Monday, July 29, 2013

Haunted Transitions

It was just this Saturday.
"Hm, she must not be here yet."
We both looked in the direction of the driveway for his sister.
"Well, you could always call her. We can wait."
Both of us got out of the car and walked to the door.
He pulled out his keys and unlocked the door, letting me in first.
"Oh, hey, I have to show you something."
"Okay, what is it?"
"Come on."
He started to walk towards the stairs and turned to wait for me to get there.
Up the two flights and then down the hall to the far bedroom.
"Okay, I have a confession to make. She and the kids really aren't going to be here until Monday. I wanted this to be our first official date."
He pulled back the blinds to reveal the balcony overlooking the lake and on the little table sat a bottle of wine and two glasses.
Three glasses of pink moscato down, my hand in his, "Would you be my girlfriend?"

Eyes close.
Smile freezes. 

It was the summer of 2010. 
Tony and I went to our favorite camping spot and this year it was dry enough that we could reach the island. 
I stirred under the pile of blankets and turned to look at him. 
His eyes fluttered open as shadows of leaves fluttered over his face like tree lashes. 
It wasn't planned, and the synchronized wake of 6:30 am on that summer day hadn't been planned at all either. 
We got up, let his dog out of the tent, and began to walk towards this island. 
I had said that I wanted to walk to it, that it was sort of mystical with the way it sat there, so close, but still taking some effort to get there. 
Walking to the left, we went until we got to shallow water to skip to where the sand and water flirted with surface of the lake. 
From there, we walked along the front, left to right. 
It was so still and so quiet. 
The water barely even lapped at the shore, almost unwilling to break the stillness. 
We came around the right side of the island and my breath sort stopped in my throat. 
There were birds everywhere. 
They sat quietly on the sand, some seagulls floated on the water lazily. 
All different kinds, silent. 
We slowly walked among them and I don't think I really breathed just so that the moment would stay frozen. 
His dog sniffed at a few and they beat their wings, flying to the early morning sky. 
All of sudden all of them followed suit and I ran to the middle, threw my arms up, and twirled in the middle of their flight, as though they would take me away. 
On a turn I saw him standing there and ran back to him, kissing him. 
He tried not to smile and then I saw one play at his lips. 

Eyes open. 
Smile resumes. 

"Of course I will." 


It was the summer of 2009.
"I probably won't marry you." 
I laid on Tony's counter, drunk. 
He had picked me up from my friend's house and we had had one too many margaritas. 
The shower ran a steady stream and I heard his movement stop. 
"What? What do you mean you wouldn't?" 
"I don't know, I just don't think we're similar enough. You won't even go to church with me." 
I could hear hurt in his voice. We had only been dating since January, and I guess even then I thought it was strange he sounded hurt. 
I've made many a misplaced comment, but that one seemed to have found a place. 

Blink. 

A memory flits by one after the other. 
On my graduation Tony came coming down. 
I received my Valedictorian metal, first in my class, and gave a great speech, one I had pulled from my heart. 
He didn't come to my reception, obviously. 
L and his mom came. 
He stood next to me and talked as people filed by to shake our hands and wish all of us graduating luck. 
He stayed for my entire reception. 
At his, he walked back to where I was siting in the bleachers to give me a hug. 
Tony never liked going to my family events. He said they didn't like him. 
That wasn't true. 
And I went alone. 
L went to my grandma's birthday party yesterday, he sat there and stroked my hand as my 93 year old grandmother told us some stories of when she was younger, of WWII, and meeting her two husbands. 
I see myself sitting on the toilet crying, head in my hands, as he used on our anniversary. 
I see the dinners we would make and then sit at the table and eat next to his huge fish tank, always joking that it was our own personal Chinese restaurant. 
I see L and I laying in the grass at the lake, looking up at the stars, lying close. 
We just talked. Always something a little there. 
I went to look through albums on my Facebook and file folders of pictures on my computer and in every single one, L was there. 
For everything. 

I'm afraid of commitment. 
I'm afraid of failure. 
I'm afraid to let go of the past. 

