Over the Thanksgiving holiday two years ago, my mother handed me a cardboard Justin Boots box filled with hundreds of pictures that had been stashed in my childhood bedroom for almost three decades.

The photographs were divided into groups of twenty or thirty and stuffed into dozens of Ziploc baggies too full to close. I pulled out each baggie and discovered there was no organizing principle: One baggie might have three camp photos, a handful from eighth-grade graduation, four from a fraternity party senior year of college, and ten from a trip to New Orleans during grad school. A few times I opened the lid of the box and shuffled the bags, trying to organize the chaos, before becoming overwhelmed and shoving the lid back on again.

I was raised in a strict Catholic home, but never experienced anything truly spiritual until I almost died of bulimia. The experience changed not only my body but also my soul. I was no longer someone who relied solely on reason and logic, instead becoming attuned to the mysterious and unknowable promptings of a Higher Power. One of these promptings came on an April morning during my sophomore year of college, when I cut through the student center on my way to PE class and a sign for “CAMP DAY” caught my eye. I was neither sporty nor outdoorsy, two attributes I imagined as prerequisites for camp counselor success, and I had no experience working as a camp counselor, but I followed the arrows to the main conference room, propelled by a curiosity that felt like an invitation from the spiritual realm. I stopped at the first table and struck up a conversation with a friendly blond guy with a nerdy vibe and teeth so white I assumed they’d never encountered coffee or red wine. He introduced himself as the director of a Christian youth camp two hours south of San Antonio who had come to campus to recruit counselors. “I’ll interview,” I said. A summer job at a Christian youth camp would be less risky, recovery-wise, than returning to my bakery job at the mall in Dallas. I filled out a form pinned to a clipboard, and then followed him to a bench in the back of the room. “Tell me about yourself,” he said. He wore the earnest expression I associated with youth pastors and pediatric nurses. I figured he wanted to hear about my faith, so I offered the short version: I’d fainted in the shower after a night of bingeing and purging, which scared me so badly that I sought recovery in a twelve-step program, where I’d experienced relief and grace for the first time in my nineteen years of life. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, and even without a firm offer, I felt buoyant about the future. My PE class now long over, I wandered to the library, daydreaming about my summer by the Frio River leading a group of girl campers as achy and uncomfortable in their bodies as I’d been all my life.

When I showed up for counselor orientation week, I learned that of the twenty-five counselors, twenty-one of them were lifers; they’d started as campers in elementary school and now appeared on the payroll. They shared a bunkhouse of memories—half of them had dated each other in bygone summers; there were rifts and alliances I struggled to track. As we watched the sky blaze orange and pink during the first sunset, I realized I’d never be all the way on the inside of the counselor crowd because I’d missed too much. I’d never meet the cook who ran off to play rhythm guitar for David Allan Coe or the couple who fell in love as first-year counselors and now lived in San Marcos. I was used to it, though—being on the outside. I didn’t quite fit anywhere. In my family, I was the emotional crybaby who wrote poetry and tried to express her feelings, while everyone else kept it light and breezy, feelings tucked safely out of sight. At college, my perfectionism whipped me mercilessly to the top of the Dean’s List, but my like-me (please, please like me) insecurity drove me to all the Sigma Chi parties, so I straddled the “smart girl” and “party girl” circles, unable to commit to either. My disordered eating had managed the gap between my outsider status and my insider longings, but now I had a Higher Power. With my new spirituality, I could manage all the worldly bullshit like fitting in and being accepted by shifting my focus from my social status to the state of my soul.

At camp, I took pictures sporadically whenever I remembered to grab my disposable camera. Usually on rodeo night when all the girls in my cabin wore cowboy boots with jean shorts. Or on the final night of each two-week session when campers stayed up crying on each other’s shoulders and promising to write once they got home to Midland/San Antonio/Houston. I snapped pictures on the rare nights we all decided to blow-dry our hair and put on lipstick. I’d develop the rolls back home in Dallas, where I’d sit on my bed and relive the highs and lows of my eight weeks in the Texas Hill Country. Then I tucked them away. For years. Decades, actually. From the ages of twenty-two to forty-eight, I have no recollection of revisiting any of my camp pictures, unwilling to confront the too-small vessel that was my body and the feelings I had about who I once was and who I’d never be again.

