Eating Disorders: My Experience of Anorexia

If you’d met me seven years ago, you’d have seen someone who appeared to have it all together. A ‘successful’ Christian, newly married to a vicar in training. Leader of a thriving children’s ministry. A talented student with a bright future. Underneath however, the reality was very different: I was consumed by an eating disorder that would nearly kill me. So how did I get there – and what has helped to bring me out?

It started when I was thirteen. Up until then I’d had an idyllic childhood: I knew who I was and I knew where I belonged. But almost overnight, that started to change. My grandfather died. I moved schools. My body felt out of control: like a tanker, spilling flesh and hormones. In search of answers, I even started going to church.

My brand of Christianity had space for ‘God’, but not for Jesus. It talked about sin and rules – but less about grace. It paid lip service to his work on my behalf. But, in practice, it was up to me to prove my own worth. So that’s what I did. I worked hard and won prizes. I resolved to be smart and pretty and most of all, ‘good’. But nothing – whether clothes or friends or money, was ever enough. I was filled with hungers. I didn’t know what they were called or where to put them. What I did know was this: they were too much.

I was too much – too needy, too intense, too messy, too fat.

The answer, I decided, was to lose weight. Instead of my desires killing me, I would kill them. I would squash my hungers and I would fix myself. I would be thin.

To begin with, I disguised my weight loss under baggy clothes and excuses – but like my bones, it became more and more difficult to hide. Frantic with worry, my parents took me to the doctors and I was referred to a treatment centre. I put on weight – but though I looked better on the outside, I still had the same issues. My body was fixed, but my heart stayed the same.

Ten years later, my old habits started to return. Overwhelmed by the prospect of a new parish and my role as a vicar’s wife, I stopped eating again. It was a slow but inexorable decline. Friends asked if I was dying – and they weren’t wrong. Yet this time, I was an adult – no-one could force me to eat.

It took the death of my beloved grandmother to pierce the madness. I was too weak to travel to her funeral and something in me finally broke. In desperation, I cried out to the God I’d tried to flee: ‘I’ve exhausted my own resources’ I prayed. ‘But if you want me, you can have what’s left’.

I had always pictured God as a scary headmaster – slightly disapproving and far away. Someone with rights over my soul – but not my body. Someone who wanted me to perform and keep His rules. This God would surely strike me down or turn me away. But as I opened my Bible, I found someone else. Instead of the God I thought I knew; in Jesus I met the one who knew me. Revelation 5:5 describes him as ‘the Lion of the tribe of Judah . . . (who) has triumphed’. My fingers gripped the page as I prepared to meet this lion: a glorious, roaring conqueror. But that’s not how the passage continues. Instead verse 6 talks of ‘a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the centre of the throne’.

Jesus was a Lion who was also a Lamb. Lord of the universe – blazing and beautiful. But also one who came to be broken – and who understood what it was to be weak. He confronted me, not as a tyrant or heavenly taskmaster, but as a gift. He came offering himself. On the cross my badness and my goodness were taken away: rendered irrel­evant by his sacrifice. Jesus didn’t want apologies, resolutions or assurances that I would do better. He wanted me. Instead of making me perform, he lifted me clean out of the arena. In return, he asked only one question: Would I receive him?

I was the girl who always said ‘No’.
‘No’ to people
‘No’ to relationships
‘No’ to marriage and health and family and food
‘No’ to risk and desire and vulnerability and need
But as I looked at Him - the Saviour who knew me and yet loved me – I said yes.
And that was when my life and recovery began.

Emma Scrivener was born in Belfast, but now lives with her husband in the south east of England. She suffered from life-threatening anorexia as a child and as an adult. She now speaks and writes about her experiences at www.emmascrivener.net. Her book A New Name is available now.