Today is a little harder and I feel myself struggling under the weight of experiencing emotions. 
Why am I so sad?
Is this what mourning is? 
Is this what people do? 
I am split and the majority of my fibers scream to restrict, that I'm fat, that I've gotten bigger, that I'm ugly. 
They say that I'm a slut for doing things this way, breaking up with him and going to someone else. 
<but we've been friends for six years....>
Mom made chocolate cake and I had a piece for breakfast. 
Tried to mentally calorie calculate it. 
Tried to purge some. 
Lowered my calories to 1000 on MyFitnessPal.
Wanted to cry. 
What is this? 
I struggle to cut off contact. 
I struggle to accept myself and the feelings I have, like they're dirty things you hide under your bed. 
My mind tells me that I jumped in with someone else and was so heartless.
My hearts says no, I did what was right and healthy. 
Maybe it's the part of me believing I am undeserving of light and life. 
I don't know. 
And what I wonder through all of this is, why have I barely cried? Why am I so numb? Am I really so heartless? 

Recovery from anything that haunts you is not an easy road. 
The memories seep through walls of my mind like ghosts. 
They are cold and too hot and crawl from floor to ceiling. 
I open a window and there's another one that needs opening. 
I need help. 


Saturday, July 27, 2013

Numbers Are No Longer A Weakness


"The gym is the only place people actually go to seek failure in order to be strong. Don't be afraid to push your limits."
My trainer looked at me and said that. 
It's something that hasn't left my mind. 

Numbers are so damn life defining. 
So, let me give you mine. 
I'm 5 foot 8 inches. 
After breakfast, coffee, some water, and then being weighed with my clothes on he weighed me at 136 pounds. 
After doing a skinfold, he calculated that I'm 110 pounds of lean muscle mass. 
I'm 26 pounds of fat. 
That number. I wanted to be fixated on it, peel it off, throw it away. 
He informed me that I am at 19% body fat and that that is healthy for a female.
He also informed me that my body type is that of an ectomorph. Sigh of relief. (A Kate Moss body type in ED terms.)
This means that I have long muscles and it's a little harder to build them, but they have long arms and legs. 
I'll take that over being an endomorph. 
Going much less in body fat percentage would be unhealthy, I would lose my period, lose the muscle I've worked for, and would be generally unhealthy. 
He said that if I lost more than one pound in a week then I would be losing muscle. 
That fact scares me more than wanting to lose weight just for the sake of a scale number. 
I forced my mind to think of things in terms of health and life. 

Let me give you some other numbers, ones that should define me. Celebrate me. 

With my calves, I can do 120 pound weighted standing calf raises. 

With my hamstrings and quads doing curls and extensions I can do 80 pounds. 
I can squat 65 pounds. Due to my twisted pelvis, that's a work in progress. 
Someday I hope to be squatting 200. 
On the abductor machine (the outside and inside of your thighs) I'm doing 145 pounds.
On leg press, I can comfortably do 150 pounds. 
When he was spotting me, I did six reps of 180 pounds. 
There was a moment I heard my mind say, "I can't do it." 
Inhale, legs close to my chest, exhale, face flushed, I pushed out the sixth one.  
Doing bridges for my glutes, I do 90 pounds. 



  
I decided to tell a few friends and L that I am recovering.
It is a conscious choice I have decided to make.
Plenty of talk in my writing, now I need to do.
On MyFitnessPal I upped my calorie limit for the day to 1200.
Let me tell you, you can fit a lot of food into that limit if you eat healthy.
There was a day when my body began to feed off my muscles for protein.
There was a day I was going to internal medicine because my kidneys were about to shut down.
There was a day I was about to be forcibly hospitalized.
There were a few days I cut.
There were a few days I purged, including today.


This is not me.
Weightlifting is a beautiful thing.
I am very scared many times throughout the day.

I walk into the gym, stretch, get a drink, and then I destroy my body, but not in the same way that this disorder does.
With every exhale and push or pull of power I exude from my body I fight.
I try to ooze out the poison stored up in this heart and mind.
I decided to make this my life style and pick up weight training.
A beautiful woman is strong. She is confident. She is intelligent. She is kind. She doesn't run from her fears. She doesn't accept intimidation. She loves. She lives. She laughs. She loves.

Eating still scares me.
Putting on clothes scares me.
Every day I pull at my thighs and stomach and chin.
I inspect my butt.
I inspect my skin.
Once you taste a little bit of happiness, you can't go back. Not at all.
So, this is where I'm officially at. I never thought I would find that I posses so much strength, but as I find every time I walk over to the racks of weights, you can't become strong going back to the things you already overcame.
If you can do five pounds more, do it.
If you can begin recovery, do it.
If you can just wake up in the morning and long for a better day, do it.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

A New Foundation

In the dim darkness I took off my shirt.
My skin lay naked in the moonlight trying to pry through the  closed blinds.
It's been something I've always been uncomfortable with since my abuse.
I had to do it.
I lay there looking up at him.
No hands rushed to grab and tear at me, hungry for what I could offer.
Instead of lusting fingers I found a soft kiss on my lips.
Here we are, dressed in nothing more than hopes and unhidden adoration.
We haven't slept together, but then again, just twining fingers communicates and bonds deeper than I have with anyone else.

