“I did try journal writing many other times, but I was never honest enough with myself about what was really bothering me. I knew if I honestly wrote about my feelings, then I would have to have some sort of reaction to the horror on the paper. Then I would have to do something about it, which meant change, and that scared me even more”
Crystal Phillips puts words to something I recognise.
In her memoir The Me I Knew I Could Be, Phillips recounts her journey through bulimia and emotional eating, and how she eventually lost 157 pounds, regained her self-confidence, and rebuilt a healthier life.
Throughout her turbulent marriage, Phillips used food as both comfort and escape. She attended various weight-loss programs, only to abandon them, overindulge, and regain everything she had lost, and more.
Her memoir is also a reminder of how we sometimes let our bodies carry the burden of our unspoken sorrow and our excesses.
Isn’t that what we sometimes do, reach for anything, as long as it gives us some relief? Anything to get us through?
Only when she lost her brother did something in Phillips began to shift. Here she recounts her epiphany:
“But in 1994, on New Year’s Eve, as I prayed in the safety of my pew, with my size-22 skirt cutting my waist, I knew I had to make a change. How and where would I begin to share my feelings of fear, hurt, shame, self-pity, and anger?…”
Phillips decided to return to journaling but this time, moved beyond keeping a food diary to writing about her feelings. She discovered that telling the truth, at least in the pages of her diary, could become a beginning.
Writing helped me to become honest again.
Crystal Phillips, The Me I Knew I Could Be
The pages of her journal unlocked the pain and shame she had kept hidden, and she began to face them.
I first read The Me I Knew I Could Be a decade ago, when I was going through my own grief: the passing of my beloved grandmother, Tai.
Rereading the memoir in the last few days took me back to the months after Tai’s death, when I tried to carry on as though I had made peace with her absence.
I remember struggling to get out of bed in the mornings, wading through the motions of each day, home and work a blur, and crying myself to sleep at night.
I remember waiting for someone, anyone, to tell me that it was okay if I stayed in bed and stared at the ceiling all day. That it was okay if I didn’t feel like greeting people or hearing their stories about Tai, because they didn’t know her like I did. That it was okay if I took whatever time I needed to grieve her death.
I remember the shame and guilt I felt at missing my grandmother so much, for wasn’t she now in a better place, free from the pain she had endured for so long?
Didn’t the Bible teach that when a believer dies, they are ‘absent from the body, present with the Lord’?
Why was I longing for her when she was finally at peace?
I remember desperately holding on to Jesus’ promise to comfort us when we mourn and to give us rest.
Although I had already been keeping a diary well before then, Phillips’ account of her grief over her brother’s death helped me name what I felt and see the faithfulness of God in my own sorrow.
My grandmother’s absence has left a void in my life. When the ache comes, I try to let it wash through me rather than hold on to it, or worse, avoid it.
Putting my pain into words did not remove it, nor erase the deep sense of abandonment that I carried. But it loosened something in me enough to breathe again.