Hit rock bottom? Beautiful. Welcome to your new beginning.

Back in my late 20s, I decided to see a sex therapist. It was something I’d been thinking about for years but I struggled to pull the trigger. Not for financial reasons. Not because I couldn’t find a good practitioner. Not because I didn’t think it would help.

I’d delayed doing it because it felt by doing so, by committing to working with someone on this thing that felt so I was admitting defeat. I was admitting failure.

I was saying: There’s something wrong with me. There’s something wrong with my body. That’s why I can’t reach orgasm.

When I finally decided to go through with it, it wasn’t at all what I anticipated. Not the experience but the source of my struggle. The reasons why letting go and being open and vulnerable sexually were so hard for me.

I didn’t have an issue with arousal. I had a body and a food struggle. I had an eating disorder. A case of body dysmorphia so extreme it caused me to both restrict my food intake to the point of losing my period some months and carry a discomfort with my body so deep, it was as if I moved through the world donning an invisible straight jacket. My entire physical being was perpetually in lockdown, held in a rigid, restrictive form so as not to let go — in any form or fashion.

A few years back I had a client struggling to wrap her mind around her progress. She was working on both healing from a previous relationship and getting back into dating in a more intentional manner.

It’s not enough! she cried into the phone. It’s NOT enough.

She stood at the point where all she saw were her problems. All she saw were her root struggles and how they had landed her here in this place of misery. I felt like saying: I know exactly what you mean.

During one session with my sex therapist, she decided my homework was to buy new jeans. Jeans that actually fit. I’d been stuffing myself into the current collection I had, all of which were a bit too snug but served as a reminder of where my body wasn’t just yet (and in my mind, the motivation to get there). I remember standing in the fluorescent-lit dressing room of the Gap on 59th street (because I wasn’t going to drop designer jean money on an “in-between” pair) looking despondently at my figure. The jeans were more comfortable but I couldn't shake off the schlumpy-ness. I’d only gone up a single size but I felt like I was wrapped in 42 pounds of additional fabric.

The awareness of my problem didn’t feel like a triumph. It didn’t feel like progress. Instead, it felt like a thing to get angry about. A thing to try to beat down and bury. A thing to pretend didn’t exist.

One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from The Gospel of Thomas, which goes:

If you bring forth what is within you, then what you bring forth will save you. And if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you don’t bring forth will destroy you.

I’ve learned the hard way that that which we pretend doesn’t exist—that which we strive to ignore—will utterly destroy us in the process. It will be a slow, almost imperceptible destruction at first, and then, without a moment’s notice, become reckless. This happened to my body. My body got slowly and then suddenly, very, very sick.

It took me getting very sick and feeling such debilitating frustration and shame to actually deal with the root issue. I wish it didn’t have to come to that but it did. It’s not the only area of my life I’ve had to hit rock bottom in order to face the reality of my struggle.

The battle with my body has now become the reminder that the only constant is our own self-reckoning. Our own ability to grapple with the icky and troublesome parts of ourselves, acknowledge how they’re holding us back, and start down the slow, steady path to dealing with them.

And as maniacal as it can feel, especially in the early moments of each new reckoning, that realization is the first step. The acknowledgment that the thorn is there and it, more often than not, has very deep roots.

But the first step doesn’t equate to it being enough. We’re not wrong in feeling that it’s not enough, because it isn’t. It only becomes enough on the other side, when we can see the purpose of our pain. When we can see the whole landscape of the process and say:

That’s why that relationship didn’t work out.

That’s why I didn’t get the job.

That’s why I lost that client.

That’s why that friend and I had a falling out.

So be kind to yourself. It doesn’t have to be enough, but it can count as a beginning.