He is everything to me.
I don't know why I've waited until I was 22 when I've had my "one" since I was 16 but God's timing is perfect.
Life has more hope when you make your own strong choices.
Tony still calls. And texts. And pleads.
Every day I fight to not be mean and cold. I was everything to him.
He's apologized for being abusive and for this or that.
Said I'm a bitch and I spread like butter.
Tears. Apologies.
Some mornings I wonder if I chose to do the right thing.
"Please God, it's hard right now, so could You maybe remind me I'm making the right choice?"
I looked at my phone to find this:

"I always seem to struggle with communicating just how much you mean to me. It's often tempting to resort to using old sappy cliches to flatter you, but I feel like that's basically what Tony does, and I know I can do better than that. And I know I compliment (and tease) you a lot, and I'm glad you appreciate it when I say you're cute, beautiful, and sexy. And I mean those things because you are. To me, you are like living art. When I see those vibrant eyes of yours or the gentle curves of your body when we're lying in bed together, I truly believe I'm looking at one of God's greatest masterpieces. But when I compliment you a lot about your appearance, I start to get concerned that you'll think that I'm just in love with your body and not you. But I really do love you: everything about you."

My ED is rearing its head again and it's clawing.
I have a few free sessions with a trainer at my gym.
The only payment?
Cinnamon rolls.
He liked my cookies too. :)
Small blessings to help me up.
It's time. To have the things I need and deserve, I have to be the person I deserve to be.
I gained two pounds from my period coming and water retention from lifting heavy and all I want to do is claw out of this skin.
Restrict.
Some purging.
The urge to do anything to get it out.
It's so hard to go upstream.
Why am I doing this? I wonder some days.
I'm playing with the idea of going to a few counseling sessions as well to help me combat this.
There's a small fire in me and I've never been so nervous and so at peace in my life.

I rouse from my sleep to find he is giving me a kiss and then pulls me close.
Legs intertwine.
"I love you," he whispers in my ear.
Groggily, but with a smile tinkling on these words, "I love you too," escapes before my eyes close.

"So I say it's worth it, to build a new foundation." -"Vacancy" by As I Lay Dying

Friday, July 19, 2013

Refined

We have the amazing capacity to stretch and bend.
Burn and freeze.
Forget and hold on to.
The human heart was designed impeccably.
Designed.
After creation we decided we weren't good enough.
Toiling and captivity and raging against beauty comes naturally to us now.
You could have asked me a few months ago how I felt about the process of letting go and I would have counted it giving up.
I couldn't fathom how you could ever let someone that had been in your life for so long go.
Ashes to the wind.
I would have counted it fact that I harbored some deep infection within me, leeching out to my lips, eyes, fingers, and toes.
As though my very fiber of being revolted against the things that determined to set me right.
The sole reason someone would decide to leave my life.
My transgressions.
Ugliness.
Life, similar to seasons, changes.
Your heart.
Your mind.
What you hold dear and beautiful and what you cling to.
It is an amazing aspect of our design that God gave us the ability to move on and to walk away.
Often times we endeavor to build a city when we chance meet one another and sometimes we end up destroying even the tools we started with.
Fire of passion.
Flood of emotion.
Mortar made of sugared hopes.
Then comes the rain.
Sometimes we can't see from all the things we hope and think and know we'll do.
Unaware that where we begin to forge these plans is actually where we will be refined.
If you asked me now, I would say that it's necessary to be walk away or walk away from.
Who are we to decide if we are good for someone?
It's not a testament to out weakness and it may be necessary.
We were designed with free will, but we often times think we know what's best.
You can't fall backwards in time to bend and mold events as you wished they would have occurred.
I think it happens as it should.
There's always greener grass after the fields burn.
I've seen them in the summer time in the pastures.
I can feel my skin blacken slowly by my choices and the turn of the world.
I can't feel the smoke burning my eyes that tears won't wash away.
Nails peel back from crawling towards the past.
Muscles ache from the running.
At some point you realize that you would rather fit where you were created to than to fight and be what you weren't supposed to be.
I just want to be refined.
In what way(s) do you want to be refined?

