Bachelorette

The night they saw through me.

2003. I’m 22.

Weeks after I saw what I was becoming, I showed up to my friend’s bachelorette party. I was the Maid of Honor and I hadn’t planned a single thing. I was splitting duty with my childhood friend. I put it all on her. I had been too consumed with myself, too caught up in my using, and everything I was hiding.

I walked in late. The room went still. All eyes on me as I walked into the kitchen where they all were. Something was off. The energy. The looks. The distance.

Deep down I knew. But I didn’t think they did.

I asked. I looked them in the eye, casual, like nothing was wrong. They didn’t pretend with me.

Gulp.

I felt the stomach drop. Free fall.

I looked down. I couldn’t hold eye contact anymore.

And that’s when I knew. The girl I saw in the mirror, they could see her too.

It was undeniable. The denial I had been living behind started to crack.

I felt the wave of it. What I’d been stuffing. What I hadn’t let surface that night in the mirror. The continued using days on end to mask what I could no longer deny. The broken mess and the path of destruction I had created could no longer be contained.

I excused myself with urgency and ran to the master bathroom. I closed the door just in time for the guttural cry that could no longer stay quiet. I sat on the floor and sobbed.

The shame.

The fear.

The embarrassment.

The weight of what I had been doing to myself and what it was doing to the people around me could no longer stay buried. It all came up at once.

I felt exposed.

Raw.

There was nowhere left to hide.

My body shook with the pain of the life I didn’t want to confront.

And then they left…

I don’t even remember exactly how it happened. Their frustration, their hurt, had reached a point where they couldn’t stay. They got in the limo. I wasn’t in it.

I was left there.

And as much as it hurt, something in me knew why. I had been disappearing for a while. First to myself, then right in front of everyone else.

I didn’t know yet. I was in Egypt. But God did.

I knew something had to change.

And instead of doing something different, I went back to the very thing that was destroying me.

- No one is too lost to be saved