Another one of THOSE posts

For a more lighthearted post, see my previous post below. Sorry there are no pictures, but my scanner doesn't work, and I don't have a job anymore to scan my pictures there.

My year-and-a-half anniversary of quitting drinking went by almost a month ago without mention. I didn't have the time or flexibility in my schedule to do anything like the (nearly) half ironman I did last year to mark the 6-month mark. A year ago, it was important to keep doing more and more crazy and intense things to mark special occasions. This year, I'm more interested in saving it for where it really counts. I'm beginning to trust myself more to have free time and use it responsibly. For me, in the first year I was so afraid that if I didn't have some slightly out of reach goal around every corner, I would tumble off the wagon, never to return. Probably, if I hadn't pushed myself like I did last year, that's what would have happened.

But now after some 18 months of flexing that muscle every day, I feel like I can lead somewhat of a more normal life. I've been letting myself have friends again. I've stopped signing up for races that I don't want to do. I'm trying the whole dating thing again. And I have even purchased beer with no intention of drinking it without going off the deep end. It feels good. I know that I can never risk letting myself have a drink again. In Florida I had a non-alcoholic beer, and even the .5% alcohol by volume was enough to trip that switch in my head that said, "STAY HERE IN THE BAR. DRINK AS MUCH AS YOU CAN UNTIL THE BAR CLOSES AND YOUR MONEY RUNS OUT. DRINK! DRINK! DRINK! MAKE SURE YOU NEVER RUN OUT OF BOOZE AGAIN!" I can never just have one drink like some people can, but it feels nice to trust myself to lead a normal life in other ways.

But I'm not here to talk about drinking. I wrote that post 6 (well, nearly 7 now) months ago. The drinking is only one part of everything I had to get over to start becoming who I am now (and there's still so much to be improved upon!). Before I really started drinking, my problem was food. I was at my wits end. I remember thinking, Addicts and junkies have it easy, because no matter how hard it is, they know that they always have the hope of quitting. You can't quit eating. In many ways, I still think that I was right.



I was always afraid of getting fat as far back as I can remember. I remember going on my first diet when I was 9. Then, when I was 13 I stopped eating meat. My whole family ate meat, so suddenly I was doing something different. It was control. It was power! I got totally hooked on it. I started eating less and less, just to see how little I could get by on. I started playing games where I would see how long I could stare into the snack drawer singing the refrain from "Lady Willpower" before I closed it without taking anything and walked away. I would always leave some of everything on my plate, take the smallest portions possible, and only have seconds if they were offered to me. I started running. The summer before I started high school I weighed around 85 lb (about 40 lb less than I do now, at nearly the same height – I never did grow much after that).

Then, the first day of freshman year, something changed. I decided that the first day of school was a "special occasion," and that I could have a snack after school. I ate a whole, entire bagel and cream cheese. Then I hit the ice cream. I ate until I felt like I was going to puke, I just couldn't stop. It was like someone had flipped a switch. I kept eating like that for the rest of the year. I just couldn't control myself at all. The will power that I'd had the year before was completely gone. I used to hum "Lady Willpower" as I shoved cookie after cookie into my mouth. I ate a whole box of Frosted Flakes in one sitting once. Another time, I ate a whole box of nonfat coffee cake. Entenmen's cheese danishes. Gallons of ice cream. I had root beer with breakfast every day, french fries and a 6" cookie for lunch, and then I would come home and eat my face off. By the time dinner rolled around, my stomach hurt, but I had to eat something because I didn't want my parents to yell at me for eating too much junk for snack. I wanted to stop, I just couldn't. I made up new games where I'd sit in my room on the third floor with a box of girl scout cookies. I would eat one, and while I was chewing it, I'd throw the rest of the cookies one at a time out the window. It felt like control. It made me feel a little better.

By the end of my freshman year, I'd gained some 45 lb. I went from a size 0 to a size 8 by spring track season. My thighs had never touched before, and now I wore through all my pants in the crotch from the rubbing. When I was in the car, I could feel my fat jiggling and it made me sick. I had stretch marks. All my clothes were stretched out and looked like maternity clothes tenting over my paunch that I didn't always remember to suck in. It made me sick to be inside my skin, but I just couldn't stop eating. I would hardly eat anything for days, and then I'd go nuts, eating everything in sight.

