“My eating became more a habit, than hunger,’ said Mitzi White, who tried to hide her pain behind her smile. “I was trying to comfort myself with something, … I’d always tell people, I was super-fantastic.” (ABC Photo)
Helping Everyone but Herself
In a pattern many women will recognize, White’s willingness to suppress her own needs and desires, while helping others extended to romantic relationships — and that’s when things really began to spin out of control.
An only child whose parents divorced when she was 5, White lost her mom at the tender age of 32. At about the time her mom died, a man named Harold walked into her life and they started dating. As the relationship became serious and years passed, he bought her a commitment ring and White purchased a little house that seemed the perfect place to make their dreams come true.
“I bought the house, knowing it needed expensive work, but he said he could do the work himself, so we moved in.” White recalls, the sadness fresh in her voice even now, years later.
Harold also had big plans for his own life as an entrepreneur. “He was a big dreamer,” White says, but she eventually discovered he was not exactly the type of guy who followed through. “I was trying to support his dreams — and with them my own of a marriage and a life together. I believed in him.” Eventually White was putting money into his projects, but he was not doing his part. “I was on a treadmill trying to make things happen for him,” she says.
Eventually expenses for unfinished renovations piled up, Harold’s fortunes failed to improve, and White’s dreams were deferred, over and over again. White felt that something had to change.
“One day, God told me to go home from work and have a talk with Harold.” That was the end of the relationship, and also when he confessed that while he could not quite get himself or their house together, he was also helping another woman in the neighborhood “fix things.” He packed up and moved in with that woman, two doors down.
“He is not blameless, but it takes two to tango,” White says. “As women, we allow what’s coming into our lives. I was only happy about two of the years we were together.” But after the breakup, White was robbed. “That’s was when I started shutting down. I just felt so violated in every way. I was no longer conscious of my actions. I kept buying stuff, gathering stuff and telling myself … one day I’m going to need this; I was still holding onto my dream of the life we would have in that house.”
Ever the loyal friend and professional woman, White kept her feelings to herself, but her health and life we falling apart. She gained weight, and her home slowly became almost uninhabitable.
“My eating became more a habit, than hunger. I was trying to comfort myself with something.” Still, she kept her bright, wide smile in place. “I’d always tell people, I was super-fantastic.”
