The Pink Elephant in the Room

This blog has become a way for me to express my spiritual journey I have been on for the past year and a half. I have truly put deepest thoughts and emotions into the text of these blogs in the hope that my story might reach others, and they may be able to relate to and even gain comfort from my words. I have tried to be completely honest and hide nothing. There is one thing that I have not been able to speak of, and upon great reflection with the Holy Spirit, I have come to realize that this aspect of my life that I have been concealing might be the main subject I should be addressing. Through this blog I am finally able to overcome all the pent-up fears of judgement and address the “pink elephant in the room.”

It was Saint Ignatius of Loyola that provided me with the confidence to write this blog. He has written about the internal spiritual warfare that humans endure. The enemy targets our greatest weaknesses and neuroses, creating fear of exposing them. We become so consumed by these fears we fall into this trap, and become convinced that if our struggles are exposed we will be criticized and judged, leaving us dehumanized. I have fallen into this trap again and again for my entire life, but it stops today. I no longer want to live out my life based on these fears.

For as long as I can remember I have had a negative self-image of myself. It has gotten so bad that I can no longer look in the mirror and see a true representation of myself. I grew up with the belief that being skinny is the most important thing, and if I was not skinny nothing else mattered. Throughout my life, this belief has affected me in different ways. When I was in high school, I felt shame and failure because I was not skinny and bordering on being overweight. I lived based on the lies that I was less of a person because I was bigger than most, especially my family members. When I was diagnosed with diabetes, I lost a great deal of weight and I was finally the skinniest person in the room. Unfortunately, being skinny only bred new and greater fears. I feared gaining all that weight back. Every time I gained a pound, the enemy entered in and instilled the fear that people would notice and once again judge me for my weight gain. Everything that I did was based off how it would affect my weight. I got addicted to exercise and developed a hatred of eating in front of people. It was not until I moved to New York where I was able to start seeing how much these lies had controlled my life. In New York I recognized something (or someone) that was more important than my weight, it was Jesus. Weight and the pursuit of skinniness had become an ideal. It was a harsh reality, but Jesus revealed to me that as long as I keep this idolatry of weight I could never completely give myself to Him. This broke my heart because there is nothing I want more than to give myself entirely to Him.

The question then becomes, how do I overcome this? This lie that weight is the most important thing has been embedded into the makeup of my being since I was a child. These lies that the enemy has put inside does not just plague me. The enemy had been planting these lies into my family for several generations before me. These lies have the terrible ability to take away lives. These lies stops with me because I finally have the courage to expose them and bring them into the light. Saint Ignatius said that the enemy has the most power when he stays hidden in the dark. Throughout my life my family lived with these lies but we never talked about it openly because of fear. Fear of what??? God wants nothing more than for these lies to be brought into the light so that He can take care of them once and for all. The truth is, I am weak, and these lies are far greater than my ability to handle them, so I am giving them to the Lord. This blog is me bringing these lies into the light and taking away their power over me, and hopefully their power over my family. I am a child of God and He made me in His image. In the arms of the Lord I am weightless.

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Originally posted at Kitty in the City.
Image: Pexels / PD-US

Kat Larson

Kat Larson

Once I moved to New York City I decided to start a blog about my experiences in the big city. The Holy Spirit continues to inspire me to write. I hope anyone who reads my blogs finds inspiration too.

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