Sophomore year is when things got really out of control. I learned how to stick my fingers down my throat to throw up, but I never felt like I got it all. I started stealing laxatives from the drug store, but (even then) I wouldn't poop in public restrooms. If I was ever stuck away from a private restroom when the laxatives kicked in, I would get so sick that I sometimes threw up. I used to get so angry with myself for being so out of control, that I would cut myself with a retractable exacto knife: deep gashes that would reopen when I picked up something heavy. This is the part that I most regret now, because those stupid scars will never go away.

And so it went through the rest of high school and into college. I was 20 years old, still convinced that the best days of my life had already passed when I was 13. I was so depressed that I defined myself by it. I used to cling on to all my "issues," thinking that that's what would make me special, worth knowing. If I couldn't be skinny and hot, I could be the frumpy girl who will always be there to listen to your problems. I could be that friend that you can't get rid of. I was one walking cry for help. I drank heavily, did every drug that came my way, and fucked anyone that showed an interest. I tried to kill myself one night. I did everything I could to sabotage my chances of getting accepted into my study abroad program so that I could sell everything I owned, drop out of school, and run away to New York City. Fucked-up shit crossed my mind, like wishing I had cancer, because cancer patients are skinny; or purposely becoming a junkie, because junkies are skinny. But much to my dismay, I was accepted to the study abroad program.

In Barcelona I decided that the best way to get sent home was if I got really sick, so I just stopped eating. In one month, I didn't have one bowel movement. I lost about 20 lb.

...And then I met a girl and everything changed. She was unattractive, opinionated, critical, and 10 years older than me, but she absolutely loved life, and I loved her. She was 30 and I was 20. She treated me like shit, and I loved it. She was ashamed that she was only in college, while most people her age had careers, and she was ashamed to be with me because I was so much younger. I idolized her. I would have done anything for her. "Why are you so sad all the time?" she asked me. She was expressing disgust, not concern. "It's really not hot. It makes you so much less fun to hang out with." And then she decided she wanted nothing to do with me (for the first of roughly 7 times over the course of that year). I was devastated. I locked myself in my room and got wasted, I couldn't think of any other way to deal with the emotion.

When I woke up, I felt so horrible, so absolutely disgusted with my own life, so overwhelmed with grief that she didn't want to be with me anymore, that I had no idea how I could live in my own skin even one minute longer. I guess it was despair. And then I made the first responsible decision I think I'd ever made in my life. I thought, Whatever I have been doing up until now hasn't been working. I need to quit dieting. I need a way to burn off all this energy. So I went to the gym and kicked the shit out of myself until my anxiety attack was gone. Then I went back and did it again the next day. I started eating 3 meals a day, and found that when I wasn't trying to skip meals, I didn't actually overeat. When I didn't restrict things from my diet, I didn't actually wind up binging on them as much. And I began writing in my journal compulsively. Every day I would drink and write and drink and write for hours until I could barely hold the pen anymore. I wanted to prove to this girl that I wasn't the loser deadbeat that she thought I was. I sat there every day and put my thoughts down on paper about what it must mean to be happy, almost every day for a year.

Out of that year came my drinking problem. But out of the same phase came endurance sports, and most of all my commitment to enjoying life. I did wind up hooking back up with the girl, and every time she broke up with me I would go back to my journal and figure out how to be that much better of a person. I could no more be bitter at her now for treating me like shit, than I could be at drinking for treating myself like shit. Both brought about the most positive changes in my life.

So yes, drinking ruined my life. But in a way, it saved it. If I hadn't started writing that year, then I never would have been able to break out of my negative cycle. If I hadn't started drinking, then I never would have had the patience to do all that writing. Also, drinking eventually took over my appetite. Food became just something to soak up the booze in my stomach and keep me from puking. When I finally did emerge on the other side, binge eating wasn't something that caught my attention anymore. It just didn't offer the same high as alcohol. It also helped that Spanish food sucks and I'm a horrible cook.

What I was thinking a lot about as my 1.5-year anniversary rolled around was about appreciating having my life back. I was on a pretty crazy "diet," but wasn't finding it difficult to stick to, because I had learned the significance of good eating. I knew that I couldn't drink, but am beginning to enjoy a normal life again because of it. And look at all the great things I had achieved in the process of getting myself through those addictions to food and drink. It was March, and I could still ride my bike 125 miles. I was swimming faster than I ever had before. And I had completed no fewer than 7 races of marathon distance or longer in one 9-month period. For a fuck-up, I think I was doing alright.

As usual with the posts like this that get pretty personal, I'm disabling comments. If you have something you would like to say to me, please feel free to send me an email at speedyspeedracer@gmail.com.