes, my skeleton-thin torso, which shocked even me now. The photos mentally carried me back to an unreal 76 pounds. In the pictures I was smiling, but I know now what was really hidden underneath that forced, faked exterior. Proverbs 14:13 says, “Even in laughter the heart may ache. . .” Being raised in a conservative pastor’s home, and then growing up and falling in love with a preacher-boy, who later became a pastor himself, I had unknowingly lived life in a performance trap. As a child I not only wanted to make my parents proud and happy, but I also bent over backwards to please every parishioner in each church where we ministered. That impossible goal continued into adulthood. I could not allow failure. I wanted to live up to the position I’d been placed in. I wanted to succeed. Our family had to be perfect. Unfortunately, the only person whose “perfection” I could control was my own, or so I thought. So I set out on a do-or-die mission to be all things to all people, even if it meant becoming a chameleon that switched colors to match her surroundings from minute to minute. As long as every single person was pleased with me, it didn’t matter to me whether I was happy or not. The downward spiral that years and years of fakery and pretense had brought on landed me, at age 30, in a hospital due to my weakened physical condition, and then on to a psychiatric ward. I was separated from a loving husband who tried his best to understand; from my three precious children ages 8, 6, and 3 at the time, who needed their mom and didn’t understand; and from our church congregation who lovingly tried to help me through this bizarre time. The four months of intensive treatment found me battling the depths of depression. Just the stigma and fears of realizing I was in a facility for mentally ill patients was a blow against hope or anything positive. Painful daily counseling sessions with a psychiatrist who specialized in eating disorders helped me to slowly peel back the many layers of masks that had been my security blanket – shields I had erected to guard my “perfection.” The day that hurt the most was when I finally had to look reality in the eye and come face-to-face with the fact that no matter how hard I worked, I would never be able to be perfect. Even if I killed myself trying, I would never be all things to all people. That was the turning point for me. I finally knew I had to face up to the truth of “You can please all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time.” I hated that! I didn’t want it to be true! But God, through His Word, softened my heart and began to break up the fallow soil so that truth could take root and grow and flourish. Paul hits the target in Galatians 1:10 with, “Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.” And also in 1 Corinthians 10:31, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” Not the glory of men or women; not so you’ll hear how awesome you are, how organized and efficient you are, or how happy and pleased you make every person and situation, but for the glory of God. It has taken me 47 years to finally allow God to “form me into another pot, shaping me as seems best to Him” (See Jer. 18:1-6). I have had to endure the real pain of giving Him the liberty of smashing the clay (me) into a new ball in His hands in order to fashion and mold it into a new pot – one that’s more fitted for His usefulness. In allowing that to happen, I’ve discovered that it’s not that I’ve had to give up so much, but instead, I have received so much. I’m just now comprehending a little of the abundant living He wants to give us and not just the living. When my focus shifted from myself and other people to God and what He wanted from me, everything else fell into its proper place. I’m not saying that I never stumble by panicking over what someone thinks of me. I still do, but I’m not crushed nor driven by it any longer. I was told that anorexia nervosa is a lot like alcoholism. I’ll always have the potential of being in bondage to it and of “falling off the wagon.” But when I focus on the Word, the only truth, and the fact that my body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in me, and that I am not my own, but I was bought at a price, it is a great motivator to honor God (1 Cor. 6:19, 20). It’s just like every other lesson we learn in living and in being like Christ, it’s a daily, progressive journey. Sometimes you fall down, but you get up, brush yourself off, admit it to God, and learn how to do things differently the next time, so as to possess more of His traits and not your own. The most powerful, liberating, peace-giving truth for me was learning that God created me just like I am and wants to use me, the real me, to do a work for Him. “Such confidence as this is ours through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God” (2 Cor. 3:4-5). Anita Haney is a ministry wife in Lebanon, Mo., where she serves as worship leader. She is the author of Battling Anorexia – A Deadly Trap, which shares her personal struggle with this eating disorder. She and her husband have three grown children.
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