The Incredible Power of Song Lyrics
Hey all! Thank you all for the great comments, love and support you all showed to me on my first post. It is SO encouraging to know that I have people who support my journey and want the best for me in terms of recovery. And look – I made it to post number 2!! Yes, that is a challenging accomplishment for me. Not just because this whole communication, divulging inner feelings stuff is so new to me, but also because I struggled with what to write. Do I write about treatment on Thursday? Do I write about anxiety, depression, body-image or any of the other hundred thoughts and emotions that come up? Do I tell a story about a rough day or things that irritated me about being anorexic before treatment? Truth is, I couldn’t choose. I looked for quotes, I read articles on EDs, I even considered writing a post about some of the gruesome facts. But then it hit me when I came across a picture of a girl holding a poster, which read, “My life changed forever when I chose not to eat.” I stopped and knew immediately I had to write about music. You see those words on that poster… they are lyrics to one of the songs that I must have listened to thousands of times in high school and my early college years. The song is called Courage by Superchick, but I’ll get to why I listened to it. In thinking about how to use that song in a post, but before I do, do me a favor, click on the link below and listen to/watch the music video for this song. Doing so will help you to understand what I talk about in this post. (Posting the lyrics just doesn’t grasp the full idea)
Song 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nDL_A6UFkw
There are a number of songs that helped me get through the last several years with my ED, but this one is one of the most prominent because it decribes the hell that I have been through battling this ED. I shared it with you in hopes that you will not only be able to understand a little more about how an ED effects ones way of thinking and the daily battle we face when it comes to eating and body-image. This particular song was a reminder that, though I didn’t know it at the time, I am not alone in this – there are other people who struggle with the same battle I do. This song provided comfort when I needed it most, because someone FINALLY understood what I was dealing with. I felt like I made a connection with the song that I lacked from a physical human being – not because they didn’t try to comfort me or help me, but because I wouldn’t let them in. I wasn’t ready to let them in. I wasn’t ready to let down the walls that I had built, and admit that I had a problem and needed help. In my mind, admitting I needed help was failure – I still see it that way today.
The lyrics and the video for “Courage” describe anorexia in a great way. There were many days that I lied about what I ate or even if I ate. There were many days that I “didn’t feel well.” I had more than my share of days I felt unbeautiful – I still do. There were days I starved myself, be it because I felt guilty for eating too much the day before, not exercising enough, or because I just didn’t want to deal with the emotions that were tied to eating. I didn’t want to deal with regret after a meal, or the fear that one meal was going to cause me to gain weight. I didn’t want to feel like I failed because I ate, or because I indulged with friends. You will soon come to realize, if you don’t know this about me already, that I have a tremendous fear of failure.
There is a picture in the music video that says, “starvation is control.” Yes, yes it is. Or at least it feels like it to someone with an ED. Starvation is a way to control the things we feel we can’t change – the way our body looks, the thoughts that go through our head… Starvation = success. Starvation = skinny. Starvation = pretty. Those are all things a person with an ED longs to achieve. See how Starvation = control now? I am slowly starting to realize now that it was a false sense of control, but there are times when I feel like that is all I have to cling to. In therapy this week my counselor and I talked about this element of control. She put it in a different light… By letting the eating disorder tell me I shouldn’t eat, or that I need to workout longer, or that I’m too fat for certain outfits, I am really letting the ED control me. I am relinquishing control to the ED and am in fact not in control at all. This never dawned on me, but it makes perfect sense to me now that I have had a few days to think about it. I felt most comfortable when I wasn’t in control at all. Yet I believed, and still find myself believing that I was in control when I chose to not eat, or to exercise more, or to only eat extremely small amounts of certain allotted foods. Eating a piece of cake or even two M&Ms was out of the question. I would feel guilty, I would verbally hate my body, I would freak out that I was going to gain weight – if I even considered eating it, I felt panic set in for fear of loosing control and giving into a rare indulgence. There were days I struggled to even eat an apple for fear that I was going to be out of control.
The music video that I linked is not the actual music video that Superchick made, I don’t believe they ever did make a video. The particular video I shared with you was made by a young lady, whom I think portrayed not only the lyrics perfectly, but she also portrayed the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of an eating disorder perfectly as well. There were many days I would stand in front of the mirror in a skin and bone state, and ball my eyes out because I still saw a “fat” girl reflection. I would nit-pick at all the places on my body that I hated and needed to work on. I would make empty promises and deals with myself that if I worked that much harder I would get there and then I could eat something. Or if I starved myself this long I could eat a small amount more than usual. It sickens me to think back to those days. It scares me that some of those thoughts, emotions, and breakdowns have started to reoccur. I don’t want to go back there. EVER. I have once again found myself turning to the song “Courage,” not because I feel no one understands, but because I want to remind myself of where I was and to gather “courage” to get through this. “I am not through the night.” I wont be through the night until I am through this an diagnosed without an ED, so for now I will continue “to walk towards the light,” gathering courage as I go and gaining strength.
One last thought and I will end this novel. It’s taken me four days to write this post. Partly because I struggled to find the words, I struggled to find a way to make logical sense of all the thoughts that are jumbled in my head but I felt that this needed to be the topic of my next post. I needed to share some ugly thoughts, not for pity or sympathy, but so that I could let them go. There were a lot of tears writing this and a lot of wounds that have been re-opened, memories that have resurfaced that I have tried for so long to suppress and lock away. But each time I sat down to write and with every word that gets typed in this post, I feel the heavy weight of those thoughts and feelings being lifted off my shoulders one by one. I feel like I have healed one of the thousands of wounds that I needed to heal. And let me tell you it is a wonderful feeling to get it out, no matter how much it hurt in the process and no matter how much I didn’t want to share them. I can move on now. I can remind myself that those thoughts aren’t how I think. My eating disorder does NOT control me. I control ME and I plan on giving it my all to regain control of MY life.
God is SO good! I wish you all the best, until next time!
🙂 K