What opening up has done for me:
In the midst of the darkest parts of my disorder, I didn’t want to admit the truth to myself. Deep down, I knew what I was doing was wrong, but instead of stepping up and facing it, I chose to ignore it and make up excuses for myself. It was easier than attempting to fight back because at that point in my life, I wasn’t sure if I was strong enough to win. However, even after finally accepting the life I was living was flawed and needed to change, I still couldn’t admit this to anyone else. I needed others to see my life as perfect and as bright as possible. I didn’t want anyone to know that instead of happy thoughts and positive aura, I was swimming in the trenches of hell. So, when I left to pursue treatment, I didn’t tell a soul. I left school without saying goodbye to my friends and teammates because I was too embarrassed to tell them the truth. I didn’t tell my best friends where I was going and why I couldn’t be in contact with them. I simply vanished off the face of the earth, because again, it was easier than having to face the hard truth. I was so caught up in how others viewed me that I disregarded other’s feelings in order to keep my ego intact. On top of everything that my disorder had made be become, it made me selfish and cruel to the people I loved. I was so focused on my conceited view of how my life would change in their eyes, that I overlooked the fact of how much they could help me heal. I was also scared about what the affects of opening up would have on my life. I was scared about how people would see me, and treat me differently. I didn’t want anyone to think I was weak and fragile, because that’s what I thought of myself. I didn’t want people to think I was weird or mentally unstable; and I certainly did not want people to think I was crazy and not believe anything I was saying. I was afraid of the people who wouldn’t understand, and so that fear caused me to hide within my disorder for even longer. What I failed to take into account throughout this period of my life was just how compassionate humans are. I had been focusing on everything that could go wrong instead of everything that could go right. It turns out people are more beautifully sympathetic than I could have ever imagined. Who would have thought? When I finally took the leap to start reaching out to people in my life, yes, I was terrified but I was met with such love and compassion, that I forget why I had ever been afraid in the first place. I was welcomed with open arms and hearts ready to mend me back together. People told me, I was strong and brave, and although at the time I couldn’t see it yet, their words were the pillars in which I began to build back my strength. Opening up has been a blessing and because of it, has allowed me to forge stronger and more beautiful relationships with people than I ever could have imagined. Although not all feedback was positive, such is life, but I learned how to accept it and not let it change how I viewed myself or my worth. When people tell me, I’m strong I can finally start to believe them. The sun does in fact shine brighter and life has indeed become sweeter. So I encourage all, whatever you are hiding behind, do not let that destroy you. We all carry burdens but we do not have to carry them alone. Vulnerability is what makes us human. Although we may not believe it at times, we are surrounded by people who love us and only want the best for us; and by opening up and sharing your struggles you’d be surprised at how strong you can become.
0 Comments
I wrote this speech for my team. I felt the need to share my story as a way to open up the conversation to eating disorders and to help others who might be struggling as well. Much of it is written in terms of how I would speak and not really grammatically correct, so just bear with me a little bit....... Everyone pretty much understands that track is a just as much, maybe even more of a mentally demanding sport as it is physical. You can train all you want, be in the best shape of your life, but if your mind isn’t at the same level, you won’t get very far. Many people don’t like to focus on this aspect, they think of it as secondary or not an important component to training whatsoever, but facing it is the real challenge and once you do your limitations become endless. Your mental wellness as an athlete should be taken equally as seriously as any other part of your training. Now this can refer to a very broad range of areas. It can refer to your attitude at practice (how you feel/view your training, how you show up to practice each day), it can refer to your confidence in your skillset (how much self-esteem do you hold) etc, and how you view yourself and your abilities, both as a runner and an individual. So this is where I’m going to jump into my story a little bit. I was always a very goal driven person. I knew what I wanted and I went after it. My parents and coaches would too often have to tell me that I set impossible standards for myself but up until my senior year of high school it had never caused a problem for me, because I had pretty much attained whatever I set myself after. Running D1 had been a dream of mine for some time. To me, it meant that I succeeded, not only as a runner but basically just at life. So as soon as I started showing potential as a freshman in high school, I had it set in my head that this was exactly what I was going to do and I was not going to take no for an answer. Fast forward to the summer going into senior year of high school, I hadn’t really met what I thought was my potential yet. It felt like every season something had gone wrong, which caused me to miss my target goals and times that I believed I should be hitting. However, now I was almost out of time, college coaches were making their decisions, and I had to catch their attention. I basically only had one maybe two at the most seasons to prove that I could still make it to D1 and meet my standards of successful. That summer I went hard. I worked my butt off. I knew I had to get in perfect shape for that. I had the perfect image of the D1 runner in my head and told myself I needed to look exactly like that in order to achieve what I wanted. I compared myself to others around me, picking out every single aspect or flaw of myself that was holding me back from reaching this goal. I wasn’t going to let anything stop me. Even though I had many other distractions and stresses of senior year classes, home life, relationships, I set everything aside and poured all my energy and focus into my running because at that point, that was what mattered most to me. And you know what, it worked, (at least for a little while. ) I had the most successful cross country season in school history. I broke every single record that I ran, I basically PRd every race, and on one of the happiest days of my life, I got offered a scholarship to run at a D1 in Florida, everything I could have every asked for. I got to live the remainder of my senior year with the sense that I had made it, I had done everything right, my life was complete. Unfortunately, that success was very short lived. Although I had reached my goals, I hadn’t necessarily reached them the healthiest/safest/proper way. All the unrealistic and unattainable standards that I had set for myself eventually came crashing down on me. Without understanding why, my performance levels in practice were not where they used to be. Workouts that used to be easy for me, I’d end up having to sit out on because I couldn’t complete them. My body was sore and ached all the time. I was angry and irritable all the time and would lash