An audience of One.

I’ll have to be honest with you.

It hasn’t been the easiest of weeks. God has a funny way of making sure you mean what you say, so that you’ll be put in a spot where you do say what you really mean.

Right after I talked about picking up our own stones, I tripped over a few myself. It hasn’t been the easiest of weeks. Church was excellent. It always is, but has been emotionally exhausting for the past 2 weeks. I think I have cried more in the past 16 days than in the past 2 months put together. It has been a good kind of crying, but any kind of crying is tiring.

Many stones tripped me in the past 2 weeks and I have had to make conscious efforts to pick myself up, bandage myself and be all right. It hasn’t been the easiest of weeks. Only God knew- He was the only one I told.

I realise one thing. That it is one thing to be physically recovered, and another to be mentally so. I want to tell you, there are many, many, many people out there who look normal and are of normal weight, but are battling with evil, evil demons called Eating Disorders inside. Not everyone at the support group is necessarily stick-thin- Anorexia is a state of mind.

Of late, some of these demons schemed to plant stones in my way, and they have made me so mad and so determined that I took a fork this morning, hunted each of them down, and squelched them.

Mornings make me happy. And I am only very rarely sad in the morning, even if the first thing I see are a pair of orange Crocs. These past two weeks have been made up of too many mornings where I have had to will myself to rejoice in God’s love because a huge fifty-ton weight pulled down on the edges of my lips. This time, I refused to let gravity win. Full recovery is defined by being free from Relapse for at least 6 months- so every single day counts.

I took a fork and killed the evil little squirts one by one this morning. I have had it.

They make a sound like -squish-.

The day after I had written the letter, God made sure I meant it.

That night, my mother came into my room, made one remark as a joke and then left immediately. I had no time to respond nor process what she had said. It was a huge stone, and I tripped. It was meant as a joke, she meant no harm, but it was a stone and something real I had to deal with. The remark was, “How come you have so much cellulite on your legs?”

For someone recovering, that one statement is enough to smash any architecture of recovery one has so painstakingly built up in the longest time. That, to someone recovering, is a very, very, very Big stone- you might call it a Boulder that was rammed right down on your foot and that pulverised it immediately. To someone recovering, it could drag back years of unresolved insecurities, painful memories and self-destructive thoughts.

At that point, I was thankful that I have reached the point where it is but only a stone and not a storm, or a boulder or an earth-shaking catastrophe. I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened, block it out of my mind as I so often used to do with all my other angry, sad, stressed emotions but I knew better this time. I took it on head-on and rationalised.

Normal people have cellulite. And I am healthy now. And if normal, healthy people have cellulite, I want to have it too.

So there. It was nonetheless a long night.

In the way God so likes to tease me as Ive learnt, I went for a short, relaxing jog the next morning when another stone tripped me right over, made me skid and slide twelve feet forward before I crashed headfirst into a fire hydrant, broke all my teeth and I was just about to get up when a huge train slammed right into me and knocked me right over again.

I was jogging, just rationalising inside my head regarding what had happened the night before when I jogged past 2 junior college students from the top junior college in our nation. Jogging innocently and happily by myself, just rationalising inside my head and thanking God for bringing me on this journey. Tralala.

I had barely jogged past the couple, a teenage boy and girl when the alpha female said out loud, very clearly and brightly, “Wah lao, this jogger run damn slooow la.”

Perhaps I looked like I hadn’t bathed for years, and like I had earwax pouring out of my auditory canals to make her think I could not possibly hear her very bright and clear voice, crisp like an autumn leaf in the cool air of that bright, clear morning.

I jogged away, looked into the sky and gave God a mock scowl. You win, God. You’re really testing me now, aren’t you?

That was only the beginning. Many other Tiny incidents happened. I didn’t tell anyone, but it was okay, because I spent a lot of time talking to God. A lot of talking, crying and listening.

The Tiny incidents piled on, one on top of the other. It has not been the easiest of weeks. But God has a good sense of humour.

Talk about practising what you preach.

All I want to say is this- that sometimes, yes, you can’t pick up all your stones before you bump into them. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. The past two weeks have been extremely trying. It has been little Anna against a whole battalion of evil, scheming demons. Little Anna has been crying and crying and picking herself up over and over again, and rationalising and pressing in. Because every decision counts, and she wants to win.

Today was a breakthrough, finally.

I learnt- stones will always be there. There will always be bad things lurking around the corner waiting to spear us. But it doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t. There’s enough reason to feel insecure, scared and unloved in this Big Bad place to make us want to hide under muck for a lifetime; We’ll never be good, smart, pretty, capable or perfect enough for this world; We can try so hard and end up destroying and losing ourselves for the most worthless of things…

And at the end of the day, it’s about the choice we make, it’s about who we live for. Living for this world is excruciatingly tiring- there’s no end to it. We’re all trying too hard to be picture-perfect on stage, what with the make-up and the costumes and the lighting and the sound effects, for a grand audience who paid cheap tickets to watch us perform. We’re trying too hard.

But live for an audience of One, and everything falls back into place. Everything becomes easy.

Because this audience doesn’t look at make-up. He doesn’t even have His eyes open. His eyes are closed, and He’s smiling, knowing that you’re not performing, but are just, sitting next to him.

Sitting next to Him, eyes closed too, comfortable, even if you’re without make-up and have cellulite on your legs.

It makes Him so happy.