the first

As I go through my journey, it constantly surprises me. In part, because I do not know myself. Instead I am defined by the stories around me. The ones you grow up with. The ones people tell you about yourself that become so engrained in your soul you start to believe them to be real. The ones you think are your identity. The ones that become your identity. Letting go of those projections, those fairytales, those judgements leaves nothing.

That is in part how I feel, a nothingless being attached to the world by a balloon string. Rediscovering who I am for the first time at 31 is a daze. Everything I once was is no more. Yes, there is excitement, but ultimately I am attached to an infinite universe that has no attachments. Paradoxes have always filled my life, and my heart. The trite statement of a double edged sword doesn’t feel trite in this context.

As I discover for the first time who I am, potentially just connected to the universe instead of a part of it, I’m encouraged by writing. The infinite combinations of letters and words and syntax have always fascinated me. Unfortunately, I not only listened to stories told to me by other people; I listened to stories that I told myself. One of them was that I’d never have enough money to support myself as a constructer of the words I carefully craft.

Sometimes I am too careful. That is a pitfall we all fall into. Perfectionism. As I grow, I realize this too is an illusion. Just like the stories that surround my very being.

As I deconstruct these notions, I hope I find solace. Harmony is my ultimate motivator. For 31 years, I’ve been motivated by fear.

I have to thank certain creative spirits who seemed to come into my life at opportune moments. An artist, a hairdresser, a dog, a matchmaker, a spirit. All of them called me to a quest to uncover what I thought was the universe, but is really myself.

There are certain people who go through life with blinders. I am not one of them. My earliest spiritual memory was sneaking into a church, playing the piano and crying in front of the Virgin Mary on the floor. No one knew I was there. Except the universe.

It was then I cried for the universe. For the pain that existed in villages in Africa that didn’t have clean running water and whose crops were extorted by even bigger entities.

In fact, aren’t we all entities? Society and cultural constructions make us believe that we are people. But we exist in time. We are unbelievably indescribable though I try to somehow place words together so others and myself can find meaning. Recently someone told me that I needed a body of work to show to those if I really wanted to pursue writing. I am hopeful but not persistent enough to know if that will materialize. Though not in retrospect, everything can materialize. But it materializes in the present. My grammar is not Joan Didion, I was not taught by Vogue. My sentences don’t always have a cause and effect, a noun and a verb. But they are real to me. And in the end, isn’t that all that matters?

where we find ourselves

Today I saw 999 and 6666. 999 Means one chapter is ending and another is beginning. I find this to be true. I find myself to have more exuberance, natural vibrance, and distress tolerance than I used to. I find myself needing less of my anxiety medication. I find myself in birds. I find myself in fields. I find myself within others and outside of others. Everything I relate to is completely different.

Yet, I am still a young grasshopper. Dr. M will teach me what I need to know to get to where I want to go. Ultimately I want to be married and be able to explore kids and have a wonderful career as a healer in my safe place. The world is a very safe place when you think in terms of its positivity. We are lucky to be able to inhabit such a place of wonder but the real wonder is in what we cannot look at, but what we truly see. That is where the magic lies, in between the real and unreal. Religion creates boundaries, it creates divides and not only divides but wars. Spirituality unites. That is the difference. The difference between liturgical commitments and commitments of the heart.

I saw a crow today watching the world. It flew onto a branch as I was taking my beloved dog outside and sat on it almost the entire time. The crow then, after five minutes or so, flew away to join his flock. Again the things we interpret are in our minds, in our body, in our spirit. To me, the spirit is the most important part. I identify with Christianity but carry many principles of Buddhist philosophy with me. The source of all suffering is the attachment to desire.

The attachment to desire is a strange thing. I was raped almost twice in Texas because of it. The first time was so bad I had to shout “no, no, get off of me” and sprinted for the door. I ran home to my apartment so fast and again because I had no boundaries, I believed a friend of Lauralee’s brother at SMU would do nothing of the sort. I can’t believe the same guy had the nerve to ask me later to watch his dog on a trip, like nothing had happened between us. If I hadn’t gotten out of that apartment, just down the hall from mine, I would have been raped.

We talk a lot about the victim-perpetrator-rescuer identity in therapy. In these situations, as my staff of therapists would agree, I am the victim. There is nothing I did except for walk down the hall into a friend’s apartment for the second time to think that I would be raped. Unfortunately letting that identity take on a life of its own because I fear success and thus losing it once attained is not an identity I seek.