out, exhaustion became my best friend, walking to classes proved to be much more of an effort than it should have. I used every excuse in the book to try to explain to myself why this was happening to me, except for confronting the obvious one that was staring me in the face. However, I could no longer hide behind my excuses…. In March of 2016, I was diagnosed with an eating disorder. Now although this might sound a little stupid, I did not see this coming at all. I was diagnosed with the eating disorder bulimia non-purging type. Now what exactly that means is I would severely restrict my caloric intake, often to only 700 calories per day, while running 7+ miles per day, but then I would get so hungry that my body went into starvation mode because it didn’t know when I would be getting food again. I would binge and eat uncontrollably until it hurt and even then I couldn’t get myself to stop eating. The best way I can describe this is, I’d go into this trance, where my mind would shut down and my body took over, basically trying to survive. I know it’s hard to understand if you’ve never experienced it and seems kind of trivial or silly but it was something I just couldn’t control and I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t control it, which caused me to hate myself even more. But in the end it was just my instincts were kicking in, in order to keep me alive. And you may be wondering, Caitlin how could you have not realized that this was messed up, clearly something is wrong there. You were only eating 700 calories obviously that’s a red flag. And I could go on and on about how messed up and fogged my mind had become from lack of nutrition, but I also had never heard of this disorder. Much like everyone else I thought that there was just the two basic eating disorders that everyone knows, anorexia where you starve yourself and don’t eat, and bulimia where you throw up or purge. Now since I defiantly was eating at times, and wasn’t throwing up, I told myself that I didn’t fit into either one of these categories so what I was doing must not be that bad. And up until very late in the game, I didn’t even believe in eating disorders, because I was just plain naiive and uneducated. I considered people who had them as weak. Now the most important thing I want you all to understand is, my eating disorder was not all about the food. Yes, it started out that way, and on the outside looking in, that’s what it seems but the real root of the problem manifested itself far deeper. My cycles of restricting and binging, and over exercising would be majorly fueled by poor self-esteem, poor body image, and extremely low self-worth. I would tell myself that “I was too fat to be a runner”, “that my running failures would be caused by any perceived weight-gain”, that “I was trash, worthless, and disgusting, for eating what I did and some of the things I was engaging in during this period. The pain that I was feeling from starving, I convinced myself that I deserved because I was too fat or not worthy to be a runner. I would tell myself that this pain I was feeling now was because I deserved it. My college coach at my last school, would often make comments regarding our caloric intake per day, he would not allow us to consume too many carbs, like having the bread at the dinner table. He would walk over our plates at meals to make sure what we were eating met his criteria of “healthy”. He made comments to myself and others about our weights and was a strong believer and promoter of the frail and skinny distance runner. Now since I was already previously struggling with my mental health and body image it only added on the extreme pressure and impossible standards that I was holding for myself. On top of all this, I was living in a broken home, inside a mentally abusive relationship, and fighting depression. All of these were the most influencing factors fueling my bulimic cycle. However, up until this point I had been putting all these emotions on the back burner. I was able to avoid these emotions during my senior year and hide behind the success of my running. I chose not to face any of these problems, convincing myself that I had it all together because I was running so well. However, once I got to college and my body could no longer take on the stress that I was putting on myself it began to deteriorate and with that my success in running began to deteriorate as well. Now I could no longer hide behind my running and was forced to face all these issues at once that I had been avoiding for so long. And I couldn’t handle it. They completely broke me. I was feeling so overwhelmed by all the pressures I was putting on myself, and all the brokenness, loneliness around me that I couldn’t properly handle or face the emotions that were in front of me. I used my eating disorder as a coping mechanism to hide behind fact that my life was falling apart. I used my bulimic cycle to fill in the emptiness that I was feeling inside. What might have started out as an obsession with weight and food turned into something much more powerful, that not even I could understand yet. In march of 2016, during one of my worst breakdowns, I called my mom, finally told her the truth, and decided to pack all my bags, leave school a month before finals, and seek the treatment I needed while also not telling a single soul because I was too embarrassed. I finally came to terms with what I was doing wasn’t healthy and I didn’t want to live this way anymore. I admitted myself into a rehab facility and then went under heavy treatment for the next 3 months. When I was released, I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I loved running but it was also one of the factors that was heavily contributing to my illness. I was scared if I started running again what would happen. I didn’t want to fall back into old habits and undergo everything all over again. Running had always been what I centered my life around, and how I described myself as a person. Now that I was considering moving away from it, who was I without it? I found myself really lost and without an identity. I didn’t know who I was without it because I had never separated myself from it. I chose to put running before my mental health and ignore problems that needed to be faced and because of that, I suffered even more. I spent the next few weeks throwing one giant pity party for myself before finally waking up and realizing that this wasn’t getting me anywhere. I decided that I didn’t want running to be fueled by my eating disorder anymore but for others. I started using my motivation for others that could no longer run, either due to permanent injury or their passing. Whatever the reason, I would blog about it and use it as my reason to get out the door each day, not to lose weight or burn calories. I feel that it is very important to understand this. Running should not be the be all and end all of your being. It’s perfectly okay to love the sport and everything that it adds to your life, but at the end of the day you should be able to separate yourself from your running identity and recognize who you are without it. At the end of this I don’t want any of you to look at me or treat me any differently or feel that I came up here to ask for your pity or gain attention. I came up here to share my story because I know for a fact that there are others who are struggling too and some of them are right under your nose. You really have no idea what people are going through behind closed doors. So if you all can take something away from today is just take care of each other.
|
Details
Categories
All
Archives
April 2021
Categories
All
|