By the time I arrived for my first summer as a counselor, I’d made it six months without bingeing or purging, the longest I’d ever gone since the madness had started in seventh grade, when managing my changing body and emerging sexuality against the background of impossible cultural beauty standards and a lifetime of repressed feelings pushed me to a breaking point. The summer I reported to camp for duty, I was also at my lowest adult weight. For the pre-camp physical, I was five feet six and weighed 106 pounds. My period had disappeared. Yes, I’d stopped bingeing and purging—thank God!—but I’d started eating smaller and smaller meals, terrified that if I took one bite too many, I’d say fuck it and wind up in a full-blown, 5,000-calorie binge. During a barbecue the first week, the camp nurse stopped me in the chow line. “Do you need more food?” She glanced at the chicken and coleslaw on my plate, and I shook my head. Absolutely not.

The camp activities director was a twenty-nine-year-old lifer and alcoholic with red hair and pale knees who insisted on controlling the music piped through the camp during downtime. Bob Dylan. Counting Crows. Townes Van Zandt. He once saw me singing along to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and said, “Oh look! Schindler’s Shoulders knows her Dylan.” I was appalled, offended, and so perversely grateful for the nickname, to hear him read my body as remarkably thin, that I was willing to ignore the reference to concentration camps. Did he want to kiss me?

I remember those summers in vivid flashes of memory. Sitting in a hot tub in Piedras Negras with six other counselors on a night off while steam rose above our heads and dissolved into the starry sky. Talking to two other counselors on the pier that jutted into the Frio River about how I learned to pray to God for strength to stop abusing my body with food. Singing “One Tin Soldier”with my twelve-year-old campers, feeling a joyful wave pass through my whole body as I raised my voice with theirs. Calling my sponsor from a pay phone to report that I’d eaten something called King Ranch Chicken, a Texan casserole consisting of pulled chicken, tortillas, sour cream, shredded cheese, and canned cream of mushroom soup. And I remember being so afraid I would gain weight that I woke up at dawn every morning to speed-walk a mile up to the main road and back. I can feel the tug of my lungs at the steepest part of the climb; I can still hear my quick, determined puffs of air.

In my third attempt to organize the mass of pictures my mother had given me, I came across a 3 × 5 matte photo from my first summer as a counselor. It must have been “Crazy Day,” so named because everyone—campers and counselors alike—wore mismatched clothes (Plaid with stripes! Polka dots with floral!), applied clownish makeup, and teased their hair into ridiculous shapes. In the picture, two young women look straight into the camera and smile. One of them, me, is already gussied up for the “Crazy Day” antics, donning a floral romper with a plaid skirt. My hair, parted in the middle (so crazy), is pulled back by two giant navy-blue bows. I remember smearing bright blue eye shadow on my eyes, but it doesn’t show in the picture. My left earring, a sterling silver heart the size of a small pancake, has no match on the right side. Around my neck is a silk black rope bearing a three-inch-long cross studded with turquoise beads—not an ironic accessory; I wore that cross every day that summer. For the picture, I draped my arm around a blonde co-counselor. She worked with the youngest campers, the rosy-cheeked little kids who spent half their sessions missing home. I remember that she played guitar and never wore makeup, but I can’t remember her name. Funny, I remember Erin, Darby, Allison, Lisa, Leslie, Emily, Elizabeth, Jenn, Lynette, Diane, and Sabra, but not the name of the woman in the picture. I recall she was devout—Southern Baptist—and never joined us to drink cheap piña coladas in Mexico on our days off. In the picture, she wears simple gold hoop earrings; no giant studded cross for her. Her style, like her faith, was understated, quiet, steady. I wonder how her life has shaped her faith since those hot summer days in South Texas.

The picture of me and the unnamed blonde Baptist counselor mesmerized me. I stared at it, studied it. I scanned it and texted it to my friend Dana, who met me years after I’d been a too-thin, cross-wearing Texan young woman. We’d never talked about this period of my life, and I was excited to show her. Look at this, I typed under the picture, and I meant all of it: my lopsided smile, the weird outfit, the cross, the flat chest. She wrote back immediately: Jesus Christ. Look at your arms! You’re emaciated. I felt ashamed then—for having this electrifying stir of memories, for missing what that body meant to me, for having been that strange thin girl, and for having outgrown her.

I look at the picture every day. It’s next to a homemade Valentine my daughter made me a few years ago and a grainy picture of my grandma’s farmhouse. Sometimes I cross-examine myself: Why is a picture of sick-and-out-of-control me pinned up next to bona fide treasures from the generations before and after me? I accuse myself of loving the photo simply because I look skinny as fuck, which is complicated, layered, distorted, diseased, and gendered. It’s also true. Partly. But the picture is also a reminder that I’ve been deadly wrong about God and God’s will before, and I probably will be again. Mostly, I justify its prominent placement on the bulletin board above my desk because it’s never too late to embrace the lost versions of myself. It’s never too late to look gently upon my most certain and incomplete self and say: “You have a home, here with the rest of us.”