Transformation Tuesday /// from Starved to Strong

BEFORE, I was slowly starving myself.

At the time I was so proud. I had just lost 25 pounds in 3 months with a restrictive diet of pre-portioned, processed foods that totaled 800 calories a day. My high school prom dress fit. Every 2 weeks I went shopping and bought the smallest jeans I could fit into, and to my joy the pants size kept getting smaller.

It’s taken years to admit that despite weighing less than I did in high school, and fitting into a size 3, I wasn’t healthy. It was even harder to admit that I slid right back into the dangerous eating habits I thought I had left behind in high school.

After all, I never looked like the stereotype. I knew people with eating disorders didn’t all look like the stereotype: gaunt and skeletal with sharp, visible hips and countable ribs. I knew it wasn’t a disorder for the visibly skinny only. But somehow I still couldn’t see it in myself. Plus, I still looked like me, aside from thinning hair and slightly sunken eyes. I think. I don’t know. I still don’t have enough distance to be objective.

I definitely didn’t FEEL good. I was weak. Little, stupid tasks were hard, like carrying a load of laundry or walking up a flight of stairs. I hadn’t exercised in months, since I was eating so few calories.

I was super unhappy. At my thinnest, I still felt fat. Food was my enemy, and I lived in fear of gaining weight and relinquishing the ironclad control I had over my body. I had to eat less and less to maintain. Eventually I couldn’t.

I wish I could say I had an epiphany and changed my habits right away. I wish I could say I started using portion control and (mostly) clean eating to build a healthy relationship with food and using regular (but not excessive) exercise to improve my strength, balance, and flexibility.

But I didn’t. It took a few more years, countless rounds of dangerous dieting, and a lot of anxiety and shame for me to get to where I am now.

NOW, I exercise and eat healthily because it makes me feel good.

Now, I’m stronger than I have been in years.

Now, I look in the mirror and I’m proud of what I see.

NOW, though my body is far from perfect, I’m happier in my own skin.

Don’t get me wrong… I’m not done. I still have muscle to gain, and fat and inches to lose. I have many mental hurdles to overcome. I still fall into spirals of negativity and unhealthy habits. Progress is slow, because as it turns out, eating 800 calories a day on and off for a few years does a number on your metabolism. But each day I work towards being healthier, inside and out, mind and body. And I’m doing it the right way, on my own terms.

Yesterday I ate a pint of Ben&Jerry’s ice cream.

It’s exactly as bad as you think. There is no reasoning that could explain it. There are no extenuating circumstances to validate it.

It wasn’t impulsive. I thought about it, and decided to do it. I walked to Tedeschi and bought it. Then I ate some of it. Then I ate most of the rest of it.

I was stone cold sober.

I am a Beachbody coach. I help others build healthy fitness and nutrition habits. This is my job. I run accountability groups structured around giving people the support they need to accomplish these goals. Yet I ate Ben&Jerry’s last night.

It wasn’t part of my plan. I didn’t work hard on my fitness and nutrition all week so I could earn this. I worked hard all week to earn some splurges on Thanksgiving dinner. I enjoyed them thoroughly, got right back on track, and then for some reason, 2 days later, I went off-track.

I tell you this because I want you to know that it’s okay if you’ve done this too. You’re not alone. We have so much working against us. So many industries (unhealthy food, quick-fix weight loss) want our money and are willing to do anything to get it. There are so many people, and so many companies ready to shame us so that we’ll give them our money.

The only way we can fight it is to talk about it. The only way we can try to build healthier fitness, nutrition and mindset habits is to own every piece of it, and help each other through it. Which is why I’m telling you all about this.

So wherever you are on this journey to a healthier lifestyle, I beg you… Please talk about it. Whether you’re happily on your way to a healthier you, barely hanging in there, or somewhere in between, talk about it. 

I didn’t get into this business so I could run accountability groups full of people who did everything perfectly the first time, all the time, right away.

So how are you?