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Another Nail, Please

"How DO you feel then?"
"Like.... like I want to disappear."
Eyes cast down, defeated.
"That's how children feel."

Intimacy is a strange thing.
Something like a twin to comfort.
I hammered a nail back into my window this week by sleeping with him three times.
It's a personal detail but a little confession here and there does the soul good.
By all means I'm attracted to him, the lines of muscle and hands, lips, and eyes that know me.
Mine know him.
It was comfort, though. I knew it instantly.
When you take something that has been in your life that long and you remove it, it's like some aspect of your fibers revolt.
He has a way with words, how they slip out through teeth and settle somewhere in your mind like a bomb.
I'm easily manipulated, especially when seeing the suffering of another.

I wanted to disappear.
There's no getting out and no going back in.
Hope. I had hope I could open this window.
I did, and I cried.
He called and said he was changing his number.
Then he brought me a shadow box picture he frame he made with small pieces of a love smoldering to ashes.
He said he was going to Denver.
I held on to my resolve and he left.
Freedom and captivity could be twins too, if the cage is big enough.

His eyes were blood shot, holding his stomach, about to vomit.
"Just take the dogs. Don't call anyone."
He had swallowed a bag of a concoction of medicine he had made and had intended to go peacefully.
Not as long as I was there.
I made him throw up. I yelled. I told him he was acting like a child.
Acting in crisis suits me.
When it's not mine.
Then, doing what I do best, I cooked him some chicken and corn on the cob and forced him to eat before going for a beer at my friends.
Text messages apologizing, adorizing, mind fucking.
I was afraid he would die in his sleep so I stayed over, not before he conned another time of sleeping with me out of the mix.
I felt no emotion.
In fact, I was so hurt by his behavior that I made sure I conditioned myself to be unhappy and not want it and begin to get rid of the love and care and let the anger seep between my cracking emotional foundation.
Crazy. That's what all this is.

Yesterday he came to my work bringing flowers and a Propel to drink.
I said I would stop by after work.
It's amazing to me, every time, how comfort and the fear of freedom bring you back over and over again.
One of my dermal has been working to the surface and so I trusted him to let him cut it out.
So sweet, gently using the razor blade to cut the skin that grows through the jewelry holes.
Tenderly he did it even.

Then I lied about going to L's brother's with him.
I'm in love with L and can't scrape off Tony. .I don't understand it and I can't understand myself or trace my behavior backwards.
I just know that L is healthy for me and loves unconditionally.
The cycle Tony has me in isn't.
There had to be some spot reserved in hell for people like me, emotional soul suckers.
Insecure little girls that can't do the right thing, tearing pieces of the hearts of others to repair the holes in theirs.
He went to my dad's and saw I wasn't there.
He saw I parked my car around back at mom's.
I pride myself on my honesty, except with Tony.
It hasn't been a relationship that facilitates it.
Four and a half years of unhealthiness.
On a good day I find myself ugly, but with him, I've seen my utmost capacity for ugliness.
Believe me, you can stretch further than you think.

He never had a Facebook until now.
Today, actually.
Said he called my mom to see if I'm talking my family things and involving them in my lies.
Told her he was sorry for some things and for some things he's done to me.
He said he's going to beat up L or go and talk to him.
Single or trying, he forbade me from seeing him.
Says people can watch what I'm doing since we live in a small city.
I feel a little bit nervous and I feel very trapped in these emotions.
I never knew that day when we met that we would be where we are now or that I was involved with someone like this.
I never knew I would become a serial cheater (not sleeping with them, flirting/kissing), say the things I've said, demand the things I have.
I never knew and God, I'm so sorry.

Friends say that he's done things to me too much but I'm me and I can only be the best me I can.
I need to have good character and I haven't.
I feel so ugly.
I feel so trapped.
I don't understand why some of me wants to stay and most wants to go.
I just try to ask forgiveness for my daily mess ups and revolt against this ugly inside.
I want to throw out this bucket of nails.

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Windows

"You're like a bird that keeps hitting a window."
I was propped up on my arms, staring out at the lake, the Molly taking effect.
"It's true. That, and I have attachment issues."

I panicked.
He called me and said that if I didn't make my absolute choice (which I've been asked to do fifty million times anyway) that he was just going to stay in Denver.
For someone that's going to have their degree in Psychology in December you would think I could get to the root of this.
I struggle beyond words with letting people out of my life.
It doesn't matter if they're toxic.
It doesn't matter if it wasn't my fault.
It doesn't matter if it's better for me that way.
He asked and begged too many times and now my resolve has holes.
Help.

