Transforming The Bad and The Ugly: Transforming Regret

The Bad and The Ugly

Most people spend their twenties exploring, pushing their boundaries, gaining life experience and qualifications, establishing themselves in careers and relationships, and perhaps starting families. I spent most of my twenties under 100lbs, including some significant time under 80. And while I did my share of exploring and experiencing, and am blessed to have made and kept some friends from those days, mostly I didn't bring things to completion, missed connections and opportunities, sold myself short and generally failed to establish myself in any way--except that I didn't die, which is surprising in itself. I spent long moments and years isolated and unable to function normally: it's still astonishing to me that I didn't get in a car wreck, and the bike that I persisted in riding barely stayed vertical from my pedaling.

my 'ugliest' recent photo

What I did achieve was my own (and any anorexic's) worst nightmare: a messed-up thyroid and adrenals and a stultifyingly slow metabolism so that now, at 33, I stay far less lean than I'd like to be on very little food: probably less than I was eating for some of my twenties. My functionality is jury-rigged with a dozen supplements and hormone helpers. 

Have you ever gotten on a rollercoaster and then, after it shot out the gate, realized that you really didn't want to be on it? Each sickening turn or dizzying plunge confirms your sense of dislocation and desire to be anywhere else. But you can't get off, and you can't turn back. That's what it feels like to be in my body. I can't turn back: if I eat any less than I regularly eat, or even if I try to skip a meal or snack, my blood sugar plummets and I can't control my mood or anything else. I can't overexercise either, or even exercise very much. And meanwhile, between huge fluctuations in fluid retained and other inscrutable things, I often seem to be getting fatter (not getting on the scale is an absolute rule, to preserve some vestige of sanity)... 



...despite meager diet and as much exercise as I can manage. Having been so very thin for so long, any fat on me at all feels and looks unbearable, and the self-directed rage that overtakes me at times is more painful than the all the physical issues. It's often followed by an inevitable upset stomach and restricting, and more of the rollercoaster: as my naturopath keeps impressing upon me, 'restricting food intake leads to more efficient fat storage.'



Then there's the intense obsession with what constitutes a healthy diet, and the faulty b.s.-meter that has allowed me to try pretty much every kind of restrictive diet out there and demonize everything, at one time or another, from fats-across-the-board to vegetables. Worst of all, from my present perspective, was allowing myself to be influenced, at a time of despair a few years ago, to try a diet program that involved deliberate and fairly hefty weight gain. Part of me insists on believing that had I not done that (and then relapsed into starvation and diet pill abuse afterwards), there wouldn't be as many fat cells lurking in my body to capitalize on the thyroid problems.

Regrets? This is my dirty secret. I don't talk to anyone about it here except for my long-suffering husband and my treatment team. It's not exaggerating to say that I was considered star potential (academically and musically) at the outset of my twenties, and to have perpetrated a major waste of the universe's resources. 

Yes, I'm ashamed. I blush at the idea that any of my friends, especially new friends, may read this, the 'bad and the ugly' of myself. But when I look at my life today, I refuse to regret my life (except for the 'condition of my physical body' part of it). I can't say that I'd have been happier as an academic or musician than I am now. I'm just getting into stride as a poet and writer, which is what I always wanted to be but somehow assumed that I had to fly high another way first. I'm meeting wonderful friends and deepening those connections, and my marriage to Phil is a blessing for which I'm daily grateful. Despite mistakes, squandering and messing up, I am grateful for where I am.



My Writing
What about my writing, then? Is it all a lie? What about all that brave joy sharing culinary artistry? What about the personal development away from control learned through driving on ice? What about taking naughty apron photos with Phil? Or the daily postings last September as part of Tina's 30 Days of Self Love? 

Actually, this is where my writing can save my life. This is where my writing, which I feel to be the best part of myself, is helping me to become a better person. I learn to conceptualize about letting go of control and to see this letting-go as a thing of beauty and an insight to be shared, so I share that. Culinary artistry and anorexia are pretty common bedfellows, but especially with the recent encouragement to create things that I enjoy too, I'm hoping that my enthusiasm for one side of the coin may spread to the other.

Also, as I mentioned in my guest post on Bitt of Raw, self-education in all sides of the nutritional story (rather than getting hung up behind the blinders of a single dogma) is something that I believe will be conducive to this kind of personal growth. That's why I keep exposing myself to writing like that of Matt Stone, who insists cogently that self-deprivation and excessive exercise ultimately lead to slowed metabolism and weight gain and that doing the reverse is what's needed for long-term leanness. I keep reading, even though he classes vegetarianism alongside all other 'restrictions' and I have absolutely no intention to start eating meat or dairy. Or gluten, obviously. Nonetheless, this is such an important message for anyone who's been caught up in a restriction mentality, maybe can't understand why it's harder to be lean nowadays, and ends up caught in an endless maze of leaps from one holy-grail diet to the next.

That's the other important part of writing saving my life: if I can share the benefit of my experience with others, and help even just one other person not to have to go through the hell of it, my gratitude will be compounded. So, I've been promising some posts on nutritional stuff for some time now, and I intend that those will be part of a process of sharpening my faulty b.s.-meter, sharing my unfortunately wide-ranging experiences on the front line of diet experimentation and metabolic damage, and an invitation to others to share their wisdom also.

Some people advise that it's better simply never to give 'the bad and the ugly' any attention at all. But sometimes, letting it out rather than holding it in can be tremendously liberating, and offers the opportunity for a locus of shame and regret to be transformed into something that helps others and is empowering and spiritual-growth-promoting.

from 'bad and ugly' to 'building an igloo?'

Do you think I can do it? Can the bad and the ugly be transformed into something integrated and broadly beneficial through creativity?