Really?

not good enough.

my before picture is hideous

i’m disgusting

rolls of fat collecting around my middle almost down to my awkwardly skinny ankles.

my after picture is great, but somehow i think it’s just the angle

that i don’t really look that good

i can’t even appreciate my after picture because now i constantly compare myself to it.

i look at myself in the same mirror,

under the same lighting,

in the same position,

in the exact very same spot,

and i think i look fatter now than i did when i took the pic a month ago

and i’m so very disappointed because this is what i do.

i get thin,

i get fat,

i get thin,

i get fat. because i’m

destined to repeat this

disgustingly unhealthy cycle,

to never be satisfied,

to never settle.

but at what cost?

I can’t even appreciate my after picture, because i’m constantly comparing myself to it,

wondering if i’ve let myself go.

i panic.

first slowly, bit by bit,

little drops of fear collecting until i’m lying in a huge puddle of bright red failure, like a scene from CSI Miami, and Callie Duquesne’s about to show up with her perfect body and shiny blonde hair and take pictures of my horribly gory demise from moderately overweight person to thin person who was never totally satisfied with herself to slightly heavier person who’s on her way to becoming fat again.

and i’m trying to figure out when it started, when i first became a person who wasn’t comfortable in her own skin, but the memories are hazy, faded and blurry, strung together at random and mentally photoshopped by years of overanalyzing and my writerly imagination filling in the details that i don’t remember, probably never remembered.

I wasn’t born hating my body

sometimes I get glimpses of it, quick flashes of what it might be like to just enjoy the feeling of the sun on my skin, eyes closed, not a thought in the world, but then

walls of reality slam down around me, ruining everything because for just a second, I wasn’t worried that I look fat from this angle, the stretch marks on my legs are showing, I’ve eaten too many carbs today, and I should sit up straight and suck my stomach in and drink 3 liters of water so no food can fit in me and then lace up my sneakers and run until and I can’t feel feelings anymore and the trees in front of me swim and sway and threaten to swallow me whole

because i’m

not good enough.

no matter how much weight i lose it’s not good enough

i should lift more weights

eat less carbs

cut out processed foods, because gluten is bad! so are things that have more than 5 ingredients! ew!

because we sit here and

judge people’s bodies

judge what food they put in their mouths

and when

and judge

judge

judge

judge

judge

judge

judge

judge

judge

judge

judge

and where the hell has that ever gotten us?

when you strip away

all the things that are supposed to keep you warm and happy and comfortable in your own skin

bulimia is the blanket you choose

you wrap yourself in lies

black is slimming

that’ll look great if you wear some spanx underneath

minimize this, maximize that

[[[and not now, but at some point CAN WE JUST TALK ABOUT HOW WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BE SO THIN AND STILL HAVE BREASTS? thanks society, for creating an ideal for female beauty that’s LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for 95% of the population to obtain without plastic surgery, because when you get that thin your boobs go POOF,

but that’s a rant for another day.]]]

swathed in deceit

wrapped in illusion

push it up

suck it in

lift

tone

burn

tan

dye

paint

NO

just

NO

because it’s still

not good enough

there will always be jeans that don’t fit

there will always be someone with nicer abs than me

even if i make my body the most perfect thing it can be, abs of steel, muscles coiled around my bones like ropes

there will always be someone else who does it so naturally

so even if i finally build myself the perfect body, there will always be someone else who didn’t have to work as hard because they’re not BROKEN AND SAD like me.

so i’ll never be good enough.

i’ll never be thin enough,

pretty enough,

young enough,

have hair that’s

long enough,

i’ll never squat enough,

bench enough,

run far or fast enough.

i’ll never BE enough

so you know what?

i’m done.

and i’ve been trying to write the ending of this poem for a few days now, because i want to to end with hope, even the tiniest sliver of low-carb sugar-free portion-controlled panic-induced hope. but this isn’t a lifetime made-for-tv movie about anorexia. those always end well, with the beautiful girl in the hospital surrounded by loving family, and then they cut to a scene of her playing some sport because she got strong again, and yay, no more eating disorder. but what they don’t tell you is that you never get over an eating disorder. you’re never fixed. you’re just stronger than you were before, and that’s the best you can hope for. so this isn’t the end of my story. i’m going to struggle with this for my entire life.

