I Choose NOT to Give Up

I stare at that quote a lot. I question it a lot. Because I often do feel like I give up on myself. When I listen to the lies of my eating disorder, isn't that giving up? It sure does feel like it.

The day Peter told me about his pornography addiction felt like a normal day. I didn't ever cry. I didn't really freak out. In fact, other than texting a few close friends to tell them about it, I did nothing. But the next day, I started getting chest pains every few hours. I'd be driving and I wouldn't even realize I was thinking about his addiction but all of a sudden, I'd feel short of breath and my chest would hurt. I was having small anxiety attacks multiple times a day but I brushed it off because, well, I do that!

A few days after that started, I began to convince myself that I am a hard person to love. I started pulling away from my faithful friends who have been there from day one and I started overly obsessing over my new friendships from The Togetherness Project. I told myself that only the Togetherness people could love this "new me" because they had all been where I was and on days when my new friends weren't available, I sunk really far into myself and was even more convinced that people have a hard time loving me. I didn't realize it consciously at first but I was pulling away from my two best friends and slowly shutting them out of my life.

I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until last week, when a third friend mentioned that my friends were feeling abandoned and hurt by me. I had done the very thing I was so afraid of people doing to me. My immediate reaction was panic and guilt. How could I have done this? I am a horrible friend. I was afraid of contacting them and in most situations, I would've just given up because I don't like any type of confrontation. I stewed over it for a day before realizing that the person in my head telling me I was a burden to my friends is a liar. I was choosing to listen to Satan and he wanted me to abandon the supportive people in my life.

So I broke free. I apologized. I cried. I did things that are hard for me to do because my friends are worth it.
My friends are worth it.
My friends were the shoulders I cried on the night Peter left me. My friends were the people who showed up when I was crying over how much I had started hating myself. My friends were the first people (besides a therapist) that I told about my eating disorder starting to consume me once again. My friends have taken my children countless times and cleaned my house and had me over for dinner and let me hang out when I was feeling lonely on weekends without my kids. My friends have been there through all of this. They never abandoned me.

Satan wanted me to worry about them abandoning me and so I started to abandon them slowly to detach from the pain I thought would be coming in the future.

Although I was feeling panic and guilt about this last week, my heart feels lighter today as I think about the apologetic conversations I have had with my friends over the weekend. I treated them poorly and they allowed me to come back. I made the wrong choices and they gave me the opportunity to start making it right.

My friends mean everything to me. My faithful friends and my new friends are some of the biggest blessings in my life and I am so grateful that I am surrounded by all of them. But I owe so much of my blessed experience to my two very best friends. I am so glad they love me. I am so glad they want to help me. Today, I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to be friends with my friends.

I've learned from this experience that I am not going to give up on myself. If other people stick with me through some really stupid decisions, I feel like I can stick with myself too. This journey has been so hard and it will continue to be hard but I am not going to give up. Because "if it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly."