Recovery Story
I’m in Athens, Greece, and I have a story to tell you. I have a healing story to tell you. I am meeting with a young woman. Her name is Lise. She contacted me about a week or so ago. She lives in Germany and she said that she saw on my website that I would be doing a workshop in Greece. She was wondering if she could meet me because she wanted to tell me her story.
Her story is that, as a girl, she developed an eating disorder. My book had been published in German, and so she came across my book. It gave her so much hope for help, that she went to her parents and asked for them to help her get some treatment for her eating disorder. They weren’t willing to do that – no matter what she said, no matter what she tried. Now, I’m not recommending this, but she ran away from home. She took with her her dog-eared, underlined copy of Eating in the Light of the Moon, which was the German version of it. She did find help. Not that the book alone helped her recover, but she found help for her recovery. She is totally recovered now, and is a filmmaker. She has made some amazing films. I know, because she has sent them to me, and they’re really brilliant.
Now she wants to do a film about recovery. She had in mind the possibility that she would find her way to Hawaii, where she would meet up with me, and then she saw that I was going to be in Greece. She contacted me. She said, “Please, can we just meet? I know that I’m going to get the inspiration that I need to do this film if we could sit and just have a cup of coffee.”
So, that’s what I’m about to do! I’m about to meet with this amazing woman who chose the recovery path.
She had to go through a lot of obstacles to get here. She was a girl, and she didn’t know where she was going to find recovery, but she did. Now, she is going to tell her story in film – her story, in her own way. It will be a combination of biography, but not quite. It will be about the healing journey. And I just wanted to tell you her story because I want you to know that it is totally, 100% possible to recover. I get to meet women from all over the world that have done exactly that.
Lise: “This is the copy of Eating in the Light of the Moon that I found over ten years ago, and you see it’s really been used. It has lots of things underlined, some things marked. I really read it a couple of times as you can see here … I actually know it by heart. Here, in my journal I wrote, Tiranes…”
Anita: “Tiranes, what does that mean? Tyrant, oh tyrant! Like a mean tyrant.”
Lise: “ I don’t remember exactly how it was but in these diaries, actually, you will find all about my journey of recovery; first the journey of where, why and how I had this eating disorder, but then also all of the journey out of it. For me, what is interesting is that (in here) you’ll find all the stuff that’s beneath the eating disorder. It starts with a really girly diary. The first entry already is about conforming, it’s about, today I managed to do this, today I managed to that …”
Even now, from time to time, I open up Eating in the Light of the Moon and read it again, because I really like the stories.”
From Athens, Greece, and the Light of the Moon Cafe, I invite you if you are on the recovery journey: Don’t lose hope. Stay the course. The best is yet to come.
I would love to hear what you think, share a comment below!
Until next time. Thank you for joining me at the Light of the Moon Cafe.
Anita