The Key to Life: A Beautiful Mind

If you want to know how I healed from my eating disorder, go rent ‘A Beautiful Mind’, starring Russell Crowe. This movie will take you to the depths of the un-recovered places within you, and then bring you back out again, gleaming with hope. I am determined to meet John Nash and his wife Alicia someday and thank them for their courage. Even though I was already well past the worst of my eating disorder by the time the movie came out, watching John’s story helped the fighter in me to finally gain some of the long-overdue recognition I owed her.

I have always maintained that it takes finding your ‘key to life’ (there may be more than one) before true healing becomes accessible. This is because of the mental illness nature of eating disorders - the whispery, amorphous voices inside the head that control us totally, without seeming to bear much influence at all. It is easy to tell ourselves that such quiet voices couldn’t have malicious intent…just like John’s imaginary roommate’s imaginary young niece couldn’t be anything but real - after all, she cried real tears!

So the ‘key to life’ is the battle cry - for me it was my music. The eating disorder affected my health so severely that I had to drop out of music school and give up any hope of a career doing the one thing I loved. So I began to fight for my life when the one thing that mattered to me more than my eating disorder was taken from me - by my eating disorder.

But I was still left with those voices….oh, those voices. The voice that told me I was fat. The voice that told me I deserved to die, and that losing my music was just desserts for the hell I had put everyone around me through. The voice that told me to push all my friends away so that it and I could get closer. The voice that ‘comforted’ me when I was starving, by telling me that it would all be worth it - that I’d see its wisdom, in time.

I never saw. The torture never ceased. In time, I recognized the voice for what it was - an ‘imaginary friend’ that was busy, quietly destroying everything that mattered to me, while it whispered to me and danced before me to keep me distracted from what was really going on.

John learned to wake up. He used his beautiful mind to distinguish the difference between the real and the unreal in his life, and then he used his beautiful heart to choose what mattered most to him and do whatever it took to reclaim his REAL life. We can do the same. I did it. You can too. Watch the movie - learn his story. I promise you will not regret it.

 Warmly,

Shannon

www.key-to-life.com