Yet, where I am at fault, is both times I was almost raped both men expected sex in return for weed, unbeknownst to me. Seeking weed during a time in my life when my icloud was hacked and had to reimage my computer almost six times until ultimately I was told to delete my social media, is an excuse to smoke weed but at the time seemed much better than smoking cigarettes or drinking. That is my fault. Not that the men expected and tried to engage in sex with me because of it. Did I put myself into a situation? Yes. Did I ask to be treated like that? No. Did I even conceive these two friends of very close friends would try this? No.

For a large part of my life, I have been the victim. That is why I identify with that card so much. But now I have learned that there are times when I become too victimized by myself.

Do I like being sick? No. Have I been a victim. Yes. Does this mean it is my identity? No. Has it become my identity in the past? Yes. Have I allowed it to become my destiny? No.

boundaries and vulnerability

My physical and emotional boundaries went straight through to my sexual ones, there were none. They were destroyed by an older man when I was a child and by someone by the name of Marlo.

Marlo and I had the most tumultuous, loving, hate filled relationship of my life. Though it is not in my heart to hate and I still wish him the very best to this day. Unfortunately and fortunately, Marlo is a sociopath. I learned that I was just a toy in his game of three, eventually moving past physical to verbal back to physical abuse, then to sexual abuse. I still can’t get to that part of my brain, the sexual abuse, because it was when I first dissociated. I’m not sure if we were still a two then. But I have my doubts, he soon made me a pawn in his sadomasochistic relationship he carried out with his new girlfriend. She was a 42-year-old married woman with a family of her own. Ultimately I left the relationship not because I had bruises around my neck and chest I hid with makeup, but because once you cheat you no longer have a place in my life. You cannot love me and someone else at the same time, I deserved much better.

That got me to kick him out, but not to have him not come back. In 2013 I made the mistake of calling him and going to a strangely ironic wedding of a high school friend of his. She had invited me but not invited Marlo. I wanted to reach out to make things okay. A mistake I have made many times before and many times after. We met for coffee, we had sex, and I went back to Wisconsin unsettled with a Marlo texting me constantly. Though this time, Marlo had an unforeseen plan. I was drugged when he came to visit me on New Years Eve of 2013. I don’t know what we did all I can remember is him asking for my computer passwords, and having sex. He said it was molly but it was special K. Even as I transcribe these words I can’t trust myself that it was special K, because I was drugged, only friends after told me their hypotheses. We had sex and I must have been saying “stop, stop” because these words have haunted me for the time after every night before I go to sleep. When I think of the sexual things he made me do even in our relationship all I can think of is “stop, stop.” I woke up the next day puking my guts out.

I had done ecstasy with him twice before, but this took the cake for Marlo. He told me he never regretted cheating on me in my home for over a year and a half when I was newly sober. He said it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. He said his girlfriend was the devil and he wanted to marry me, but he wanted to keep her in his life and have us both. I was what got them off, keeping secrets from me, having sex in my bed, having sex in our second bedroom and having me wait in the bathroom after coming home from work as I heard heavy high heels clank out and close our front door while Marlo was in the bedroom. He said that if he was to do it all over again he wouldn’t change a thing. He said the only reason they had stopped was because her son walked in on them wearing masks and he called Marlo his dad. That broke my heart.

I thought at the time the past was in the past, little did I know that Marlo had no plans of “never letting it ever happen where he didn’t know where I was ever again.”

poetry for the soul

ANXIETY

you fill up the room

disguised

like carbon monoxide

until you find me

i cannot hide

and then air

it doesn’t exist

my lungs are filled

with the sightless gas of you.

………………………………………………………….

PTSD

are you a snake?

your venom seems to be in my blood

but you never seem to rattle

before i shake

………………………………………………………….

when you arrive

i don’t exist  

an unforeseen visitor of my unbecoming past

………………………………………………………….

DEPRESSION

you live in me

but i don’t know where you are

you’re like a radio station

when you’re tuned up you get me down

………………………………………………………….

someone asked me to write a poem about happiness the other day

well its hard to write about something when you live in a foreign place

five years its been. five years of the same. five years where I’d rather be asleep.

not rather. been. 

rather than live with the reality of what I’m in

we had one good summer

………………………………………………………….

 I sent you away

 with a cd

 no one would love you like I would

 a band of horses running you out

………………………………………………………….

