My Story
I really don’t know where to start, so I’m just going to throw it all out there. Alrightee, so.
As a kid, my family life might not have been the best, but I had it better than a lot of other kids I knew. My parents were still married, we lived in a nice house in a nice neighborhood. I went to a great school and got great grades. We took family vacations every spring and summer, sometimes even over winter break. I had a fair amount of friends, two of which lived within walking distance. Live really was pretty great.
My mom went to everything, and supported anything my sister or I wanted to do. My dad worked nights, so he wasn’t around as much, but he came when he could. My dad wasn’t as supportive as mom, but he knew what I was capable of. He pushed me to excel in everything I did, and motivated me to be better than everyone else. More often than not, I was. I don’t say that to be cocky, because part of me thinks the other kids were better off than me, they played games while I read school books. They made art; I did math. Everything I’ve done even from that young age has been directed at making me the perfect young lady to be accepted to the perfect university to live the perfect life married to a perfect man.
The entire plan sounded lovely to me.
Middle school came and the school got bigger. Suddenly I wasn’t surrounded my middle-upper class students any more. They put me in the honors program and I met kids that were smarter than me. They knew more facts, could do more math problems in their heads, they had read more books. I realized that these were the people that would be living the perfect life.
My childhood friends started to drift in different directions than I went. Some joined sports teams, and so I had to join them too. All my life I had been competing with them, and so now I had to prove myself better in more than just academics. I played volleyball and I was the youngest kid on the team. Needless to say, I sucked. Pretty bad.
Then came jr. high. The classes got harder and my grades stayed perfect. I joined the track team and was the worst person there. Not once did I ever run a race to actually earn the team points. You know how it is, they don’t cut little kid sports, they want to encourage kids to keep playing so they try to play in high school.
My Parents took me out of honors math, and so all the kids in the honors program called me stupid, because now I was in a class a year behind them. Looking back, I think “heaven forbid I take pre-algebra as a 7th grader”. When it was happening though, I hated my parents for it. The kids were cruel, making fun of my clothes and my hair. I still remember the day one boy told me it looked like I mopped the floor with my hair. It was in these years I stopped eating for the most part, getting down to about 500 calories a day. If I couldn’t be the smartest, of the most athletic, I made sure I was going to be the thinnest.
High school started and I still wasn’t eating right. I’d started self-harming the summer before 9th grade, hating myself for being on a terrible volleyball team, for not being thinner than the other girls in my summer gym class. I hated knowing that because I was too stupid at math back in middle school I would have to wait a year before I could get back into honors science because I was behind everyone else. I felt like a failure.
Things spiraled out of control and people never noticed. My two best friends went to Spain that summer, and after that they never really included me in anything again. I was always third wheel, and the butt of all the jokes. I hated myself for letting myself be an easy target, but it’s hard to tell them to stop when you agree with everything they were saying.
9th grade came and went and the summer after I joined the cross country team. My boyfriend of a year and a half broke up with me and I thought it would be for the better. He had tried to help me with my bad habits, but I think he got sick of trying to fix something he didn’t break. At that point, I was sick of living with me too. The summer workouts started making me sick from having not eaten enough before hand. It was then that I realized I needed to focus on eating if not regularly, then at least only healthy foods. Running became a passion and allowed me to work out a lot of negative energy that I used to take out on myself. It allowed me to set goals for myself, and after reaching those goals my feelings were beyond words.
Failing to reach those goals though… those were some bad nights. I would cut after a bad race day, or would skip a few more meals if I knew I’d gained a few pounds that might be slowing me down. I put so much of myself into the sport that it determined my mindset for the following week until the next race. I’m still like this today.
A few people I know personally know about my unhealthy habits. Some have helped me a lot along the way. My parents got divorced the winter of 2012, and my relationship with my father has started to come into existence. I’m so thankful now for the things I have been blessed with in this life, and I’m working on getting back to having a relationship with God. Something I seemed to have lost after years of desperation for something that would make my life better to happen. I’ve made all new friends, ones that I don’t feel the need to compete with, but also ones that I’ll never be as close to as my old ones.
I’m working on making changes in my life, and hopefully one day I’ll be able to tell my children about my life and have them know that I’ll never judge them for anything they do. I want to live an open life, one where people know me for who I am. This is my story, and everything in it is a part of me.
The good, the bad, and the ugly.
