Insatiable Hunger Pangs

I.

I did not intend to spend fourteen years of my life cycling in and out of treatment centers for an eating disorder. To be fair, I did not intend to have an eating disorder at all. I don’t know the exact age that I began to feel such overpowering shame about myself. I don’t know the precise moment that I began to hate myself for existing. I do know that I was fifteen years old when that shame and self-hatred began to promise that counting calories and exercising more would satisfy those voices of condemnation. And like all good liars, they did not deliver on their promises. The appetite of those shaming voices was ravenous and never satisfied.

Within a few short few months of beginning what I thought was a journey to a healthier version of myself, I was hospitalized for severe malnutrition and cardiac issues. If that seems like a quick escalation, it was because the goalpost of the health demands to feel okay kept moving. I would reach the weight that was going to make me feel safe and good about myself, and suddenly that was not enough either. I needed to get just a few pounds below that. Or if I had kept my internal rules of how many calories that I was allowed to eat each day, the next day’s caloric intake needed to be even less than that.

Over the years in various treatment centers, I was given a lot of advice on how to get over my low self-esteem: I needed to repeat ten positive affirmations in front of the mirror each morning / I needed to counter the self-hating thoughts by telling myself that I am actually a good person and deserving of good things / I needed to cultivate self-love by seeing my failings as just part of common humanity.

When I stood in front of my bathroom mirror in the mornings and repeated cheesy affirmations to myself, feeling like an absolute fool all the while, I could not see how this was going to bring me to recovery. I knew the things I was saying were not true, and I was certainly not convincing myself by just saying them over and over.

If I sound cynical about the aforementioned advice, it is because I am. There is nothing inherently wrong with morning affirmations, and if that helps you get through your days, I’m not telling you to stop. But while affirmations and self-acceptance are not evil things, they were (and are) powerless to speak the kind of hope that raises the dead and sets prisoners free.

In the periods of my deepest struggles with food and my body, all I could see were the ways that I was not enough. I was extremely aware of all the ways that I had failed and was failing and would fail in the future, and this applied to all areas of my life. My body was often at the forefront with the eating disorder, but do not be fooled: my mind, personality, art, career path, and every moral failing I’d ever committed were also under constant scrutiny in my mind.

How could I live a life without self-destruction if I knew that I could never meet all the accusations coming at me that demanded my perfection?

The strange problem with my suffocating shame and self-hatred was not that I needed to conjure up a sense of self-worth which would give me motivation to recover fully and therefore live a fulfilling life. I used to believe that. But the burden of creating my meaning and self-worth was too great. I am convinced that the actual problem was that the diagnosis of my situation wasn’t deep enough. I didn’t need more self-flagellation or to hate myself more; I needed something else entirely.

The tricky thing about the kind of toxic shame that curves us inward in a posture of self-hatred is that the very reason it holds power is because it presupposes a dark, twisted hope that we could actually have made ourselves okay on our own power. It says, “You could have fixed the problem, but you simply cannot get yourself together enough to do that. You could be a person who has worth and proves that they are lovable if you could just get your body or career or late-night temptation under control.”

It is vitally important that those who are struggling with toxic shame and self-hatred hear that they are loved by both God and humans, and that they have value. But we also need our exhausting, false hope of creating our own self-worth to be fully destroyed so that we can hear the good news of God’s floodgates of grace and mercy – the kind of grace that is ready to swallow us whole in its goodness.

There is a series of documentaries by the filmmaker Jean Kilbourne that address how media messaging in advertisements have created unrealistic expectations for women’s body image. The series is aptly titled Killing Us Softly. This is what shallow diagnoses of the human condition do. They kill us, but they kill us softly. They leave us in a deathlike state of believing there is still hope of making ourselves okay. And at some point, we inevitably come face to face with either the utter exhaustion or the utter failure of maintaining the charade that can build our worth in this life.

What then?

The bind that I was caught in as I destroyed my body and tried to relentlessly to fix my life into some acceptable state was what we may term in Christian circles self-justification. That is to say that my sense of worth and selfhood was something I had to create by meeting every demand placed upon me.

The concept of self-justification in my lived experience showed up much more subtly than my childhood Sunday School classes had taught me it would. I used to imagine self-justification would show up as one arrogantly saying, “I will be morally perfect as a squeaky-clean rule-follower, and then God will be pleased with me.” Perhaps sometimes it does still overtly show up like that. But that wouldn’t be quite as convincing in our daily lives, would it? We could perhaps hear the lie in that more easily.

For me, most of the time it has showed up as an oppressive shame whispering that I am fundamentally failing in every area and beyond the reach of any gracious, loving God.

A Christ who died to save sinners was a nice thing that happened and something that we sang about each Sunday, but in my mind, to quote Luther, I was still “a painted sinner” and Christ as “painted Savior.” I needed to know that I was real sinner and Christ a real, merciful, and loving Savior.

