Book Launch Speech: This is my Reason

I just wanted to share a few words to express what this book means to me, what it's about, and where it came from. 

You may end up reading about this, but as a little spoiler alert, I have battled anorexia since my teenage years, and depression has come along with it - so the things that happen inside my head are different than what happens inside of most people's heads. 

Inevitably, some of my fears, such as being misunderstood, are unavoidable.  I also had a significant fear of being known and not accepted, so I purposely pushed people away out of desperation to be accepted for my very worst, and to prove to myself that they couldn't stick around. I had a fear of being forgotten and alone, and I lost a lot of time to treatment and hospital visits, and time living inside of myself so I couldn't be around or present with people. My biggest fears, whether in big ways like being alone in hospitals without people knowing, or having some of my most close supports and relationships walk away, or having others think that I was just rebellious and not trust who I am as a person because they could only see my behavior -  these fears did come true.

I am also, as everyone else, ultimately alone with myself, because God is the only One who can fully know and love. And you know with all of these fears coming to life that I tried to push away so desperately by overcompensating with more harmful behaviors or pushing harder against people in efforts to express my true heart and intentions in non-beneficial ways, I'm still here. I didn't always think I'd make it through, and I always have. And I've grown. And since I am here, I have to tell the truth. I have to tell my story. Because there are people out there who have the same story. We actually all have the same story, it's just different for all of us. We all need the same things. We all need the same persistent, relentless love.  All of our hearts are stubborn. If we each look into ourselves, we get a window into the lives of those who feel so distant from us. Because we all have needed the same persistent love that God has shown us through people here on earth. Those are the people who have helped us understand our need for God, what his love and grace are, and what they even mean. We are all God's tools of love for each other. 

And we are all just the same. If we can use that to see each other's humanity, if we are willing to try to connect to the scary ideas that we think are foreign and distant because we don't understand them, we see that we are all in the same place. We are all trying to get to the same place. We are all crying out for the same things, the same love, the same need to be heard and seen. There is no different Christian, or person. And there is no crummy Christian. If the standard for "good Christian"  was trying not to sin, we would all be crummy Christians. But God doesn't see that. His grace is based on a decision he made thousands of years ago. He decided the original law in the Old Testament that he created for humans to either live by or face his judgment, was, and I quote, "weak and useless." He says that in Scripture, that His own law was useless. When I first read that I was thinking… that seems irreverent… looking around hoping no one could see me and that I wasn't going to get struck down by lightning. But no - God realized making us follow rules or be punished was not something we are capable of.  Us humans could not handle it. If we could handle following a law perfectly, none of us would get parking tickets. So instead of judging us based on our performance and ability to follow his law to the letter of it, He made a priesthood in Jesus that would last forever. He would be the true leader of all of us. The leader by love, and humility. Who has compassion and empathy. He died once, for all sins. And that was it. He then said that Jesus came to save the world. To save it. Not to condemn it. And that was it.

I'm saying all of this to illustrate that there is no in-between space of salvation and Christianity. There is only holding on, and not holding on. There is no "middle ground" Christian. There is no fence straddling. No matter how weak we feel, holding on is what keeps us with God. There is no difference between any of us. I'm sharing this because this is really important for people who are struggling with things that they can lack complete control over. I need to make the message of the Good News loud and clear to those who feel helpless, assuring them that there is no one out there trying to condemn us (besides Satan, and God ignores his judgments). 

I mentioned before that since high school, I have faced anorexia. And I hardly say these words out loud, because I hate that title. I had one doctor's appointment where I said to my Physician Assistant, after a time I had relapsed, "I don't even have an eating disorder," and she said "Kyra, it's called ANOREXIA." And I glared at her, really frustrated. Then I thought about what I was doing and why I was there and realized, huh. I guess I do. 

I also have depression. I didn't always have depression. And I have it now. Some days are better than others, and I'm not always able to do the same things I used to be able to do with as much freedom. Sometimes I can only 50% focus on what's going on around me because I have voices taking up the space in my head, that say cruel things and try to take me back to past places. I've had periods of time where I couldn't show up to church every week. I've had to drop classes. I've had to spend months out of work and school to heal in hospitals from these illnesses. And I wondered every day what I could do to be worthy again, to not lose the connection with God I thought I had to earn. When all he's trying to do is love me where I am. Asking me to hold on from where I am. And that's all I have done because it is all I can do as a Christian - and I still have voices in my head. And I still can have these harder days. But knowing that God is holding on to me, has put me in a place where I am functioning well without giving into the thoughts that used to control me. Letting go of trying to keep myself in check for my wrongdoings has freed me up to actually change instead.

