When it was all said and done, the year I spent in Bolivia was one if the most defining years of my life. By the time I returned to the US, I considered myself to be fully well, totally healed, made new from the inside out. Relatively speaking, I was right; but realistically speaking, I still had a long way to go. ( And I still have a long way to go :). )As far as I could tell then, I was good to go. But I was also starting to feel a lot of the emotions that I had been numbing with food.

It seemed like the more structured my life became and the more I was held accountable by the people around me that year, the more upset I got. Even though on the outside I looked healthier and my face was brighter about 3/4 of the way through the year, I was starting to feel a lot of the emotions well up inside that I had been stuffing all these years. There was a lot of anger which I had been accustomed to turning directly at myself that kept rising up, and I was having a hard time keeping it in. I started getting mad at the people closest to me, even when the anger was completely unwarranted. There wasn't any reason to be mad at the missionaries I lived with, just like in the past there was no reason to be mad at the physician who was trying to help me. It seemed like the more that my new friends/host family tried to reach with care into my secret, inside world, the more upset I got. The beauty of hindsight, coupled with a lot of patience on the part of my stateside friends, has shown me how the anger tried to take over my personality and become who I was (throughout my life, not just during that year. It happened to begin to rise to the surface again when I wasn't able to use the control of food to stuff the anger.) God did not create me with a spirit of anger, and trying to fight against it in my own flesh only made it worse. Trusting in Him to deliver me and allowing Him to re-work and reorganize my life was the only way to bring about the separation from the past pain and emotional injuries that were at the root.

However, I am jumping forward quite a bit by saying those things :).

I am going to keep this post short and sweet and try to pick up where I left off next time.