but there is hope.

because today, i’m going to eat something with more than 30 grams of carbs in it and

you know what?

i’m not going to have a panic attack.

maybe i’ll stop when i’m full.

maybe i’ll stop when i’ve stuffed myself.

maybe i’ll obsessively cut it in half and then log it into myfitnesspal.

but maybe not.

and tomorrow, i’m going to lie out and read a book in a bikini and every time i wince and cringe and want to curl up into a ball or go inside or readjust myself so i look better i’m going to remember that

my stretch marks are battle scars

my hair might actually grow long again

my lovehandles are a trophy, not a source of shame

and if what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger

if we really believe that

then we shouldn’t hide our scars

and if anyone says a word to me about them

any of the marks 20 years of disordered eating left on my body

if someone says one single disrespectful word

i’m going to tell them the story of the battle taking place inside my skin

i’m going to read them this poem.

Goodbye Skinny Jeans: An Obituary

For a long time I kept a pile of jeans that didn’t fit.

Some, my prized Abercrombie size 2s, were from high school, and after the first time I lost weight on Medifast, I rejoiced in being able to wear them again.

Some I bought during that first Medifast run, or the second. Every so often I went to Hollister and tried on all the jeans on the sale rack. It was a contest to see how small a size I could fit into, a contest I told no one about, because of denial, and then shame. My mother’s voice echoes in my head, saying, “Honey, this is a contest no one wins,” and she’s right, but it didn’t matter at the time. I was drunk on the feeling of buttoning those size 3s, stretchy victory wrapped around my hipbones.

For a long time I loved those jeans… for all the wrong reasons.

I loved those high school Abercrombies because they were high-waisted, and actually fit my body correctly. I have no hips. Well, barely any hips. The difference between my waist and hip measurement is about 2 inches. I loved every pair of Hollister jeans, because they symbolized victory (albeit temporary victory) at the end of one of my numerous weight-loss attempts. They were trophies I’d won in the battle against fat and unhealthy and excess and gluttony and insert more twisted eating disorder imagery here. I kept them because they were expensive and pretty and had low numbers on the tags, but more so because getting rid of them meant failure. Getting rid of my skinny jeans meant accepting that I’d never fit into them again, and that, in my eyes, was accepting defeat.

I know we’re always told to dress the body we have now. It’s in the same book with “be comfortable in your own skin,” “love the skin you’re in,” “take pride in your body,” “you are your own worst critic,” and other advice I agree with but can’t seem to internalize. It’s also logical, because in most situations, you can’t walk around naked. You’ve got to wear clothes. So they might as well fit, flatter, and make you smile when you see your reflection in a store window (which in my case means they are often neon, frequently sparkly, and include very short skirts). If you want to buy an outfit and make your goal to fit into it, go for it – some people swear by it – but owning an entire wardrobe full of clothes you don’t fit into is both unhelpful and alarmingly negative. There’s nothing like starting your day grabbing the one pair of jeans that fits off a pile of 11 pairs that are too small. Plus, since you wear that pair so much, you start to wear through them in the upper thigh area, and though it’s less about the size of your thighs and more about the fact that you’re wearing the same pair every single day, as a result, you spend the entire day hyperaware of your thighs rubbing together when you walk. 

From a financial perspective, dressing the body I have right now would be an expensive undertaking for me because every five seconds my body has a new “right now.” Sometimes, it is completely different at noon than it was at 7 a.m. If healthy bodies fluctuate, consider the bodies of people who have been actively yo-yo dieting since freshman year of college, with disordered eating habits tracing back to sixth grade. Some months every day of my period is a different level of bloat. There aren’t enough clothes in the world to account for the weirdness that goes on inside my body on a daily basis. Even if there were, I can’t afford them, and I certainly have nowhere to put them.

I work at a day camp, and on 70s dress-up day I had a brilliant idea. I rounded up my flare leg skinny jeans and offered them up to the guys as costumes. As I watched teenaged and 20-something dudes parading around in my denim victory trophies, it dawned on me: I’m utterly ridiculous.

