Chosing to Live

On Valentine's Day I will be speaking at the State University of New York at Geneseo, as I do each year. 7pm. Topic..... eating disorders. Specifically.... mine.

"Do you ever get tired talking about it?" My husband asked me. Tonight I did. He's never actually heard the whole story, and it might be better for him that way. It's a hard illness to understand, and what happened.... happened four years before I met him.

Yet his love and his support has been a massive part of my recovery over the past 10 years.

In some ways I get tired of talking about it.... which is the exact moment that I need to talk about it more. As part of recovery it is my responsibility to share. Each year when I do this talk a few of the kids email me. I know I reach someone, somewhere and give them a ray of hope.

Someone, a long time ago did that for me. Her name was Colleen and I will never forget her.

Her ray of hope followed me for five years before the day I died. When I woke up it was something I held onto.

I feel honored and I especially feel blessed. I am lucky, so very lucky. To be alive, to have a family, to have been able to bear a child, to function, to live and breathe.....

I remember being told I would never be healthy enough to have any of that. A tube up my nose and what seemed like spaghetti in terms of IV lines protruding from my chest. I was presecribed a life of weakness and illness.

All of which I rose above.

I want to give you the formula. I want to give you the secret. I want to tell you it goes away and never haunts you.

But I can't.

What I can say is that it will haunt you, and you must remain strong. I look at my seven year old son and I have reason to hold the course.

What I can say is that if you look hard enough you will find a ray of hope.

What I can say is that there is freedom, days of freedom. Weeks of freedom, and sometimes years of freedom. What I can say is that there are times when it seems like it would be easy to go back.

But I won't have my son grow up without a mother because she didn't love him enough to stay well. That right there, is my top priority. It's one thing when I am sick and it's only me. It's an entirely different story when what I do directly affects my child.

That's how I stay recovered. I will not do that to him.

So I will share my story and I will walk the path. I often times think I should create a power point or some kind of presentation.

Yet my life is not a presentation. It's my story. It's my life. It's about a 10 year span of flushing myself down a toilet. It's about a choice I made at age 10, and then a secodn choice i made at age 20. It's about a choice I have made daily for fourteen years.

It's about choosing to live.