And guys, all of this is just me. A few months ago I would have told you that I'm broken. But I'm not broken. I was broken because I sin, but that's different. I was saved from that when I chose God. And so was every single one of you, who has ever sinned. That was our brokenness. We all were broken. Sin is the only thing that makes us broken. And that is now irrelevant to God because Jesus died once for all, and in scripture God tells us that he only sees his own image in us. We don't always see that in each other or ourselves, but God sees that in us.  So sin used to make me broken, but my illness does not nor ever has made me "broken." I was not born broken. I was born with a mind that deeply processes things. That feels things so deeply and gets cut through the soul often. That hurts for the world. That fears how I could hurt others. That loves so hard in my heart that it's afraid of what to do with it. That feels things so deeply and doesn't know what to do with it. Instead of letting things pass me by, I take it in. I see pain. That doesn't mean that chill people aren't good people. They have their own gifts. One of mine is deep feeling, which can be terrifying. And I don't know what to do with it. So it comes out the wrong way sometimes. In my case it came out in ways harmful to myself, hurtful to others, and hard for others to watch. 

I'm not broken. I see things differently. I internalize things differently.

I've been listening to a woman named Glennon Doyle who is incredibly wise, and she told this story that beautifully illustrates my point. She was in mental hospital and said, 

"My roommate's name is Mary Margaret. Mary Margaret is anorexic...One night, after lights out, I tell Mary Margaret about my great-grandfather. I explain that he was a coal miner in Pittston, Pennsylvania, and that every morning my great-grandmother packed a lunch pail for him and sent him down into the mines. It was dangerous work because there were deadly, invisible toxins in the mines, but the miners' bodies weren't sensitive enough to register the poison. So they carried a canary in a cage down into the mines with them sometimes. The canary's body was built to be sensitive to toxins, so the canary became their lifeguard. When the toxin levels rose too high, the canary stopped singing, and this silence was the miners' signal to flee the mine. If the miners didn't leave fast enough, the canary would die and, not much later, so would the miners. I tell Mary Margaret that I don't think we're crazy, I think we're canaries. 'Could it be', I ask, 'that we aren't making any of this up - we're just sensing the very real danger in the air?' I tell Mary Margaret that I think the world is more than a little poisonous and that she and I were built to notice that. I tell her that in lots of places, canaries are appreciated. They're the shamans and the poets and the sages, but not here. I say, 'We are the ones on the bow of the Titanic pointing and yelling 'Iceberg!' but everybody else just wants to keep dancing. They don't want to stop. They don't want to know how broken the world is, so they just decide we're broken. When we stop singing, instead of searching the air, they put us away. This place is where they keep the canaries."

And so, we adapt. We learn to adapt to the way that we think and the way we think that other people view us. And that is life. For everyone in this world, that is life. 

This is whyI want to close the gap that causes fear of the unknown. So that people who don't understand mental illness don't need to be afraid of it. We need to embrace our strengths and pick up the slack for each other's weaknesses. This is a part of the body of Christ. There is scripture that talks about how a body functions because every part does it's own job - if we had 6 legs and no mouth, then we would not function optimally.The gifts that come from mental illness are certainly part of the body that is needed to fully function. And the weakness of it is picked up by someone else's strength.  

I lived in isolation, fighting so hard to get people who have never experienced an eating disorder to understand me. Desperate for them to trust that my intentions were always good. I just wanted to do right by God and everyone I love and look up to. I just wanted to be a better person. I just wanted to be loved. And I pushed it too far. All I heard in my head was if I didn't push it further, I would never be good enough. This was the only way to be good. To be loved. People couldn't see my intentions. They saw me slowly killing myself. They saw me lash out in fear that they were going to take away the only thing that understood me, because it lived in my mind. 

I needed something unconditional. My eating disorder was unconditional in one way - it would never leave me if I didn't want it to. But it is unconditional punishment. Unconditional, nonetheless. I lived in isolation. No one knew what I was facing in my mind. They were busy fearing for my life (which is reasonable), and also my salvation. 

But I was holding on. That was my only job. My salvation was unconditionally safe in God's hands. I read scripture. I prayed. I showed people God by telling them about how praying helped me. This was what I was capable of in these times, even though my life felt completely useless to me because I really didn't have an offering to the world, but I was offering what I could to God during those times. My salvation wasn't at risk. But now, I feared my salvation was no longer unconditional. It would be based on whether I could recover or not. And I couldn't yet. So I lived in fear because of others' fear. And I blame nobody because none of us knew what was going on. This was new territory for all of us. No one knew how to help or what to do and we didn't have answers. That's exactly why I have to share my experience and the truth that I have learned. 

