Whenever I smell leather I am immediately overwhelmed with the desire to ride again. When I hear soft classical music I desperately desire to play the piano again. When someone tells me I am fat I want nothing more than to spend the rest of my lunch hour heaving into a toilet.

There was a very dark sad time in my life when my every waking moment was consumed with food, calories, weight loss. My worth was measured in how much I didn't eat. How much I didn't weigh. I hoped in my starving and vomiting that I would be good enough. I would insulate myself from rejection. From not being pretty enough. Thin enough. Good enough. Of course, when you eat three peas a day and lots of black coffee, there is no danger of this. You're very thin. You have people pinching your cheeks telling you to gain a little weight. Grandmothers offering you to plump you up. Girls jealously eyeing you, telling you how horribly unhealthy it is for you to be that skinny. And you've put yourself far from rejection. But you have also put yourself smack dab in the middle of a nightmare.

Once you push yourself past the whole "not eating" stage, you're still stuck with the demons in your head. The ones that tell you every bite of food is something to feel guilty about. The persistant belief that every meal should be purged in some way, shape or form. If you aren't dieting somehow than you're losing. This isn't a phase. You're stuck this way for years. It doesn't show outwardly, it's your own private war. And you finally get over all this. And your normal. You no longer google "anorexic tips and tricks". You have forsaken the support of other equally disturbed girls who advise you to do things like "cover your food in dish soap" so you won't eat it. You have, in some ways, become normal.

You thought you were. And then, there it is, the nightmare someone calls you fat. And, they are right. You aren't the same thin girl anymore. You've put on weight. You've gotten curvy. Cubby. Soft. Whatever you want to call it. But you no longer live on the safe side of the line from judgement. This is the moment you can choose. You can relapse, as you're prone to do, into drastic non-eating measures. You can tally your human worth in calories and pounds. You can allow the years of healing to be reduced to nothing by one insensitive comment.

Or. You can remember that you are a pearl of great price. Loved above all by the Creator, fashioned in His hands to be perfect. Placed in this life to show others that you and they are loved with an everlasting love. Regardless of weight. For in His eyes you are worth life.