WAY BUT UP

After hitting rock bottom, they came back in a big way

s TO rY BY Chris Ti NA hU ghes BABB , rAC hel sTON e & e milY T Om AN Ph OTO gr AP hs BY C AN Türk Y ilm Az & Be NjA mi N hA ger

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Thanks To Tabloid and reali Ty TV, we know that people are sometimes prone to self-destruction. Watching it can be morbidly entertaining, but more intriguing than the train wreck is the rare story of one who manages to pull himself out of his pitiful existence — the drug abusing, jailbird celebrity who finds lasting sobriety and subsequent success or “Biggest Losers” who shed hundreds of life-threatening pounds. These are the stories that move us, and you don’t need to turn on the TV to see them. These true tales of redemption are being lived, and touching lives, right here in our neighborhood.

By the time she was really sick — her senior year of high school — she sometimes would eat a bowl of rice with parmesan cheese for the day.

“I’d even go through the drive-through of Taco Bell to create some evidence to show my parents I had already eaten,” she says.

She was so thin, she had to wear two pairs of pants to keep warm.

At5-foot-3,herweightdroppedto 76 pounds in the matter of a year. By thetimeshestartedgettinghelpfor anorexia, her body was deteriorating so rapidly that all four of her heart valves were leaking.

“I was headed for a very slow suicide,” she says.

After that, her parents did not allow her to drive, go to school, ride horses or do any other activities. She was either with them, or she was in a treatment center.

She gained weight and was able to attendSMU(insteadofTexasA&M as planned). She struggled with eating throughout college.

“What I didn’t know through my initial treatment, but soon discovered, was that what I wanted was to disappear,” she says. “For me, to be seen meant getting hurt. I never wanted to be hurt again.”

She realized she was afraid of men and of being attractive to them.

She lost much of her identity in the disease. It cut her off from friends and family and most of the joy in life.

But slowly, she started to realize that some men are OK, and one of them fell in love with her.

“I stumbled into a relationship with someone who I wanted to be with more than I wanted to be with the eating disorder,” she says. “You can’t have both. It’s impossible to be in an intimate relationship with an eating disorder and a boyfriend.”

Soshespentmuchofthisromantic relationship just observing — how to eat normally, how to interact with friends, how to enjoy sitting on the couch watching television on a Saturday afternoon.

“I had gotten tired enough and seen through most of its lies by then,” she says of anorexia. “All the hurt it claimed to keep me from really just kept me from life.”

Her whole self needed restoration. Like a jigsaw puzzle, she took pieces she liked for the picture of herself, and she left behind the ones she didn’t. She got back in the saddle, literally, and returned to things she liked before the eating disorder. That’s when she decided to get a master’s degree in counseling.

Eating disorders are tricky, she says. You can’t take your eyes off for too long, or “it’s gonna get ya”.

“So, I decided to make it my life’s work,” she says.

She knows what it’s like to lose oneself inaneatingdisorder.Butnowsheis restored, and that gives her clients hope. They can believe in her before they can believe in themselves.

“They can see I’m not any different from who they are. I’ve just worked at it longer.”

MicheleDerrington

There is an old brick two-story abode in a residential White Rock neighborhood where women go to heal. It’s called The MagdaleneHouse, and those who end up there are alcoholics who have, in most cases, lost their families, jobs, homes and dignity. By the time they meet Michele Derrington, who runs the place, they are often dirty, sick and broken, yet she welcomes each new arrival with marked compassion.After all, it wasn’t so long ago that she was in the same dismal spot as them.

At43yearsold,Derringtonhas a commanding yet gentle presence — residents and workers at The Magdalene House listen to her intently when she speaks. It comes as some surprise, then, when the well-spoken, smartly dressed director shares that she has spent more than a few of her days in jails, treatment centers and psyche wards.

She grew up in the White Rock area in a sporadically violent home where she remembershavingherfirstalcoholic drink at age 5.

Throughout her youth, drinking and dabbling in drugs was normal. When she was in her late 20s, Derrington tried cocaine. From that point on, she says, she just couldn’t get her head straight.

“Once I [tried cocaine], it was all I ever thought about.”

Until then, she had been working toward a promotion at her job, but hooked on drugs, she could no longer function.

“I left the job, spent all my savings and things got really bad,” she says.

The addiction landed her in perilous places, including the scene of a murder.

“I witnessed someone getting shot over

$20 worth of drugs,” she says. She was subpoenaed to testify against the gunman and showed up in court wrecked after a night of cocaine use.

“Fortunately, I was never called to testify,” she says.

Seems like that would be rock bottom, she says, “but I had many bottoms … I would tell myself, ‘I am never doing this again,’ but by the next night, I was doing it again. I couldn’t hold any type of job — call centers, restaurants, the simplest of tasks — I just couldn’t work.”

In 1999, she entered rehab for the first time, but there was “still a lot of denial going on,” she says.

Therehabilitationcenterpopulation included burglars and homeless people, she says.

“I was not like them. I wasn’t willing to do what [the counselors] told me to do. I just didn’t get it.”

She soon relapsed, and things became worse, she says.

“Iresortedtodesperateacts. I did whatever I had to do to feed the disease looking back, I should be dead today.”

Derringtonexperiencedperiodsof sobriety; she even landed a job with the DallasSymphonyOrchestraforsome time, but she couldn’t hang on. She says she just wanted to be normal — have a drink now and then. She didn’t understand why she had to be different.

Finally,herfamilymembersintervened.

“My mom told me we were going to the Arboretum. I knew something was up.”

They were actually staging an intervention, after which they drove Derrington continued on page 35