I have to stop  and just share that I hate this. I hate sharing these parts of me. They make me feel ugly, even though I have been working on accepting it for so long. But I have to share. Because I didn't believe there was a single person in the world I could connect with. I thought, "there is no one like me." Then I realized there are so many people living in isolation, pushed away in corners, just like me. You find them when you give a piece of your heart and say, "it's okay, me too." 

There was a time where I experienced heartbreak. I never understood what a broken heart felt like. Until I felt my heart, inside of me, be pierced. I can't tell you what that feels like. I finally realized that I was not understood. I would be alone. I would never be understood. Maybe there was nowhere in this world I belonged. I lost everything I ever knew in my life and what I had understood life to be. I never imagined it to be like this. I think of Fantine in Les Mis when she sings "I had a dream that life would be, so different from this hell I'm living, so different now from what it seemed, now life has killed the dream I dream." I would sing that in the car a lot, because I'm not dramatic at all.

And then finally, when all of that happened, when life as I knew it crumbled before me, when I lost things in my life I thought were unconditional, when my heart broke and seemed it would never be put back together, my fear of God not being enough for me vanished. Because God was only enough for me. And then I realized I am the luckiest person in the entire world, because very few people get to understand to the extent that I have that you truly can survive on God alone, being the only One who understands you. 

After he showed me that I could do it just with him, he started adding supports back into my life. He added doctors, who showed me what God's unconditional love looks like. I didn't care a single medical thing they said to me, I wouldn't listen to them without love. For the first time, I understood from experience that grace is not based on my performance. It's based on love. I couldn't recover myself back into grace. Not possible. God decided thousands years ago to make it impossible for me to try and earn grace ever again. My mom started spending her time going to therapy, listening to everything I said, and reading books to help her understand what in the world was going on with me. People were now trying to understand me instead of pushing what they thought was just my "sin" away, when they were really rejecting me and not stepping into my world. They were scared and pushed it into a box that it didn't really fit in, like a puzzle piece you know looks wrong but you really don't want to deal with it and you want it to fit and you get frustrated and exasperated and don't really want to finish it the right way because you don't know how anymore so now you have an incomplete puzzle with a piece in the wrong place that it doesn't fit, and you keep trying to force it to fit and squint a little bit until your vision has distorted the reality and convinced you that you can make it fit. But you can't.

I started writing this book after I left treatment for the last time, and finished running my second marathon back in 2017. Everything was fresh in my mind, from my experiences in treatment and the deepest depths of my eating disorder. Over the course of 2 years some of those memories have blurred, but my objectivity has deepened. So my book has a combination of both. But this time isn't just about my book. This is about taking the fear away from mental illness. This is about helping people support their loved ones. This is about bringing connection, empathy, love, and God, to people who struggle with these things. Eating disorders. Mental Illness. Addiction. For everyone to come out of isolation.

My insecurity gets deeper and deeper knowing people will read this book.  But I have to start somewhere. We have to start somewhere. 

This is my offering to the world now. And I'm ready to share it. I am not fully recovered. But I am okay. And I am ready to share my story. This is the most vulnerable thing I have ever done. But invulnerability never softened anyone's heart. It never brought compassion. It never brought empathy. It doesn't reach anyone. And it's just not real.  

I might be the most stubborn person I know. But my doctor told me that stubbornness isn't a bad thing. I think it's like anything else. It can be taken too far, but it also cultivates resilience and persistence, and that's what got me here, in every sense of where I am.  

So I could spend my time standing here telling you stories, they might be more interesting. I could tell you about all the walls I've punched. I could tell you about the times I would get up at 3:00 in the morning to go running in 15 degree weather, with hail and wind around the BC reservoir in the mornings, and then barely eat enough to get through the day of working with children. I could tell you that I have voices in my head that tell me to do ridiculous things. I could tell you that I've cried over chicken because I didn't make it so I didn't know what was in it. It was probably just olive oil. Also the girl sitting next to me made it. She was at the same table as me. I watched her make it. 

I could tell you things I've done that now humble and hurt me. How I yelled at my nurse that she just wanted to see me naked because she had to leave the door open when I took a shower to make sure I was safe. 

I could tell you that I've been from hospital to hospital and experiences from each one. 

But those are only stories. They are just engaging. They don't tell you who I am. They are only surface level. 

