Erica Lee

I recently came across a question on Facebook that stopped me for a moment: “What is your story? Share it unedited and unfiltered.”

So, here it is. May my testimony be used to bring others hope, remind someone that they are not alone, and show that even the darkest chapters do not have to be the end of the story.

My prayer is that through every broken place, every battle, every loss, and every redemption, someone else might find the courage to keep going and believe that God can still bring beauty, purpose, and healing from what once felt impossible. 🩷

If you only looked at my life from the outside, you might see a story that eventually worked itself out. You might see faith, recovery, strength, purpose, seven years of sobriety, a woman who encourages others, shares her testimony, serves people, and is building something meaningful out of everything she has survived. But that isn’t the whole story.

The truth is, my life has been messy—beautiful and heartbreaking, faith-filled and full of questions. There are chapters I am incredibly proud of and others I spent years wishing I could erase. For much of my life, I didn’t really know who I was. I only knew how to become who I thought other people needed me to be.

Be good. Don’t cause problems. Make people happy. Be successful. Be strong. Don’t disappoint anyone. Somewhere along the way, I learned to measure my worth by how well I could meet everyone else’s expectations. Underneath it all was a little girl who desperately wanted to know that she was loved, wanted, safe, and enough.

My parents divorced when I was very young. My father struggled with addiction. There were painful experiences in my childhood that shaped the way I saw myself long before I had the words to explain them. I learned early how abandonment can make you question your worth, how trauma can follow you into places no one else can see, and how easy it is to become very good at looking okay when you are anything but okay.

By the time I went away to college, I carried wounds I didn’t understand and insecurities I didn’t know how to name. College was supposed to be one of the best times of my life. Instead, it became one of the places where I nearly lost myself.

Anorexia and bulimia took over my world. Food wasn’t just food, and a number wasn’t just a number. My life became consumed with calories, weight, exercise, restriction, purging, rituals, shame, secrecy, and control. While other students were thinking about classes, friendships, dating, and their futures, I was planning my days around an eating disorder.

It became so severe that I knew which bathrooms around campus were least likely to be occupied so I could purge without anyone knowing. Eventually, I could no longer hide how sick I had become. I was told that I had become a liability to the university, and I was forced to withdraw from school and enter treatment.

I watched the life I thought I was supposed to be living continue without me. Friends moved forward. Classes continued. Life kept happening while mine seemed to come to a stop.

Over the years, I found myself fighting battles most people couldn’t see—eating disorder treatment, depression, anxiety, trauma, self-destruction, and hospitalizations. There were moments when the pain inside me became so overwhelming that I didn’t want to be alive anymore. That is part of my story too.

I don’t say it for shock value. I say it because I’m done pretending redemption requires us to erase how dark things once became. There were years when I genuinely could not imagine becoming the woman I am today. Then alcohol entered the picture.

At first, it did exactly what I wanted it to do. It numbed me. It quieted my thoughts. It helped me escape myself for a little while. Eventually, though, the very thing I was using to escape my pain became another source of it. My drinking became hidden, secretive, and wrapped in shame.

I became very good at separating the person people saw from the person I was when no one was looking. Addiction thrives in secrecy, and so does shame. I was carrying both. There were so many times I wondered, How did my life become this? How did the girl who once had dreams for her future end up here? How did I become someone I barely recognized?

What I understand now is that my worst chapters were never proof that my story was over. They were chapters, not the ending. On July 14, 2019, I stopped drinking. Recovery did not magically fix my life. Sobriety did not erase the trauma, instantly heal my relationship with food or my body, or take away every struggle with depression, anxiety, perfectionism, fear, and shame.

Recovery has been much less like crossing a finish line and much more like learning how to live honestly, one day at a time. Sometimes one hour at a time. Sometimes simply choosing not to give up. Somewhere in all of that, my faith became more than something I believed intellectually.

God met me in places I thought were too broken for Him—not when I finally had everything together, not when I became impressive, and not when I stopped struggling. He met me in the wreckage.