HOPE

when the sun sets

it always has to rise

………………………………………………………….

what everyone looks at

is what they think they see

the outside

is the lie that tells us the truth on the inside

………………………………………………………….

there is no light

at the end of the tunnel

the light is there the whole way

we just don’t see it

carbon monoxide

I had a dream last night that Fiona and Justin would not let me see their kids if I was a healer. It is too un status quo for them. Just like the crow being misunderstood.

I sit here writing and it is important to give the context of where I sit, and more importantly, how I feel. I woke up last night at 3:31 am and was not able to return to sleep. It is now 5:25pm. I am writing on a marble cocktail table I just purchased and a new rug, a sign of changing my external surroundings to match my interiors. They are light and airy. I stare at a Calder mobile gifted to me by my Godmother Diane. I stare at a beaming blue Maria Santi-banez gifted to me by my favorite aunt, Aunt Madeline, and my Godfather Uncle Matty Boy. I am uncomfortable, even in my beautiful surroundings. I am slightly anxious, though no where near the level I was before taking my medication. My back rests upon a worn in leather rolled arm chocolate sofa. I worry the semi attached cushions cannot be flipped.

I am still here. Sitting in front of my television, writing away my anxiety. Anxiety is like carbon monoxide, sightless and smokeless, slowly taking away all of you as anxiety quickly shoots to panic.

Yet, God is Great and is still performing miracles everyday for me. The biggest change I see is within myself. I no longer care about the hacking that took place in 2014. If it happens again, these things can always be fixed. Plus, I am not important enough for someone to actually waste their time on me. I am smart enough to not replay 2014. I simply refuse to go back to a life that was riddled with anxiety and depression. Though I still struggle with those diagnoses now. I was thinking about jumping off of a building. And I knew what building it was I wanted to jump off of. For the first time in my life I actually had a plan. I only told my father. Obviously this is not in my new life but the feeling of suicidality still haunts me at times. I was hearing my subconscious far too loudly in my head. The division between conscious and subconscious and unconscious is an interesting thing. 90% of the things we do are formed by our subconscious. Although I no longer take any ADHD medications, I still struggle with the fact that my brain operates on a different circuit, and that’s ok. My abilities can never fly with something that traps my mind into a box. I am an outside of the box thinker and person, and it traps you.

We are still spiritual beings in a human experience.

birds and paradoxes

My second session with Beatrice was just as insightful. A wounded crow had found her way into her backyard, laying on heart stones and bleeding out on her wings. She had taken rest there just before I arrived. Her intuition told her I would have the message. I felt a sense of pressure, but around Beatrice I am always comfortable. I know my angels are always watching over me, and if I had the message, it would be delivered. She had gifted me a birdcage and a feather the session before. I saw an eagle fly over my car on the way to her home, and two crows circling around something.

After calling someone to come get the wounded bird, we sat down and she first asked me what grounding meant. I told her peace, harmony, and calm – like a rock that has water flowing over it. She asked me to go outside and connect with the bird. I went outside and she held the space for our energy. I kneeled on a grass area that clearly her dog, Tito, used to relieve himself. I didn’t care. It was there that I was called, an area presumably unclean to our human spirit, but not to our higher spirits.

It now reminds me of the moment I saw beauty in Chicago, a blade of grass blowing in the wind next to dog poo. I thought in that Chicago moment, it would never get better than this. I had a boyfriend who loved me, a job I adored that I could walk to just down the street, a beautiful apartment to live in and my best friend next door.

As I sat down I placed my hands together. I closed my eyes and breathed. Beatrice had already called someone to come rescue the crow. My eyes started to rapidly move and I saw a triangle upside down. Then I felt an energy saying “you will be okay” “you will be free.” My eyelids were flickering so rapidly just like birds’ wings. I saw chevrons, triangles right side up. I went inside and told Beatrice the message. She said she thought the bird was there for me. I told her, I think the bird is me. And she agreed. I am deeply wounded right now, and just starting to recover from my anxiety and depression. I have felt adopted my whole life. I have felt largely misunderstood my whole life, just like this “falcon” who we found out was really a crow.

Crows get a bad reputation. The are seen as the birds that are the most unclean, they are portrayed badly in the bible, but they warned Peter who didn’t listen. They have powerful messages, and this one completely related to me. I saw 444 on a license plate driving over. My arrival time was estimated at 444pm, and I arrived at Beatrice’s at 444 exactly on the dot. These are not coincidences, they are Godincidences.

