Crystal Andrus Morissette - The Emotional Edge: Discover Your Inner Age, Ignite Your Hidden Strengths, and Reroute Misdirected Fear to Live Your Fullest

Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it,

we can never do anything wise in this world.

HELEN KELLER

I recently found my first journal. I flipped to the first page and read the first line:

I just want to be empowered.

I wrote that on February 23, 1997. I was twenty-six years old. At the time, I was living in a lovely, panoramic house on the water with two beautiful, healthy daughters and a bodybuilder husband who came home every night. We owned a prosperous local health club, had money in the bank, and were investing monthly. Id competed in and won fitness competitions such as the Junior Ontario Bodybuilding Championship and the Ms. Galaxy. Id even set some regional track-and-field records and received the Mayors Fitness Award. Id managed a chain of health and racquetball clubs, including opening my own Crystals Health & Fitness Spa when I was only twenty-two. I helped my husband open his Adonis Health & Fitness a year later. I had filmed a national episode of Really Me on YTV, on which I showed teenagers the power that exercise gave to me (for over five years it would run almost weekly across Canada); Id been on the cover of a few fitness magazines; Id been invited to be a guest on a national Canadian TV talk show (I said yes); and Id been asked to pose in Playboy (I said no). I was attractive, strong, smart, kind, and friendly. I had everything: stainless steel professional series appliances, a six-hundred-square-foot kitchen, a table that sat twelve, a Corvette convertible in the garage, and a minivan.

What else could one want? And yet I didnt feel empowered. To me, empowerment meant feeling at ease within and about myself. And since I had one idea that dominated my thoughtsconstantly reminding me of how unacceptable I wasI knew that, deep down, I wasnt empowered. Instead, I felt like maybe if I did more, Id be more; if I got enough, Id be enough. But I was tired of doing and having. And I was only twenty-six.

The night before I bought that blank journal, with my two-year-old sleeping peacefully in her canopy bed, I sat in my rocking chair nursing my youngest daughter and listening to Bob Greenes Make the Connection. My husband wasnt home from work yet. It was eleven p.m. I was crying. Sobbing, actually.

Id hear Oprah say years later: I didnt really know what the connection was that Bob was always talking about. That night, I didnt really know, either. But something in my heart cracked open just wide enough for me to believe that maybe I, too, could be happy and thin again.

As I look back, it shocks me that I wasnt thinking about finally dealing with the time when I was twelve years old and my father told me he was going out to buy a gallon of milk and a pack of cigarettes and then never came home. Id had no idea my parents were even arguing, and yet nothing in my life would ever be the same again. My parents never once sat us down and explained what was happening. It was just never talked about. Dad moved in (three cities away) with his new, crazy girlfriend; and a month later, my older brother followed. I never said good-bye to either of them. I wasnt thinking about healing from the multitude of traumas that came after thatwhen my mother threw herself into bodybuilding and partying, moved her 24-year-old boyfriend in, or when the sexual abuse began to occur nightly. I rarely thought about how she kicked me out when I was fifteen, or how afraid I was thatdespite the treatment Id undergone for the early signs of cervical cancer when I was only seventeen, taking the city bus to the hospital by myself