It is like the iceberg of culture. One of my Professor's Dr. Noel taught us about how culture is like an iceberg. There is the surface level, which is what we can see like the way people dress and eat, for our intents and purposes, I would say behavior. There are unspoken rules that are right below the sea level, for our purposes an example would be respect; and there are unconscious rules that are way below the sea level and are totally unseen, like for us, our deepest values and desires as human beings and Christians. The concept is slightly different in public health but I'm changing the figure to make it work for us. Yet, we judge each other based on the least relevant, most surface level things like outward behavior - when the important, deepest core values that each of us have, are probably close to if not identical. We need to see the unseen. Because we get scared when we don't understand what we see, why someone is the way they are or what in the world they are doing, but we completely understand the unconscious values we all have because we all have nearly the same exact ones.

Guys, this is just my story. Your story is different. Disordered eating is painful too. Dieting is painful too. Undiagnosed eating disorders are extremely painful. Body dysmorphia is painful. Every single one of you is affected by something deep that you invalidate. Maybe you are a woman who is disrespected by your male coworkers every day but you think you are just being sensitive. Maybe you are a man who is deeply distressed but has no male friends who will see you for who you truly are. Maybe you have lost loved ones and no one knows how your heart breaks and aches every single day and it's just a resting pain, but you don't talk about it because it was far in the past. Maybe you want to make a future for yourself but it's too overwhelming to start and so you stuff it in every day and it eats at you and you stay stuck in the same place. Maybe your kid is going through a tough time, but you don't want them to think you're disappointed, and other parents' kids seem great, so all you can do is offer up desperate prayers, and you feel like you did something wrong. Maybe you have been raped or sexually assaulted, and you think that it was your fault, that you should have done something differently. 

We all share deep, aching longing and pain. For empathy. To be seen and trusted. For our experiences, for our good, well meaning intentions. This is so big, guys, this is so big. This is overarching ALL of us. This is underneath ALL of us. There is nothing to be afraid of. There is no boundary that separates us. This is not unknown to any of us. This fear is silly. We are all longing for the same, deep needs. This is everyone. 

I am the lucky one. People believe me, now. I've been validated by my people, who I've carefully given my heart to. I have the skills and knowledge to overcome something difficult that other people don't have. I used to get annoyed that we had the same classes every 5 seconds in treatment about "cognitive and dialectical behavioral therapy" which taught us how to utilize the way we think and act to our advantage, to prevent ourselves from reacting and using harmful behaviors.  I actually would start teaching the classes sometimes before the clinician got there because I was getting bored of hearing them talk, and once she sat down and let me lead the class. They loved when I did that. But they drilled these skills and tools into our minds so we can pull it out of our back pockets. These are skills people who don't have voices in their heads don't all have. It puts me at a great advantage for life.

I'm also blessed because I know God loves me in an extremely intense way because of how he has taken care of me in the best way possible through the darkest times of my life.

So I can tell you more stories. I have a million of them. There are people in this room who could share stories about me. But I want you to know you can share your story and that it's valid. You aren't alone in your story. Our stories come together. 

As Christians, we have 2 purposes. I think sometimes we forget that all we are trying to do is live a life worthy of God, to the best of our ability from where we are, and to help people find him too. And get to experience his love. To love and to be loved. That's it.

I think I finally understood grace when I showed up to a doctor's appointment and I told them "I'm manipulating you guys, and you don't deserve this. You shouldn't keep seeing me when I'm not changing. You don't understand, I purposely lose weight before my appointments. Because I gained weight this week, I'm telling you that next week, I am purposely going to lose weight. I can't lie to you. I do this on purpose, and I don't know if I'm going to change. I might, but I don't know where I'm going. And I do this on purpose." 

They said, "We're meeting you where you're at. You're not manipulating us. We're doing this with you. We aren't giving up on you. We're proud of you." I was in awe. I was in shock. What I was used to from previous support was "why wouldn't you do what you are called to do? This is what the Bible says. Do you have faith?" I would be called manipulative. It brought me to believe that I had to prove myself to be worthy, but I couldn't. I was stuck. And without grace, I couldn't get unstuck. Then my doctor showed me what God was trying to show me all along. When I heard what she said, I was in awe. I was in absolute awe. All my therapist said was "gosh Kyra we all work with eating disorders we're used to this."

And I'm sure when we do something that we don't feel like we can be accepted for Jesus is saying, "C'mon guys, you're all the same I'm used to this. Let me be with you and walk through it with you."

God is everywhere. No one who is broken about their mistakes needs rebuking. No one who is lost needs to be reminded they don't know where they are and that they need to figure it out. Remember that holding on is enough and is all we can do as Christians. And our responsibility to God and each other is to be His tool of love.

PC: Zhaun Frias