To Cook, To Eat, To Live

Do you eat to live or live to eat? What if you stop eating altogether? Our courageous sister, C Chou found her answer in the midst of her battle with eating disorder.

Eating is special to me because I starved myself in high school.

At 15, I packed my bags and struck out to Aurora, IL where I attended a state-funded boarding school called the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA). At a very raw and difficult time in my family life, I flipped them all a very polite bird and peaced out. I was running away from problems, and they followed me. It was leaping out of the frying pan into the fire. And you can’t stop drop and roll for three years.

Without exaggeration I could write volumes about my adventures there.

I was a terror to the administration; it was a totalitarian school regime with anarchy always brewing: we were the bold sip of guerilla warfare. It was a noble affair to keep things awake. The academics were rigorous but rich; the social life was a very strange hierarchy of nerds and ubernerds and seminerds, milling amongst ourselves. To this day, my closest and dearest friends boast war wounds from those years. We wear our scars proudly.

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The environment was prison-like, so our food was no exception. Like the Bastille prisoners, we would bond in aching silence as we gnawed stale sandwiches and iceberg lettuce. Three meals a day, seven days a week, for three years. This was not a college campus. There were no restaurants around. We were not allowed to leave. A gourmet retreat was the Panera Bread located 10 miles away. Living in the middle of cornfields was palate isolation, gastronomical desolation.

I remember a sad moment where my roommate (and facebook wife) and I cooked macaroni and cheese in a hot water boiler that was only meant to hold water. Pasta with too much bite, clumps of orange cheese powder, and mealy water. We forced ourselves to eat it with melting plastic spoons, crouched on the floor in front of the boiler.

“Just eat it,” the cheese powder slipped off the noodle. Water leaked off the freeze-dried powder and left it dry again. These were the macaroni wetlands and the contents of its lukewarm maw. I couldn’t look at her, but I could see the grimace deepen in her peripheral face. “Don’t taste it, just swallow.” And that, my friends, is too pitiful for an indelicate joke.

The road to acknowledging I had an eating disorder was long. It weaved through my entire time at IMSA. Then the journey of repenting and walking away from it was even longer and damn humbling; it was not a placid plod, but more like tearing wildly through the field, crazy-eyed and nostril-flaring, clawing my way from it. The actual disorder and my struggles are for another time; God brought me through it, digging into my root issues of intimacy and identity. That’s all I want to say about that in this story– not because I’m reluctant to share, nor do I intend to trivialize the issue of addressing and working through eating disorders. My paradigm needed to shift on what was food, what was beauty, my family, and who I was. I would find out this was deep healing only possible with Christ. But this testimony is about the quiet start of healing, the foundation of support He laid for me with my partners in crime.

There is something special about a community that melts the dysfunction of solitude and loneliness. All sorrows are less with bread, and people with which to break bread. I know that community is not the answer to everything. A season of solitude is also fine, even needed. But no person is an island. No person need walk a path of healing alone. I, of GI-Jane/robot mentality, forget this. The gnawing hunger in my stomach, the dull ache in my bones; these things first began to change when my friends would find me, when they sought me out, knocked down my doors, threw rocks at my windows, and asked me to chill, asked me to break the rules with them, asked me to eat with them.

I had a keen awareness that the way I lived was not healthy. Hell if I knew how to start changing. I didn’t know where to begin. But He did, and it needed to start with the understanding that I was embraced for who I was, not tolerated. That I was not alone, but an integral part of the heartbeat of a mob of hooligans. Christ understands exactly what we need and He grants it to us, even when we can’t form our lips around the words to articulate it.

“Give us today our daily bread.” Matthew 6:11

This crazy bunch of kids, this community was a part of my daily bread. This bread describes what I need the most, what I need to survive and live. This bread does not become old. It’s new and different every day, but just as filling. I need this bread in order to start to heal, to build an expectant palate of His promises, to want to receive even more from Him. And it is “ours” by His grace. This bread would be given to me daily, and it would sustain me, overflow in me, and build me up to really live.

I know I say this a lot, but it hits me harder every time: God is so faithful.

Read more of C Chou’s stories at http://seechou.wordpress.com