The solution that has rescued (and continues to rescue) me from my exhausting attempts to create self-worth went against the societal expectations that the antidote to shame was within myself. Because to find relief, I first needed to be accused rightly to see that I could not, in fact, justify myself into okay-ness or meaning or worth by attempting to meet the demands placed upon me.

And when I had finally given up the chase, laid bare on a bathroom floor that still smelled nauseatingly like vomit from my nightly ritual of paying penance before a toilet bowl, I looked up and beheld the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

The majority of my life, I have been metaphorically covering myself with fig leaves, knowing they were insufficient and hanging on by a thread, and being told by many around me that this was not even necessary because nothing was wrong — I just needed to love myself more! At some point, there needed to be a shattering of the illusion: the situation was worse than any of us were naming. I needed more than fig leaves; I needed a God who provided the covering of his own choosing.

For those fourteen years of treatment centers, I was regularly told that I could reach a place of relief and recovery if I ignored the accusations of failure around my body or education or career or moral failings or relational ruptures, and I accepted myself as I was. This was the way: create my own meaning and find my true identity as an independent self in this world! The law of self-acceptance laundered as gospel.

If I could love myself well enough, willpower up enough motivation to recover, treat my body correctly, and become a respected and vibrant voice in the recovery community, then I would be okay. It was still contingent on me to make myself okay. They were not offering me true freedom. They were offering me new rules, and they were telling me I could meet these ones. The new rules were dressed in prettier clothing and made to seem like hope, but they were woefully insufficient to save me.

I had to be shaken loose from any hope that I could make myself someone worth loving on my own efforts, whether by temporarily warding off the voice of shame and self-hatred by doing all they required or by trying to meet the new, glitter-drenched expectations of the treatment centers. God had to hammer out the illusion of self-sufficiency.

I knew nominally that I was a sinner. I certainly treated myself as I believed a sinner should be treated. But if I was sicker and more sinful than I could ever have imagined, what hope was left for me but death?

In a letter to a friend who was deep in spiritual despair and shame, Luther wrote, “It is my faithful request and admonition that you join our company and associate with us, who are real, great, and hard-boiled sinners. You must by no means make Christ to seem paltry and trifling to us, as though he could be our Helper only when we want to be rid from imaginary, nominal, and childish sins. No, no! That would not be good for us. He must rather be a Savior and Redeemer from real, great, grievous, and damnable transgressions and iniquities, yea, from the very greatest and most shocking sins; to be brief, from all sins added together in a grand total.”

II.

When the sun rises over the mountains in Wickenburg, Arizona, the mountains turn a dusty blue-orange that takes your breath away. Even as a frail teenager, I was held in the beauty in the fresh morning air on the dude ranch that functioned as a treatment facility for adolescent girls with eating disorders.

There were only two brief parts of the day that I was ever okay on the ranch: the few moments watching the early morning sunrises and sitting under the massive array of stars that spread across the night sky. Every other moment that I was awake felt like pure misery.

There were two buildings on this dude ranch that each housed twelve teenage girls who were relearning how to eat food. I was missing the first few months of my senior year of high school to sit in group therapy in one of these buildings where we were taught to use “better coping skills” than self-starvation or throwing up. I had spent the last year suffocating under my depression and wanting to die, and I had a feeding tube shoved up my nose since my third day arriving at the ranch, fully against my will.

For the first month, I swung between perfect compliance and quiet rebellion. But sometime around month two, something broke within me. The depression was an oppressive black cloud hanging over me, and one day I simply stopped eating and gave up.

As the young social worker sat across from me on a wooden picnic bench, she looked at my hunched shoulders and curved-in body posture with more softness than I could bare. “That shame does not belong on you,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. And against my best attempt to remain strong and stoic and unphased by pain, my body convulsed into sobs.

I had lived as a girl condemned by my inability to be perfect, despite my best efforts, and it was the first time I had heard that perhaps I did not have to live under the weight of this.

The relief was a gift, but it was a short-lived gift, because her answer was telling me only part of the story. It was certainly a solution moving with the grain of God’s gracious economy, but it was incomplete to save. Just like shallow diagnoses, her words did not go far enough. Shame did not have to destroy me, but not because I could conjure up self-love strong enough to combat the shame. It was and is only because my all my lack had been placed fully on the Crucified One. It is the ones who look to him who are radiant and whose faces will never be ashamed.

My gaze was still on myself.

III.

The question Who am I? is one I’ve been told is vital to my recovery, as though my identity and worth were something I could look inside myself to discover.

This no longer makes sense to me.

Despite my bent to think I can independently conjure some semblance of meaning on my own as a fully autonomous human, I am, in fact, a creature who was meant to exist in relation to the Creator in a posture of pure reception.

It’s a humbling posture to not contribute anything. But it is also the deepest relief. My friend Laura wrote, “Sin is the creature’s unbelief in God as Giver, and lack of joy in existing by means of God’s gift.”

Existing by means of God’s gift: it took a long time for me to understand that this identity in relation to our Creator is not simply a gift like all other identities, as though Jesus simply unlocks for us our most authentic selves. This confused me for a long time. I understood that I was to receive my very self from God, but I still was conceiving of identity and self as independent from him.