They’re Abercrombie jeans from 1999. I bought those jeans when people were still worried that Y2K was going to transform all of our technology into steaming piles of gooey red mush (okay maybe not exactly, but forgive me because I just caught up on True Blood). I bought those jeans before I kissed a boy, drove a car, cheated on a Spanish test, or left the country. I bought those jeans before I lifeguarded, taught swimming, and found my calling teaching English. I bought those jeans the year 10 Things I Hate About You was released, but years before I took a page out of Julia Stiles’ character’s book and danced on tables in Munich, Berlin, Rome, Prague, Dublin, Doolin, Amsterdam, and a tiny farming village in Southeast Holland called Well that I was lucky enough to call home for a semester. 

The scene that inspired a lifetime of dancing on tables.

I bought those jeans the same year I bought a pair of platform Velcro sneakers from Costco and wore them under those jeans. PLATFORM. VELCRO. SNEAKERS. FROM COSTCO. I’m going to take a moment and let that sink in.

They looked something like this. Except worse. 

People change. Bodies change. Careers, cities, relationships, and styles change (see above picture: platform Velcro sneakers). Dreams change. Lives change. And so should denim. 

Everything changes, and that’s a good thing. Maybe that means one day, if I work hard enough, my relationship with my body and myself will change.

But I’m starting small.

Goodbye skinny jeans. 

PS:

BODY DYSMORPHIA: I'M MESSED UP. Are you? Let's discuss.

I just read this beautiful, haunting, honest, and hilarious piece by a writer who recovered from anorexia. It came in the middle of an internet rabbit hole I fell into, one of the negative-body-image-fierce-lady-writer variety.  As usual, I emerge from the reading binge, bleary-eyed in my underwear, wondering what it all means for me: as a writer, a woman, a daughter, a friend, a teacher of adolescents, and a lifelong disordered eater.

Confession time: My weight never dipped below 100 pounds. 

Here's the thing: not all anorexics and bulimics are thin. Many of us look quite normal. At my smallest, I looked a bit bony, arms and legs dangling off a normal-looking, even slightly soft midsection. Both times... At 16, eating 300 calories a day, downing half a dozen horse-sized diet pills, and running track... At 26, eating 890 calories a day, working out endlessly and never leaving the house... I looked good. 

I was never hospitalized. I came close once, after going four days without eating and passing out during a final exam, but never quite made it there (thankfully). 

No one ever staged an intervention. There were no doctors, nurses, treatment centers, support groups, or anything of the sort. Only crash diets, gym memberships, vomiting halfway through a 10 mile run on an empty stretch of highway, and years of feeling unhappy and uncomfortable in my own skin. 

At my thinnest in recent years, I was 127 pounds, and looking back I'd sacrifice a few relatives to get back to that weight, but at the time I felt pudgy. I remember vividly how, even with so little fat on me, when I laid down to tan in my bikini the skin on my hips fell out of my bikini at an unattractive angle. It's gotten to the point where I don't know what I look like at all. I can't tell. Nothing fits. My body appears stretched out, loose, misshapen, and weird. My face looks good, not fat like before when I was crash dieting, but my body... I guess you can only bounce back from so much. 

I go through positive phases. I'll see myself naked in a mirror, lift my arms above my head, and think, "You know what? I'm actually pretty hot." Looking at my stretch marks, I'll think, "Damn... those are awesome stretch marks. They're badges of honor, battle scars to be worn with pride... They are marks of survival, not failure..." 

Then I remember that nothing fits, and I want to cry again, I want to give up, I want to crack down and get back in shape I can be proud of, I want to lie down and do nothing at all... 

AND IT'S JUST A BODY. Before you even think about saying it, realize that I've said it to myself a million times, and I'm saying it right now as I write this: What the hell is wrong with me? Why do I let this take over? Am I that vain and self-absorbed? Is there nothing else that matters to me? What does it say about me that I'm so obsessed with how messed up my relationship with my body is? I hate it. I hate it. I wish I could stop it. Part of me hates you for judging me, but part of me is right there with you, making a face at myself. 