I laid on my stomach on the towel smoking a Swisher.
Sunshine on my back, her boyfriend asking me about my tattoos.
I never smoke.
Only when I'm being a bird, perpetually hitting the window.

It's a different kind of high.
Calm.
Not intense, just euphoric.
Sort of floating.
The wind felt good on my skin and I think for the first time I felt aware of my body in a good way.
I wanted to stay in my bikini forever.
It was as though my skin was a silk sash on the breeze.
Clean air.
Softness.
Reality.
It was there, just plain.
I would melt if I could, maybe fade away.

Sometimes, well, all the time we're messes.
We're all floundering around, having our own struggles.
Humanity.
Perpetual and endless.
Somehow we interlock existences, paining each other and making it worthwhile in other instances.

"I think you'll do it, I'm just afraid it'll be too late for you and L and he'll leave."
Me too.
He said he wouldn't.
That doesn't mean you can take forever.
I feel trapped and powerless anymore.
Somehow two people fell in love with me.
I was worth it and beautiful in some way and yet I don't feel like either of those things.
I just want to peel these emotions off like old skin.
Start over.
I deviated from the plan again, God.
Comfort got the upper hand today.
Still shocked that I did that.
I'm sure more than a few of you are face palming me.

It just felt good to walk, feeling my eyes dilating as another wave of high came.
Summer evenings could have me forever. I would slip between petals of flowers and remember that flying isn't a sedentary hope.
Open me up.
I'm just as curious to see what's inside.

I'm tired of hitting windows.

Friday, July 5, 2013

Relapse. Restore. Reborn.


He was going to propose to me this weekend, had we been together and had I gone on vacation with him. 
Wrap your mind around that. 
I can't. Not yet. 
Someone wanted to spend the rest of their life with me.
I'm at the age where this is no longer something you just talk about with your friends, giggling at a sleepover. 
It's something you long for. 
He kept telling me this was out of the blue and so fast and it's like I had either been thinking about it for a long time or it was a spur of the moment deal. 
It felt spur of the moment. One night I just came home and said we're done. 
I know that many of you don't believe in God and I know I talk about Him a lot these days, but knowing I dodged this bullet makes me all the more grateful that we aren't alone in this life if we don't want to be. 

Life is changing for me. 
I know there are several of you who have been with me from post one to this point and I can only hope that you've seen a change in my heart and life. 
Stagnation scares me. 
So let's look back. 

This is a picture of me at Methone in Greece. One of the girls on the trip took it of me and I didn't know. 
I would have to say this is a defining moment in my life, immortalized. 
You see, when I started college it was with both my parents. Things had always been rocky as I've said before.
Dad was controlling, mom was manic depressive and suicidal and very, very insecure. 
People pleasers, she and I. 
Constant fighting, constant manipulation, emotions were too much. 
I came to college thinking I had escaped that old life. 
My sophomore year of college was one of the absolute worse, by far. 
My mom tried to commit suicide on Christmas day, Tony was using every day, my parents were burning the last bridges of hope in their relationship, and I was just somewhere in the middle. 
Alone. 
By spring semester I was beyond depressed. I would come home from my night job at 4 am and then would watch the sun come up. 
I don't really know what I would do. Dream of leaving. (I had always wanted to go to Greece.) 
Sometimes I would cry. 
Watch Netflix.
Surf the internet. 
Then I would go to bed and skip class. How I passed with B's, I don't know. There were a few C's but I'm surprised I didn't tank myself more. 
My junior year we were supposed to go to a study abroad fair in the student union for extra credit if we checked out my TA's Spain booth. 
I don't know why, but I stopped by the Greece one. 
On a whim I signed up. 
My teacher said it was full but did I want to be on the list in case and I thought it couldn't hurt. 
There was part of me that felt like I might as well not because no one gives up a trip to Greece so easily. 
I felt a nudge in my heart so I sent the email saying yes. 
Within five minutes he said someone backed out. I was in. 
From there, it was a series of blessings. 
Someone I barely knew gave me the $500 fee I didn't have with the requirement that I help someone else in need someday. 
I raised over $2000 and my friend loaned me the remaining money with what she received from going to Afghanistan. She never had me pay back $1200 because she felt she was doing fine and wanted to bless me with that gift. 
When the picture was taken I was thanking God because quite honestly, I didn't feel like I had control over anything in my life and nothing good would come from it. 
Trust is a tough thing to learn. 
I heard a still, small voice say that everything would be okay. I can't explain it without sounding crazy. You just know it's God. 
I made terrible choices over the summer and thought, yah, right. Everything is a mess. 
Went to school, cycled the usual self-hate, making a relationship work that didn't, and felt the nothingness creep over me. 
Relapse. 
Restore. 
Reborn. 

