A Story of Recovery:

Fears of Real Life

When people used to ask me what my greatest fear was, I wouldn’t say spiders or heights, I would say that I will fall in love with the man of my dreams, get married and be blissfully in love, and then a little while down the road he will wake up and realize that he doesn’t love me and that marrying me was the biggest mistake of his life.

I had always been afraid that I wouldn’t feel confident with the decision to marry. I thought that I would be thinking, on my wedding day, that this guy who I was committing my life to was a pretty good guy, good looking, and someone I respected and enjoyed, but that I wouldn’t feel passionate about him. I thought I would have doubts or feel that I was just settling, because I would think he was the best I could get. I came from always being worried that I was too much or not enough, and that I would always be a disappointment to others. I felt that once someone really got to know the real me, they would be bored or disgusted. I thought life would just be easier alone.

However, the day of my wedding, I had complete and all-encompassing peace that I was absolutely doing the right thing, with the right person, in the right place, at the right time. I felt passion, romance, and anticipation, but in a calm, centered, peaceful way. I never thought that kind of deep conviction was possible, not for me anyway. My wedding day was a picturesque dream—the weather was perfect and I was the happiest I had ever been in my entire life. That day, God gave me a miracle. After three-and-a-half years of abstinence in FA, I quit my full-time job and moved with my new husband halfway across the country.

It had been a process of years of working the FA program and two back-to-back AWOLs to get to the point when I could allow myself to be vulnerable enough to experience being loved and cherished by another person. I was able to overcome my fears and let myself be vulnerable and intimate, only through first learning how to be vulnerable and intimate with my sponsor and my fellows in FA.

So why did I wake up one day, soon after being married, and say to my sponsor that this felt like the hardest thing I had ever done? I didn’t think that life was going to be totally easy now that I had the experience of complete peace and conviction in the decision I made to get married, but I was still surprised by how hard it was.

It started with driving up to our new home after spending a week on a honeymoon. As we ended our journey, parked in front of the house with the U-Haul full of all my material possessions, I found myself crying uncontrollably. It felt like forever that I sat in the passenger’s seat, with my new husband sweetly and patiently letting me cry.

That began what I’ve heard others call “post event blues.” The party was over and this was my new life now. Staying abstinent, living in a new place, being in a new relationship, having a new FA fellowship and a new climate—new practically everything! It felt so much harder than I ever imagined.  I had to learn how to weigh and measure in a new kitchen, how to navigate the highways in a new city, and how to be away from my family and my original FA fellowship. I know for certain that if I didn’t have Program, I would have eaten addictively long before now.

I started having dreams of eating addictively and watching my husband watch me binge. In my dreams, he would look at me disgustingly and say, “You’re ruining everything.”  I know that if I were to choose to take the bite again, he would be losing the woman he fell in love with and married. I would become a stranger who would be obsessed with food and wouldn’t be able to show up for building a solid foundation of love, trust, respect, integrity, gratitude, all of those things so vital to a successful and happy relationship.

I’ve always heard that “time heals all wounds.”  I like rephrasing that to say that “Time and abstinence heals all things.” For me, adjusting to change takes time and abstinence. God has gifted me with both, and for that I am so grateful. I’m grateful for a program that teaches me to take it easy on myself. Being a newlywed in a new part of the country is a life situation that I’ve never walked through before. I heard from my sponsor and from others that it’s okay that I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, because I’ve never done it before! What a novel concept for me, that it’s okay to not have everything figured out.

I’m learning that when I’m able to stay in the moment, I find the loving hand of God steadying me, showing me the way, comforting me in a way that I used to search for in food. I’m so grateful that I get to wake up every morning next to a husband who only knows the abstinent me, and who gets to see me cope with life changes without eating addictively.

I still know that the decision to marry and move to be with my husband has been right for me, so why it is still hard sometimes? Because it’s called life. Because it’s called being a food addict who chooses to be abstinent, no matter what.

My mother told me once that in the early years of her marriage to my father, she got into the habit of sitting around at home during the day, eating sweets and watching soap operas. I had a fear that I would end up being a depressed newlywed who didn’t know what to do with myself, eating addictively and numbing out in front of the television. I used to roll my eyes when I heard fellows say that no matter what they were going through in their life, that they found peace in knowing that they were going to eat three weighed-and-measured meals that day. I understand that now. Some days I’ve felt that all I have accomplished is eating my three committed meals, but that keeps my foundation strong and allows God to work in my life.

If I choose to eat because I miss my family, or if I’m frustrated that my new husband misunderstands me, or because the traffic in this new big city makes my blood pressure rise, I would be throwing away all of the peace I’ve worked so hard to hold on to. My abstinence is precious to me. I know it’s what will continue to carry me through all the right and good things that God will bring into my life, however easy or hard they may be.