I suffered from anorexia and bulimia nervosa for fifteen years. Fifteen long years. The Courage to Hope is my story of how I overcame. My goal in writing it was not only to share my struggles with an eating disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, self-injury, and rape but also to provide tangible pieces of advice on how to overcome such obstacles.

I became a ballet dancer at four years old and continued until my early teenage years (right about the time my eating disorder started). There are many things I loved about ballet dancing. I felt strong. I felt confident. I felt beautiful. Ballet was my form of self-expression. On the flip side, ballet also taught me about comparison. I learned early on that there was a certain way I was supposed to look and act. And this set the tone in my life for many years to come.

Out of the blue, one day, when I was ten, I became afraid to touch things. Door handles, counters, pens-all of it was not clean. I was only ten years old, but my fear was real and paralyzing. I needed to be clean. I felt lost and confused. But I knew it was not normal to think the thoughts I was thinking. So I kept it all hidden.

By the time I was twelve, I had "discovered" anorexia. The turmoil that was in my head became calm when I was restricting my calories. My life felt manageable and the OCD stayed quiet. So I became determined to protect this new secret way of coping. When I was fourteen years old-after I had been starving myself for well over a year and had already been to multiple doctors and therapists-my parents checked me into an eating disorder facility. But it would be another almost decade before recovery would stick. And things got a lot darker for me before they finally began to get better.

I begin each chapter of The Courage to Hope with an excerpt from a journal I kept in the midst of my struggles. I follow the journal entry with a written snapshot of what was happening in my life at the time the entry was written, and then with tangible pieces of advice I would like readers take away and focus on-the steps I took that brought me from that dark place to the place I am at today. Photography will also be interwoven throughout the book to visually capture the raw feelings I explore in these pages.

Our past does not define who we are-we are not bound by what has happened to us. But we are gifted with taking what has happened to us and sharing it so others may have hope. My hope for my audience is that reading my story of my own difficult journey, and the lessons I learned along the way, will help them recognize that they, too, have a story to share-and that sharing it matters. That they matter.