I don't know what to do next. The whole thing makes me extremely uncomfortable. But I have to find some meaning in all of this madness, or else what will it have all been for? There's no way I can just wake up one day and not agonize over my body, right? That ship sailed in elementary school. I was never going to be normal. Maybe I should set my standards lower and learn to cope. 

CONFESSION TIME: I hate myself. Not who I am, but my physical self. I think it has always been this way, and the periods in my life when I thought I was coping were actually denial. I don't know if I know how to NOT hate myself. 

RELEVANT EXAMPLE: My legs look great still, but all I see when I look at them is how much nicer they would be if I hadn't tortured them with years of yo-yo dieting. All I see when I look at them is the fact that they don't fit into my pants and I refuse to buy new ones because new ones are failure. All I see when I look at them is that they are 3.5 inches greater in circumference than they were 1 year ago and I HATE that I know that, I HATE that I have the measurements of my thighs logged from this week last year. I HATE THAT I'M THE KIND OF PERSON WHO MEASURES MY THIGHS, LET ALONE WRITES THOSE MEASUREMENTS DOWN WITH DATES. 

Part of the problem is the fact that I'm afraid to talk about it. I feel self-absorbed, selfish, superficial, obnoxious, and like a total jerk because there are people everywhere that have real problems bigger than being 20 pounds heavier than they should be and not feeling confident naked. People everywhere yo-yo diet, cry in fitting rooms, and count calories, and we shouldn't talk about it because people are in real pain out there and every time we talk about our self-indulgent self-proclaimed self-hate, we're marginalizing the real problems and wasting time that might otherwise be spent solving them, or making our lives better and more fulfilling so we aren't self-indulgent assholes who worry about ourselves all the time. 

Today I'm going to take a stand in the opposite direction: I am genuinely unhappy in my own skin. Regardless of what that says about me as a person, it's the truth, and it's awful. I know the vast majority of the problems in this world are far worse, and that millions of people would love to have this be the worst problem they deal with. But to me this is a big problem, and for myself, I won't let it be marginalized. 

I'm hoping that if more of us talk about disordered eating and unhealthy body image, we'll start to feel better. It doesn't need to be sensational to hurt. Every time I walk down the street behind a thinner woman and find myself searching for a physical flaw on her, just one thing I can claim to "beat" her at, it hurts. She's probably a lovely girl who has important things that matter and she's not preoccupied with the fact that maybe her legs could be slightly more muscular because she's a good person who has better more meaningful things to fill her time with. She doesn't deserve my critique, silent or not. Every time I think back to this mythical time when I was thin with despair -- which is even stupider because I know that at that time I was just as unhappy as I was now, despite being much lighter and fitter -- it hurts. Every time I see someone eat just one portion of something indulgent and I remember gorging myself on Doritos in second grade because even then I couldn't moderate ANYTHING -- it hurts. It hurts to realize you've spent your whole life failing at something. It hurts to admit all of this. It may not be poverty, hunger or abuse, but it hurts, and it's real, and you can judge me all you want for writing about it in such excessive detail, but I need to do something. 

I have battled eating disorders, body dysmorphia, negative body image for most of my life and it feels as if it's eating me alive. I need help. And I'm going to talk about it. 

What about you? 

Why I spend hours reading what other people write about their eating disorders

I make no secret of the fact that I have a messed up relationship with food. Everyone in my life knows of my twisted body image. It’s pretty hard not to. All you have to do is watch me interact with food, talk about food, abstain from food, exercise compulsively, refuse to leave the house for 3 months until I’ve lost weight, or talk about how much I wish I could just eat a bagel without feeling guilty for at least 72 hours afterwards. I’m a writer, a talker, a storyteller, and a world-class yo-yo dieter. I also have no filter. So my dirty laundry is always on display.

