My story is about my need to be accepted and about how accepting God’s grace has allowed me to be free. Growing up, I was into many activities, but figure skating was my passion. Today, I am a professional figure skating and power skating coach with the St. Albert Skating Centre. I love nurturing young athletes to help them tap into their true potential.
I only had the pleasure of competing for a few years, but I was fortunate to meet and compete against many great people, including the most recent Olympic champions, Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir.
My skating career came to an early and sudden end. Many factors produced this outcome. I had lived for figure skating! To have this torn away literally broke my heart. It became a physical pain that I tried to stamp down. I felt like a part of me was dying. To cope with this “death” I developed bulimia.
Bulimia, in my illogical world, became the next logical step. In elite figure skating, the pressures to be incredibly fit and THIN, are high. I was sure the reason my dream was failing was because I wasn’t thin enough. Often I have described my life in the last 6 years as a “bloody, uphill battle”, and the pain or discomfort that I lived within the eating disorder mimicked my emotional pain. The action of chewing it up and spitting it out mimicked what I so desperately wanted to do with the emotional toxins in my life.
From early on I thought love was dependent upon my actions. I was a “good” daughter, a “good” athlete, a “good” wife, and a “good” mother. Wow! That sounds so arrogant, doesn’t it? Yet arrogance was not my motivator. Fear was. I was terrified of not being “good enough”.
I went in circles with this belief. Sure that when I faced failure, it was due to my inadequacies.
With each failure came a greater despair that I wasn’t good enough. and that must be because the consequence I faced weren’t big enough or strong enough to knock me into place. This resulted in me isolating myself from the life being lived around me. I cannot even begin to describe the loneliness that came with this choice.
It was only when I realized that my battle on this earth is God’s battle, not mine, that I was able to really begin to develop the person God created me to be. I realized that God had been with me in all I went through. That he was standing with me. I just didn’t accept it. This realization was not a one-time thing. It is a conscious, focused awareness that I have to tap into on a daily basis. Bulimia is a disorder that I know I will deal with for the rest of my life. But this disorder has brought me broken and open to God.
Words can never express the weight lifted when I realized it is not up to me. It is up to an all-knowing, an all-loving, and an all-powerful God. Psalm 103:12 states, “as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” My God is now bearing my burdens for me.
I want to put myself out there for any of you who might be struggling with an eating disorder or even body image issues. I felt so alone in my brokenness, and I don’t want others to experience that same sense of shame from hiding and ache from the loneliness. Contact North Pointe Church at 780-452-5566. I would be happy to talk.
Amy’s Acceptance