The question of who I am most fundamentally no longer makes sense because it no longer matters. My life is hidden in Christ, and I am loved by him. We are bound up together, and he is my life. He has dressed me in himself and his righteousness, and that means I am free to live lightly in this world. There is no longer a “me” apart from Christ, so why would I need to look inward and discover who I truly am? I am his, and I am free.

IV.

I was in a session with a therapist in Nashville in 2018, and before I began to tell her what I needed to say that day, I prefaced my speech about twenty different ways. I needed to make sure she knew I wasn’t saying this or that, and I was definitely already aware of that other thing.

And she stopped me and gently said, “Lindsay, you don’t have to do that with me.”

My whole body untensed a little bit at those words. I exhaled. There was safety in believing I didn’t have to perform perfection for her to stick around; I could just be loved as the messy human that I was, and she would stay.

That woman was a small reflection for me of the love of God.

The God who loves you and gave himself in the person of Jesus doesn’t need your self-justifying attempts — in fact, he is actively trying to kill them off. And that killing work is for the sake of your health and life. In his kindness, he is driving you to cling to one thing, and that is Christ as gift; Christ who is your life.

That is the ultimate exhale and untensing in the presence of such inexhaustible grace: you are so very sick, and you are so very loved, and God’s love for you is not contingent on anything have done, are doing, or will do. The God found in the Christian scriptures is a not a Zeus figure as some imagine him, a deity dominating from on high and moving humans like pawns in a capricious cosmic game. He is an all-powerful God who is seen most powerfully in weakness, hanging on a cross as he lets his rebellious creatures kill him. He is God who gives himself, and he gives himself to you.

You can certainly spend your life performing external perfection and attempting to self-justify through whatever creative means you’ve found to pretend at okay-ness, but I can attest it is a weary and worn life. You and I are real sinners, not painted ones, and he is real Savior who came for the sick and dying (which is to say, all of us).

The reality is that I cannot offer you anything new and innovative today, and in truth, my pride takes a hit at that idea. I would love to bring something brilliant and fresh that you will remember for all of time and eternity. (That’s a healthy and realistic goal to have, right?) And I cannot do those things because the antidote to the lack of self-worth that expressed itself in harming my body — and the antidote to every effect of the curse of sin that has us bent on trying to be self-made deities — is what it has always been and what it will always be, and that is the gospel.

The good news is actually good: you are not capable of contributing anything to your cause before God because the law of God levels all of us to the ground. That’s not reason for self-flagellation, though some people make it out to be. Instead, it is to force your gaze away from yourself and to the ever-compassionate arms of Jesus.

It is to hear the fire of John the Baptist preaching repentance to a “brood of vipers,” and then, as I have been reminded a few times as of late, it is to follow John’s pointed finger and “behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” There’s the movement: the leveling law showing our need for a Savior, and the Savior giving himself. It is the glorious, good news of our gracious God whose property is always to have mercy.

If you are currently caught in the cycle of chasing worth and meaning, believing even a little bit that you can actually satisfy the constant accusations of not-okay-ness that never let up, or if, perhaps, shame has you in a deathly chokehold that feels like it will crush you, may God give you the gift of clear vision of your desperate need and deep sickness. And this vision is not to engender self-hate; your Creator made and loves you, sick and messy and terrified as you as you are. This clear vision is so that as you see clearly, you may fall to the ground where the loving arms of Jesus are waiting to embrace you. In a place where all your efforts have been blessedly stripped away from you, your only job is to receive the gift of the God who gives himself freely. The liberating word is that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. You can actually rest.

It is not liberating if you are simply a painted sinner, and he a painted Savior: you must be a real, true, egregious sinner, and he must be an even more merciful and gracious Savior.

It is not liberating news if you still have to prove and create your worth in this life: he is your life, and this gift is one you simply receive.

It is not liberating if he requires you to self-flagellate in penance when you sin because you were the first sinner in all of human history whose offenses went beyond God’s capacity to save: Jesus’ death was for every sin.

It is not liberating if you must keep your head hung in an appropriate amount of shame when you walk back into the sanctuary after you have given back in to a specific temptation again: his mercy is always more.

It is not liberating if there are strings attached, as though you are forgiven and shown mercy, but only with the condition that you get your act together and don’t ever do those things again: that’s not a gift. You will inevitably sin again, and you are offered the free gift of God that is actually, truly, a free gift (one to which you contribute nothing).

I have been drawn lately to the last stanza of a 1927 poem by G. K. Chesterton as I think of all the cheap advice I was given over the years:

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

I have done the cycles of attempting self-created identity and found them empty. But I have also met the One who calls dead humans to life. Yes, my name is Lazarus and I live — “but it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”

My fellow weary creatures, Jesus bids you come find real, lasting rest. So, lift your heavy, weighed-down head to gaze upon the Savior. Your sins are many, but behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.