The first official diet I went on was Atkins at age 17, but I might even go back further, to sophomore year. My school picture was heinous, and my retake was beautiful. The difference between the two: a season of varsity cross-country. In sixth grade I ran one mile a day after school every day for a month until my brown baggy pants from Express (the ones with white contrast stitching that Rose also had) were baggy and I rejoiced in the mirror. In first grade I started complaining about how my thighs spread out against the leather car seat. Even before that, I switched to skim milk and insisted on only eating bread if it was toasted, because the texture of mushy bread reminded me of the texture of my mushy tummy, and that made me feel like invisible mosquitoes were biting me all over. I can remember tons of bits and pieces like this, disjointed memories forming a strange constellation I’m still trying to make sense of.

I’ve come to realize that when it comes to disordered eating, there is no past tense. There is no end, all better, wrapped up in a Lifetime movie bow as the credits roll and the people embrace. It’s always a part of you, it always will be, and if you really think back, you’ll probably realize that it was a part of you long before you knew it. I know I did.

Which is why I submerge myself in eating disorder writing. I keep thinking if I read enough of other people’s problems, my own will start to make more sense, or at least not be so stifling. Being at war inside your own skin is tough. I have so many years of resentment for my body built up that sometimes it feels like sitting in my living room. all the windows opened, on a pollen-heavy spring day, when my roommates and I have forgotten to clean, the cats have been wrestling, and I have a bad cold: SO MANY ALLERGENS FLOATING AROUND THAT I CAN’T BREATHE AND WANT TO INJECT BENADRYL INTO MY VEINS AND EYEBALLS AND FINGERNAILS BUT NOTHING WORKS.

This is one of the aforementioned cats. He has a lot of fur. Lots of allergens. YAY  METAPHORS! 

I find it helps me to read about eating disorders because it’s a combination of escaping my problems and dealing with them. I’m immersed in the content of my problems, but not directly dealing with my own. It’s an indirect therapy, like when the detectives on SVU ask a young sex crime victim to draw pictures of her life, and the pictures help them solve the crime and help the little girl deal without an intense, dimly-lit, Detective-Stabler-flying-off-the-handle interrogation. (Sidente: This scene DID happen in the episode. It was just later).

But what does it all mean? I just ate healthily for most of the day before eating a slew of random items that had too much combined fat. I spent half the day complimenting myself on stopping when I was full only to spend the rest of the day eating past the point of being full and reminiscing about how wonderful it felt to be kind of empty in the morning, a messed-up bliss that only comes at midnight after eating a tablespoon of almond meal for no apparent reason. Then I read. I read and read and read. And here’s what I’ve come up with:

It has to mean something, all these hours spent reading about all these struggles. I’m not sure what it means, but I’m going to figure it out. And I’m going to write about it. Obviously. Get ready.

Stress Hangover: I WANT MY LIFE BACK

The class I just taught was a disaster. I'm sitting here at my desk, counting the minutes until I can leave for the day and escape to the sweet oblivion of my bed. 39 minutes until crisp sheets, PJ pants, lemon seltzer and Ice-T's sarcastic quips about the latest murder-rapist to terrorize the streets of New York City. 38 minutes until fuzzy socks, cool air, the evening stretched lazily in front of me in that special way that only Thursday evenings before Friday holidays can (Sidenote: Thursday evening is more glorious when there's no work Friday. Fact). 38 minutes until I start my usual weekend dance of trying to shove the stress of the work week out of my head for long enough to enjoy the 2 days off. 37 minutes until I can shut my eyes and try to sleep and probably fail because there's too much in my mind but somehow trying unsuccessfully to sleep beats purposely being awake.

When I started student teaching and grad school, my mom stopped incessantly yelling about my terrible sleep schedule. At first I didn't know how to respond. No one yelled at me to get up at a reasonable hour on Saturday. No one cared if I slept until 4, which I routinely did. No one screamed at me when I was going to be late for teaching. Instead, I woke up to hot coffee being poured into my mouth and a warm "Morning honey!" When I finally confronted her, she said, "Honey, you're working extremely hard. I can't imagine taking on that courseload while teaching all day. If you need to sleep 20 hours a night, by all means do it. In high school, you were just lazy. Now, you deserve those 20 hours." 

