Surrender

When I think of total surrender my mind floods with panic. The idea of utterly letting go of my illusions of control frightens me beyond belief, makes me want to grab a shred, any shred, of control back as fast as I can. I hold it tightly, as if in a toddler's clenched fist, and throw a tantrum if anyone tries to wrest it from me. I'm very immature in that way.
The eating disorder has been and is still so hard for me to fully surrender. When I let a little bit of it go, let go of it's most overt behaviors, I grasp onto isolation and fleeing the scene both figuratively and literally. Always there is something I feel I have to hang on to. It's a push-pull, constantly --let it go, snatch it back, over and over again. This frustrates me because with my perfectionism I feel I have to surrender completely, all at once, perfectly. I can't make mistakes. I have been told surrender looks more like stepping back, taking my hands off the situation and asking someone to help me -- yet still in my perfect world I would step back once and that would be done. The truth is I have to do this over and over again, each day my disorder beckoning and each day having to say no. My head agrees with this, but my heart falters, my mind races, and inside I can't imagine myself truly letting go.
Yet I know, when I come to my end, I have no other choice, I have no other recourse. I have tried so hard, so hard to manage the eating disorder on my own, tried to balance life with addiction. I have tried to hang on to bits and pieces of it, and always the bits and pieces end up dragging me back into the black hole of my disease. It never works and yet continuously it asks me, why not try again? Maybe this time it will work. The maybe never happens, my life becomes more unmanageable and my fears get bigger and once I begin I can't stop. I can't stop! This is no prescription for life, this is my disease and as they say in AA, it is cunning, baffling and powerful. In the end, whenever and wherever I find it, my only way out is to surrender to a higher power, whether that be God or simply the treatment team he has placed in my life for now.
Maybe it's not so much an unclamping my toddler's hands from around the eating disorder, but of allowing someone, something, to gently and patiently pry my fingers away from the pacifier. Maybe it's allowing someone, something else to comfort me in the absence of my usual tools, trusting that this strange new tool I am given may work given a chance. Rarely if at all have I given recovery a chance to work. I run headlong back to my old ways, hoping they won't be so hurtful this time, hoping for the relief I remember and fantasize about, hoping for a miracle. The miraculous relief of the eating disorder doesn't come the way it used to. The price I pay for it has become greater and greater and will eventually cost me my life. My life, do you understand, do I understand? I used to think all I had was my eating disorder and if I left go of it nothing would be left of me. In reality my life is all I have and if I cannot, if I will not begin to surrender my will and my life over to the care of a God other than my disordered idol, I will lose my life. Truly a sobering thought, surrender or die. Like in a war -- I am in a war, and I guess now is a good a time as ever to pick sides.