I think I’m going to start using this blog again more regularly. I fucked up. Well saying that implies guilt and mistakes and I honestly just think that what happened, happened. I have dealt with depression and anxiety my whole life, I’ve dealt with self hate, body hate, and distorted eating my whole life. I was raised in a family that hated themselves and their bodies, were very vocal about their terrible relationship with food, and pride themselves on their ghastly thin figures. To give some perspective, my grandmother was the longest living anorexic in the history of my city’s clinic. When she was my age she weighed 150, a year or two later she was about 70 pounds. I know this not because she shared but because she wrote her weight on all her childhood photos. She remained around 80 pounds the entire time I knew her. Her daughter, my aunt, reminds me so much of her. I caught a glance of her license she had written 90 pounds on it. My family isn’t around 4 feet tall, on average it’s like 5 foot 5. Underweight is healthy and a healthy weight is fat. This is what I grew up in. I don’t want to blame them. Especially since I know they are sick. There are other reasons for my relationship with weight and food being the way they are. I’m lazy and inactive and when I was a child I hated moving. I was overweight probably since I was 7 until about 2 to 3 years ago when I lost weight and tried to get healthy. Now I’m overweight again. I went through a breakup last winter that left me unstable and wrought with guilt. I felt so horrible and so guilty that I couldn’t care what became of me. I still feel guilty to this day for ending it, but I didn’t like him, I didn’t see a future with him, and he was getting to be suffocating. I needed to learn that it was okay to put me first and to end the relationship. I didn’t handle it well, I broke it off in a cowardly way and I ended up trying to forget the whole thing happened without acknowledging it or dealing with it. I’m still trying to deal with it. After that happened I went through hell trying to understand myself while also coping with the hormonal hell that is senior year. I had done well in school, but all those 13 years had seemed wasteful and I had no clue what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to do seemed impossible and unimportant. So I stopped. I stopped moving, I stopped caring about my body. Besides some measly, undedicated yoga practice I did nothing. In late december my grandfather died. His death had been a source of anxiety for two years leading up to his passing. I had laid in bed horrified that if i even thought of him I’d kill him and ever second he was alone I could kill him by just thinking of him. He was weak and depressed and missing my grandmother, he stopped eating, he grew skinnier than his already underweight frame. I saw him as a thing to focus my worry on and I did. For two years I was kept up worrying about him. Then he died. My anxiety didn’t know what to do with itself. My weight kept climbing. Senior year got more stressful. Of all the things I had to worry about my weight seemed least important. I went from reaching my lowest weight ever of 142 pounds in november of 2014 to climbing to 154 by February to even higher at 160 by June. As of July 26, 2015 I am 163.4 pounds. 1.6 pounds away from the weight that struck me in November of 2012 as the point I needed to make a change.
I’m terrified. I’m terrified that two years of hard work are completely erased. I’m terrified of the thought that I have to do it all over again. I’m terrified that despite failing and starting over thousands of times the past three years, this time I’m really back and the starting line. How easy it seems to slip into the routine that generations before me have. I’m going off to school in a month and my family wouldn’t even know if I’m starving myself. But I’m far too educated on the subject to let the destruction take over again. I’m going to be the one who is healthy. I swore that to myself two years ago and I’ll swear it again. I want to become a backpacker, a hiker, a explorer, a yogi, a rock climber, a mountain climber, I want to be strong and powerful and when I’m old I want to be able to get out of a chair. I want to religiously do handstands and pushups. I want runs to be refreshing. And if I ever dare to raise children I want to raise them to never ever have to experience the hell that is a destructive relationship with food. I will not let my family corrupt their hearts or their bodies or their minds. I will be healthy and I will follow my dreams dammit.
So where do you start when you start? I don't remember! I don’t remember how to stay dedicated and passionate and to love my body. I don’t remember what it’s like to want to change. I don’t remember the process itself. I don’t remember my meals, my workouts, my plans. I don’t remember how it felt to begin, to be a beginner. I remember, however, what it feels like to reach a goal. I wore a bikini in a waterfall pool on Kauai last summer. I showed my pasty white stomach to strangers and I felt damn good I felt comfortable. I will feel that way again. Of course having tasted success at one point will make me want to taste it as soon as possible. But it might take two years again. I might gain the freshman 15. Even though the thought of that sends me into a panic attack, to be 180 again, holy shit, holy shit. But I will once again be comfortable in my skin. And fuck. I want to be strong. I wanted to be skinny and normal before but I want to be strong and able bodied now. I want to be able to hike for days straight. I want to be able to run for minutes and hours. I want to be able to crank out pushups or bicycles when bored. I want to be able to stand up straight and strong with a 60 pound pack on my back and see the 15 miles ahead and then the 100 and then look back at 200 complete, still feeling capable, proud, and strong.