I took this to heart and I'm glad I did. It's so easy to feel guilty for the time it takes to recover from teaching, especially in a tough school system with many troubled students. Even the greatest teachers -- you know, the annoying ones who seem to have perfect systems in place for discipline and instruction that promote student accountability, consistency, inquiry, and growth -- come home and sit on the couch for awhile to decompress. Trust me. I've asked them. I'm not saying I'm thrilled about it. I would love to be able to leave work and DO things for the several hours until I go to sleep. I would love to teach summer school if I weren't so destroyed from the school year. I would love to have real hobbies that require regular time commitments and friends I see more than once every other month when I don't bail because I'm too tired or upset. I would love it. But I've come to terms with it. I no longer apologize for my SVU binges, or clicking DECLINE on 99% of the weeknight facebook event invitations that come my way. I'm not happy about it, but I spend enough time feeling guilty about the fact that I could have done this or that better at my job. I'm not going to feel guilty for how I recover from that job. 

But this year has not been typical. Nothing about it has made sense. And somewhere in the last few months I began to wonder if things are getting worse. Somewhere in the last few months I began to think maybe I should replace "well-adjusted" with "in denial" when describing how I deal with all this stress. 

Did I always take things so personally? Did I always get this destroyed? It's hard to remember. This year has been terrible, worse than other years by far, but my reactions have been astronomically more severe. My first year was pretty bad. I taught 7 different classes at one point (non-teachers: I mean I had to prepare 7 different lessons each day). My second year (or was it the third?) I had those 8th graders in the morning that gave me HELL, and then there was the year I had to plan different lessons for each 7th grade class because they were each dysfunctional in completely different ways. Last year was awful, the worst I thought I'd ever deal with, until this year happened. I was upset frequently. I slept a lot. But I wasn't this unhappy this often for this long. Lately it seems like every little thing sets me off, and the panic and anger and pain that set in last for longer.

I used to go weeks without going out on the weekends. I used to sleep 20 hours a day. But somehow I remember it being a choice I made, which implies that I could have made a different one. Last weekend, for the first time in 2 months, I went out on Saturday night. I karaoked with my friends and for awhile, it was actually fun. I didn't drink, because I can't control my emotions sober let alone drunk, but I love being with my friends so I still enjoyed myself. Sort of. Mostly. For awhile. I thought if I looked the part, dressed the part and acted the part, it would be enough. As it turns out, pretending to be okay isn't the same thing as being okay, so I ran out of Hong Kong in Faneuil Hall crying.

There you have it. There's no set of circumstances that could allow me to go out and for ONE NIGHT not fall apart. I can't be normal. It's not an option for me anymore. I'm at home alone every weekend night watching TV and reading because I HAVE NO OTHER CHOICE, unless I want to make crying while sober in crowded bars a habit. 

Remember when you realized you couldn't drink like you used to? It happens to all of us at different times. I was about 25. Losing 30 pounds and being 3 years out of college combined was what did it for me. Suddenly, I could count the times I HADN'T gotten wasted, instead of the times I had. Suddenly, I was hungover until 7 o'clock at night. I started losing Saturdays and Sundays. Eventually I realized why: My tolerance had gone down. My body chemistry had changed. My outlook was the only thing that hadn't shifted. 

That's how work feels. The stress from one tough class leaks into another. The stress from one terrible day is still there the next morning. I run and sleep and box and watch SVU and I still can't get away from it. The stress is like a hangover that never ends. You can reevaluate the way your body handles alcohol, and change your habits accordingly. You can drink more water, drink less beer, get more sleep, and be hungover less frequently. But what can you do if your job is what's making you sick? What do you do if your life is one neverending migraine headache,  your mornings are spent bent over the toilet, you've been sick with one thing or another since October, and your doctors tell you the stress is causing your body's systems to malfunction? What do you do when you panic the second things seem calm because it's so unfamiliar that you're unprepared? What do you do when your body rejects the place you have chosen to do the job you love more than anyone has any right to love a given job? What do you tell the ER doctors when you're throwing up blood for no reason? What do you do when what's wrong with you doesn't show up on blood tests, and there's no medicine to make you better?