WBB ESSAYS
Find Your Identity
and Find Your Passion!
- Amy
I enjoy writing. I really do. It’s something I’ve always done recreationally, but never seem to be able to ‘get it right’ enough to consider making it public. Too often, I don’t feel as if I have anything to say. And if I do, someone else has probably said it already, and they probably said it more eloquently.
I write as I write. I write like it’s a journal because that’s where the majority of my experience comes from: high school assignments and journaling my life. To call this piece of writing an ‘essay’ seems wrong. The word ‘essay’ to me implies structure and formality. ‘Essays’ have an introduction, several ‘body’ paragraphs, then a conclusion. This isn’t going to be like that. Why should you impose structure and order onto your thoughts. Thoughts flow in and out. Sometimes, they pour in at such a phenomenal rate you don’t know what to do with them. Other times, they seem to have completely dried up and you begin to wonder if you’ll ever feel inspiration again.
That is the central theme of this non-essay. How on earth are you to go about figuring out what you want to do with your life? What comes next? What are your passions? When you have whittled your life and your cares down to food and weight for so long, figuring this out feels as if it has become unimaginably difficult. Eating disorders often strike around the same time we are supposed to be figuring out things about our lives and our futures. I’m not saying this always happens, but statistically, the most common age for the onset of anorexia nervosa is 14 and the most common age for the onset of bulimia nervosa is 18. These are hugely significant times in our lives.
At 14, I was trying to figure out my place in the social world. In high school politics. In my new job (conveniently enough, at a bakery). But it wasn’t just ‘my place’ I wanted to discover – it was my role, my identity. I didn’t know who I was and I didn’t believe this could be something you ‘discovered over time’. No way. I believed it was something I had to decide, and that whatever decision I came to at the age of 14 would last forevermore.
So maybe I did see things in a rather dramatic way – can you blame me? At that age, everything felt extremely dramatic and catastrophic.
At 18, I was fresh out of high school and starting university. I was living away from home. I was in a different country, in fact! I finally had that independence I had so desperately craved for most of my life. I was also asked, over and over again, what I wanted to do with my life. I chose to study Law because… er… to this day I’m not entirely sure why. I enjoyed Legal Studies in high school. I practically grew up on picket lines and protest marches with my dad. Being asked to explain my choice stressed me out even further. So I didn’t know what the hell I wanted to be doing in ten years time – big deal. How can you expect people to have their lives carved out ahead of them at such a young age? On average, we are likely to have three complete career changes in our lives. I don’t mean we’ll change companies three times, I mean we’ll study Law, practice for several years, decide at 30 that actually we want to work with children, go into a job in childcare, this’ll lead into a job in education, then at 45 we’ll decide that actually what we really want to do is open a restaurant.
I think that eating disorders are often a way of running from the choices which seem so incomprehensibly significant. It’s no secret that eating disorders tend to strike intelligent individuals who are very driven. But instead of putting that drive towards something productive, we fear the wide open space ahead of us, and turn the drive inwards on something which is so much more simple: numbers of calories, numbers on the scale, numbers of minutes we exercised for today, numbers of stomach crunches we do each night. Life, simplified into digits and measurements.
This fear of what lies ahead holds us back. The future seems so vast and complicated. There are far too many uncertainties. It’s not easy for someone who likes to plan her days out into fifteen-minute blocks to let go of the reigns and declare her intention to go wherever life takes her. Even the mere suggestion may prompt a sense of uneasiness in some of you.
I can never jump inside anyone else’s head and understand their thought processes. I can only share my own experiences, in the hope that someone will identify with something I’ve said and increase their understand of their own situation.
I don’t quite know how I got over this particular hurdle. I don’t even know if I am really over it. My biggest fear, I think, was relinquishing (what I interpreted as) control over my life. I needed to have a plan. I needed to know what was around the corner, what was going to happen tomorrow, in a week, in a year, when I’m thirty, etcetera. I needed to know what I would eat tomorrow, on Tuesday, on Wednesday, at the barbeque on Saturday, how I could get through the whole thing only eating salad and not getting caught, where I would barf up the lollies I ate when I got stoned on Sunday, whether I would have uninterrupted enjoyment of the bathroom when the laxatives took their effect at 8am on Monday morning, and so on.
You have to recognise that THIS IS NOT ‘CONTROL’. You can’t possibly control everything. Maybe you can control your food and your weight, but everywhere else, time will still be moving and things will still be happening. And you’ll be missing out.
Did you know control is defined as “a means of limiting or regulating”? Limiting your life, regulating the potential for adventure and discovery.
I can’t quite define when I finally found a balance between ‘control’ and ‘off-the-rails, I-don’t-give-a-fuck’ self-destruction. I have careened between being cruelly strict on myself in the belief that doing so would somehow set me up with a bright, understandable, neatly-outlined future, and deciding that I don’t even deserve a happy, successful life, so therefore seeking out ways of damaging myself. I don’t think I ever decided that I would seek a balance. The ‘journey’ to this place I am in now is a little fuzzy in my mind.
Somewhere in the midst of all these desperate attempts to ‘put myself on the right track’ and ‘follow the path that would lead to a good FUTURE’, I discovered something even more rewarding: a good NOW. Life got in the way. I don’t quite think I will ever accept that ‘perfection doesn’t exist’. I am a perfectionist, pure and simple. But the mere fact of me writing this proves something. I have wanted to write about some of the lessons I have learnt throughout the recovery process, but I could never bring myself to do it. Every time I put pen to paper, it sounded so crude, so amateur, so imperfect. It still does, but if you are reading this, it means I bit the bullet and decided to send it in anyway. Yes, I’m rambling. Yes, my thoughts are all over the place and this doesn’t flow perfectly. Yes, I have even forgotten what point I was trying to make a few times while writing this. But why should it matter? Why should we hold back from expressing ourselves simply because we FEAR the tidal waves we (so overdramatically) believe our actions might cause?
How are we to figure out our future? Who knows. I blame the education system I grew up in. I blame the beliefs expressed day-by-day at my high school that ‘you must make the right decision now because you’ll never have another chance’. There’s ALWAYS another chance. It may not be the SAME chance, but I really believe these days that when one door closes, another one opens. You don’t decide what your passions are. You don’t sit down and study some list of life-plans then pick out one which appeals to you. You’ll find over time that you are drawn to certain things. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that all my favourite books are written by journalists, that I adored studying International Law, that I feel a twinge of jealousy when I see BCC Foreign Correspondents on the 6pm news. But I have not yet decided anything. I don’t see the need. If that’s where I’m headed, that’s where I’m headed. If something else comes up which fascinates me even more, then so be it.
We’re so young, yet so desperate to grow up. As children, we dress up in our mums’ high heels and sneakily put on their lipstick. In primary school, we want to be in high school. In high school, we are constantly told to prepare for varsity. In varsity, we are supposedly getting a degree so we can get a career. We, as a society, need to stop constantly looking for the future and actually allow ourselves to experience whatever we’re doing now.
I don’t have any magic spell which will miraculously make you relax the reigns you currently hold over your own life. I can’t even detail how exactly it happened in my own life. I wrote this not because I have all the answers, but because I have a bunch of thoughts running around in my head and I hoped that by sharing them, I could stimulate other people to develop new and different understandings for themselves.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this – it really means a great deal to me.
- Amy