She came outside and mentioned to the aviary rescuers that her husband is in a David Bowie tribute band playing at Stillwater. I told her – Beatrice – STILL WATER! She didn’t make the connection until we returned inside, just like the metaphor of my grounding, water flowing over a still rock.

She said we are blessed to be here. We have the five senses. That is why I chose to be on earth. To help others and heal them. Angels don’t have the five senses anymore. But on earth we have these things. WE indeed, are the lucky ones.

She started talking in an Indian accent. Channeling the past lives I have lived, as a powerful intellectual in royalty. She affirmed this to be true again, as was my experience with my first medium. I wanted to tell her I am so blessed to have her as my guide. I did.

She told me that my name would be a pen name for the writing to ensue. My name is C. See. My dreams are helpful for me to validate my gifts.

Paradoxes are the meaning of life. Jesus overcame life, by death. Ultimately coming to this realization at Easter has confirmed everything I knew to be true in my heart this entire time, just like Beatrice said.

be loved, beloved

My battery is on 11%. I just texted Beatrice 1111 was showing up for me. I just texted a Lester at 11:11 guiding him on a problem that was exactly similar to the one I had with Charles. I blocked Charles on snapchat and today on my phone. My friend Lester had an eerily similar story – a reflection of my own with Charles. Lester was deeply in love with someone who said she needed space when he became too attached. Then she removed herself from his life in an effort to remove the pain he felt from pulling back. He can’t help but feel that if he were in a future place in his life, she would want to be with him. I advised him that if she only wanted to be with him for who and what he could be, that he should let her go. He deserves, as we all do, to be with someone who accepts us as we are. Charles needs to let me go.

While I was in another of Beatrice’s readings, I felt electrical shocks run through my body. It is important to me to write about my first and only (not last) astral travel. I saw myself climbing a ladder. The ladder was high and I was not afraid until the ladder became straight, as if I was getting to the finish line, and I looked down. I knew it was my mission, I knew it was my purpose, to continue climbing. I distinctly remember seeing the earth and knowing I could do this. However, a firefighter came up and rescued me and brought me down the ladder. I know now that that ladder is something I will cross and finish by myself.

It is 12:21 am. I am seeing 2’s 1’s in my sight line everywhere. The funny thing is, I am dyslexic, and this is a sign that the world as I knew it is not the world I know. Everything I knew was backwards.

Beatrice texted me “I love you!…” and wanted to write beloved.(BE)(LOVE)(ED), BE LOVED, Beloved.

Again I have been seeing 1111 everywhere. Beatrice is going to explain to me its significance. Yet, regardless of these positive affirmations in my life, today I forgot about what was important.

I forgot that the universe was and still is on my side. I forgot myself. I forgot that I was love. In the beginning of the day I remembered it. In the middle I forgot it. At the end I remembered it. I saw a blue light above my Dad’s head tonight at dinner. I keep seeing light around the crown of people’s heads, even in therapy. Beatrice told me to write about my miracles, and I am writing about them, but I am also going to write about but not focus on my struggles.

As I go through an awakening, I am so disappointed by the people I thought were supportive of me. I don’t need to separate myself from people, but I need to set boundaries. A certain friend needs to be awakened but seems to be denying her true collective consciousness. I see her in yellow-white light always. She is extremely special. There are other people in my life who are becoming more important. Donna, Heather and Georgia are some of them. But in the end, what makes life so hard? Ourselves.

the upside of knowing

I never understood Snickers, Marlo and many more people I would meet in my life. And I probably never will. Is it my fault for choosing blissful ignorance? No, because that is a choice all of us wish to make for ourselves. Unfortunately my soul does not align with its strategies; until now do I realize that my soul is my soul, that its purpose cannot be changed but is connected to a changing universe. The pain of knowing is better than blissful ignorance, that which is truly my soul. I just didn’t realize that I was surviving in blissful ignorance rather than thriving in the pain of knowing.

Knowing isn’t pain, but the process of training every gene in your body not to take the comfortable road of blissful ignorance is. The world has hidden treasures you don’t look at, you see. You don’t hear, but you listen. That distinction is the premise of my blog, and is intricately connected to my journey.

For example, driving down to Beatrice’s home, I saw my birthday on a license plate, and birds on the wall on the 5 down to San Diego. I left seeing purple and yellow, the two strings on the bird cage she gifted to me, in energies all around me. She said this is a skill I will be able to develop. It was the most rewarding session of my life because I know now that I have a path to follow, and a way to get there; I just have to navigate through my past traumas, that pain of knowing. And I have, very cleverly. Yet accepting my traumas as lessons holds the key.