I never thought I would break up with Tony. It was always something I just talked about and never believed I would do it. 
It will ache sometimes, but it's as though I haven't been taking a breath in years and now I am. 
I was so hollow. I just can't put it into words. 
It leaves me sitting in this chair so in awe that I was such a shell.
A lot of you feel it now. 
It's terrible, that nothingness. 
Long nights and aching hunger you'll never satisfy. 
For life, for food, for love. 
I was so scared to take a step. Terrified. 
It's like there was nothing and I was nothing and it was all so pointless and empty, but I had to keep going because there was a void I had to desperately try and fill. 
God watched me shuffle around the rooms of my heart moving stuff and He offered to help me get rid of things and offered to do things and I just kept telling Him no. 
"I love You, but I don't need your help right now." 
I moved things around threw things and experiences away to the extent that all I had left was a mattress on the floor and a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. 
I always thought I would end up married to Tony because, well, time had elapsed and I was accepting that wherever I went in my life it would be hard and it would hurt.
Sometimes, as much as it doesn't make sense, when that's all you know, it's what you cling to. 

I decided to choose life last week. I sank to my knees and said it out loud. 
Tears streaming down my cheeks. 
The poison is leaving a little bit every day. 
Maybe this won't be an eating disorder blog anymore. 
Maybe it will.
I'll still struggle. 
One good day doesn't mean I'll not skip a meal, not purge the ice cream, or feel like I'm hot in my bikini. 
I promise I'll still be the same girl you've stuck around to read about all this time. 
I'll still be searching for beauty, diving into the ugliness of humanity, dreaming, writing, crying, being. 
I promise I'll still care if you will. 
I just can't go back, and that's what's beautiful. 



"This is what it feels like"

Monday, July 1, 2013

Give Me The Morphine


I feel like a sledgehammer and I did what I felt was best for the both of us. 
But. 
But he still is calling and texting, asking me to give him another try, go on vacation with him to Denver like we had planned. 
Just let him chase me. 
"We didn't even have a fair chance with you gone at college all the time and me in trouble for most of it. I'm finally getting clean and we can leave after I get off parole in March. It doesn't have to be Colorado, I will go wherever you have to for school." 
You want to know how I look when he talks? 
Sad. Eyes always cast down, arms folded at my chest. Angled towards leaving. Looking at the door, wanting him to just tell me I can have my dog for the summer.
Wasted money on a ticket for a concert I'm no longer going to.
"Cut your losses" my stepmom said.
He said if nothing changes in the next two days then he is leaving for good from my life.
This time, I know he's serious. 

I feel like there's a scream inside of me, waiting to escape.
It's building like a dull roar and working up to the surface.
Depression is slowly coming back; it waited for a moment like this.
I was eating like a normal person for three or four days and now I hate myself for it.
The self hate talk is back.
I've considered sinking again into my eating disorder even more due to my bones not being as sharp now.
That's because I've been adding muscle tone.
And anyway, it's not like being thinner would make the hurt and the emptiness go away.

So I channel all my painful emotions into bands like these. 
I run. I lift. I ache. 
When I turn this on then I just pour it all out. 
Then I pray. 

I have acknowledged my need for change and I'm saying, God, you promised you would make me what I'm not yet, so do it.
It's easy to revert back to the old way of life and easy to question the new potential way when you face discomfort, I know.

Meanwhile, I feel like I'm going to hurt myself.
Legitimately going to hurt myself.
Whatever is inside trying to fight the changes and feels deep regret for breaking up with him.
It's like there's a war going on inside of me and I'm desperately trying to fight the side that wants to go with the current and go back to him.
He could do the things he said he would.
Things could get better between us.
I still feel like I'm about to tear in half.
All I want to do is drink and cry and tear myself.

Help.
You helped me know what I need to do and I'm looking around for the next step and all I hear is to keep going.
I don't know where I'm supposed to keep going.
So many emotions that I'm not prepared to own.
So many uncomfortable feelings.
Dear Lord, don't let me go back. I can't. I had a reason I left so don't let me forget.

I feel so broken.