I have spent years asking God why certain things happened. Why that childhood? Why the trauma? Why the eating disorder? Why addiction? Why so much loss? Why a body that often doesn’t cooperate with the life I want to live? Why have so many parts of my story required grieving the life I thought I would have?

I don’t have neat answers for all of those questions, and maybe that is part of telling my story with no filters. Faith does not mean I have never been angry, questioned God, or struggled to understand what has happened to me. It means that somehow, after everything, I still believe He has been here—even in the chapters where I couldn’t feel Him.

I have learned that healing does not always look like getting your old life back. Sometimes it means grieving the life you thought you were going to have and discovering that there can still be beauty, purpose, and meaning in the life you have now.

My body has forced me to slow down in ways I never wanted. There are limitations I never expected to face and days filled with appointments, treatments, doctors, exhaustion, and the frustration of wanting to do more than my body allows. I have had to mourn versions of myself I thought I would become. That grief is real, but so is gratitude.

Today, I am seven years sober, but I am not a finished product. I still struggle. Old thoughts sometimes return. Fear still gets loud. There are wounds God is still healing and parts of my story I am still learning to make peace with.

That is the part we don’t always include in inspirational stories. We like the before and after—the broken person and then the healed person. We like testimonies wrapped neatly with a bow.

But most of life happens in the middle. And I am still living in the middle. I am healing, learning, unlearning, grieving, growing, falling down, getting back up, and becoming. Maybe that is what makes this story real.

For years, I believed my brokenness disqualified me. Now I believe those very places allow me to sit beside someone else in their brokenness and say, I know what it feels like to believe your life is beyond repair. I know what shame sounds like. I know what it feels like to look in the mirror and barely recognize yourself. I know what it feels like to wonder whether you will ever be free.

And I also know this: Your story can change. Mine did. Not overnight. Not perfectly. Not without scars. But it changed. Somewhere along this journey, the woman who spent years desperately trying to disappear began learning how to use her voice. The woman who carried so much shame began telling the truth. The woman who once wondered whether her life would ever have meaning began realizing that maybe the very things she survived could become a bridge to someone else.

That is why I share my story now. Not because I have conquered everything or have all the answers, and certainly not because my life has become some perfectly packaged testimony. I share it because someone else may be living in a chapter that feels impossible right now, and maybe they need to see someone standing a few chapters ahead saying, Keep going. There is more to your story.

I used to believe my life would be defined by everything that went wrong—the trauma, the eating disorder, the addiction, the hospitalizations, the mistakes, the losses, and the limitations. Those things are part of my story, but they are not my identity.

Today, I see myself differently. I am a survivor. I am a woman in recovery. I am a woman of faith. I am a friend who has loved deeply and grieved deeply. I am someone who has fallen more times than I can count and discovered that getting back up is its own kind of courage. I am still learning who I am when I’m not performing, pleasing, proving, hiding, or trying to earn love.

Maybe for the first time in my life, I am beginning to understand that I don’t have to become someone else in order to be worthy of a life that matters. This is me—still healing, still recovering, still believing, and still here. After everything I have lived through, I don’t say those last two words lightly. I’m still here.

There was a time when I couldn’t imagine saying that with gratitude. Today, I can. My story isn’t neat. It isn’t filtered. And it certainly isn’t finished. But it is mine. If everything I have survived has taught me anything, it is that some of the most beautiful chapters of our lives can be written after the pages we were certain would destroy us.

I don’t know exactly what the rest of my story will look like, but for the first time, I don’t need to know. I’m no longer trying to erase the woman I’ve been. I’m learning to love her, forgive her, understand why she survived the way she did, and thank her for holding on long enough for me to become the woman I am today. My real story is not about having it all together. It is about falling apart and discovering that God can still build something beautiful from the pieces.

It is about addiction and recovery, pain and purpose, grief and gratitude, brokenness and redemption, losing myself and slowly finding my way back. And if there is one thing I hope someone takes from my story, it is this: As long as you’re still here, God is still writing. Perhaps the chapters you haven’t lived yet will be the ones that finally help you understand why you had to keep turning the page.