The red carpet that Beatrice mentioned they were rolling out for me was the same red carpet treatment that they rolled out at the golf tournament for my Grandfather Joseph and Grandmother Dina. Even as I type golf gold keeps coming up! It took 5 people to do the job that Joseph did as one person at the golf tournament in Florida. At 331 am I saw the connection. A sleepless night, but thank you to my ascended masters and the universe and my grandpa who manifests as well as a blue light. My Grandfather Michael was a lightworker as well. Can you be a star seed and a lightworker at the same time? I’ll have to ask Beatrice.

Life is never rainbows and butterflies. But the universe, when we connect to it, is.

turning blocks into opportunities

I was in Toyko the first time I was molested. She was a friend of mine, and would come over to my home to play with my stuffed animals. Then the door would shut, and I knew playtime was over. I never told my parents why I no longer wanted to invite my friend over, or go to her house, but I remember clinging to my mom’s feet on our wood floor in our downtown Tokyo home while she was on the phone with my friend’s mom, just saying that I no longer wanted to see her. I’ve used euphemisms throughout my life. In part because I never wanted to get anyone in trouble, but also in part because I never wanted to get myself in trouble.

As I grew up and came to live back in California to where I had moved home after my first of abusive relationship in Chicago, I entered another one. I thought I had learned my lesson then, that standing up to sociopaths or fleeing from them would fix my problems. Unfortunately that is never the case. In fact, I still seem to run away from people I once trusted who then broke my trust and hurt me. This time it was Snickers.

The police came to our apartment after I found meth and a half burnt spoonful of it in her room. I almost disassociated I didn’t realize what I was seeing, I was in so much disbelief. Someone not only I trusted but my family trusted with their mortgage not only betrayed me by stealing thousands of dollars, but by projecting her problems onto me. Because of these projections, I was at fault for going into her room after losing beloved wooden bowls passed down from my grandmother to my mother, and then strange things, like my underwear and my sheets, that she had taken from me. At that moment, blissful ignorance failed me yet again.

Then I realized the gravity of the situation; I was living with someone very unsafe. I asked my father to come and put a lock on my door, but since our familial relationship was too intertwined with theirs, he put it on my closet door so she wouldn’t know. Unfortunately, blissful ignorance changed my life again. I slowly moved all of my most precious possessions into the closet so they could not be taken. I wanted to pretend none of this was happening. She claimed I had a lock on my door, but the lock could be opened with her long acrylic fingernails, a signal that I was crazy for thinking the lock on my bedroom door wasn’t impenetrable. 14 checkbooks were stolen from a pack of 15 that I had recently paid for upon the purchase of my new Jeep. I remember her saying, as she leased her $300/month Mercedes SLA in lipstick red, that she didn’t know “I would get a car like this”, implying my car was such an upgrade from the evergreen Honda civic I grew up driving. She asked me to drive her to the Square in it. At that earlier time, I still thought she was my friend.

A cop knocked on our door at 4am; she had returned to find me in her room in disbelief of everything that she had stolen from me, and in shock over the crystal meth I found in her closet. It was like she had stolen my identity, as I immensely placed so much meaning in the objects around me. She ran into her room, not after spitting on me and twisting the blame to me for entering her room after stealing day after day from me in my room.

My shampoo, my face wash, anything she liked she would take without remorse. To this day I know she is a narcissist, exhibiting other strange tendencies. Even growing up she would jest at others at the expense of me or them. When I answered the door, the Mesa police officer asked if everything was ok. Living in blissful ignorance and not wanting to disrupt the boat, I said “yes – but there was some spitting involved.” He left, and she repeatedly banged on my door and said “it will never happen again that you go into my room without me knowing.” She later installed video cameras though that were for her, I had only entered her room after months of things just going missing, my mail being taken by her which I had to apologetically say “I’m sorry – this is addressed to me.” For the entire 6 months of living together I sequestered myself to my room to eat and to live. I was in brutalizing fear daily, partially brought on by my circumstance, but also by being afraid to stand up to a bully.

After claiming the spoon was filled with incense, and being informed she no longer accepted checks from me to pay our bills in her name that she was never paying “because they took too long to cash.” I knew I had to leave the situation. In July of 2015, I paid her over $500 in cash and checks for bills. Eventually my father demanded that she show him our electric bills, that I would essentially be paying for in full since she would never pay the months bills prior.

I constructed a whole story around Snickers yet she was the reason why I entered into healing for the the first time. I saged my apartment for the first time. My grandfather appeared in the form of an eagle driving home from a medium session. I don’t credit her enough with helping me realize my true capacity, and my own shortcomings, especially in giving my power to her without even taking a second look.

safe spaces

Meadows are beautiful. They have always been my safe place, a yellow field of flowers draping over rolling hills. This was one of my first childhood memories, and to this day even more cherished than the cherry blossoms that arched over the streets of Japan.

I had a wonderful dream last night and a nightmare. It all started again when I met Beatrice. Not only did she recall my first entry in our healing session prior to the full moon when she asked me to journal, she recalled the fields of rolling meadows I so desperately hope to return to. I am a light worker, and I am still figuring out what that means. I am rainbow aura, and it has been told to me I come from the Pleiades constellation. They are the seven stars in the universe so compactly concentrated that no natural burst of the big bang could have caused the constellation to be arranged in such an abstract way. That’s because they are God’s work, not man’s and not those of science.

Beatrice told me that a bird had come into her house two days prior, on Saturday, a day after I connected with her. My grandfathers manifest in an Eagle and an Egret, and it was no coincidence that a bird refused to leave her house that Saturday. I had told her nothing about me, only that I was struggling with anxiety and depression and wanted to jump off of a building four months prior, which heightened two months ago. I told her about my manifestations and that is when she relayed the story of the bird – as validation, as knowing that the bird was meant to be in her home for a reason. She felt the urge to gift something to me, the first, a birdcage – the second a feather – the third, a book from her own grandfather who had died in a fire on Easter Sunday. She explained that I am wrapped in a societal package, but what is truly beautiful about me is my heart, and that I lead with it.

Only the books were saved on that Easter Sunday. How precious she shared Treasure Island with me. I am not a victim but an easy target. My angels showed her a red carpet rolling out in front of her, so beautiful she cried. As a fellow lightworker, she offered to mentor me. She said I not only have dreams that manifest with my family, but there will be larger dreams that manifest with complete strangers.

Contrary to my last post, I do not enjoy being the center of attention.

She said that since I don’t like attention or being the center of it; I just like being a part of it, that my biggest fear will be letting people down. Everything she said about my life rings so true to who I am. As someone who now has validation, and a mentor to see energies and not only feel them, I am encouraged. My angles showed her tapping or reiki as a way to heal others. She said I hold the key to my destiny. I later saw an Instagram post on the same message by another healer. Every block that my angels were giving me is an opportunity for faith in the collective WE.

“vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change” -brene brown

I started losing weight when I studied abroad in September of Paris in 2008. I dropped from 125 pounds to 103 when I returned home to California in December of 2008. I still don’t know why I think so fondly of Paris. In part, because I think of Paris externally, not internally. There is also magic in the city that cannot be denied. I was surrounded by art; my major was Art History and it connected me to that spiritual dimension.

During my anorexia in Paris I realized who my true friends were. They were the girls in my sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, that I was originally so intimidating. They didn’t say much, but they always included me. I met Tucker, one of my dearest friends and a person I feel I was supposed to meet on my creative journey. He had just spent the summer as a glass blower in Chicago. We took a trip to Interlaken together where we stayed in a hostel with a nude man and later para-sailed together. I lost those pictures when I lost my facebook and phone, but that a story for a later day.

My friends including Tucker knew there was something wrong with me, yet they never did anything intentionally harmful to remind me of it. I bonded with my sorority sisters as much as I could but I was in a full time relationship with my eating disorder and you cannot have a relationship with anyone else once that strikes. I would show up late to dinners and occasionally throw up in the bathroom. The two people who knew what was going on were Michelle and Katrina. Both whom I still consider my best friends today. They loved me through the hardest parts of my life, and still today when I have been freed from an eating disorder for over ten years.

An eating disorder is a difficult thing to explain. Someone once said to me, Gina, in an outpatient eating disorder program at Chicago that “you can’t explain it from the inside, and you can’t understand it from the outside.” This still rings true for me today. Other than the loss of who I thought were my best friends at Northwestern – I cannot attribute my loss of weight to anything other than the desire for attention.

Northwestern was the first time I had attention from boys, I got into the best sorority class, and was part of the coolest kids on campus. Three of those people in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences literally and figuratively turned their backs on me when I walked into my own college graduation. It was one of the most humiliating moments of my life on the day that would have been my proudest.