If we are going to go through the character arc of my not being good enough and the affect that it had on my life thus far , we have to further elaborate on what led me into my post-high-school downward spiral and my current health issues.
In high school, I tried extremely hard. After my middle school experience at being an overweight/ flunking embarrassment, I was shown how people only gave me praise and attention if I wore a size zero and excelled in my studies. So I withered away and took notes/ highlighted my books until my fingers bled. I tried to keep a social life, but eventually the obsession with my food and appearance gave way.
I even drove myself to school (once I got my license) hours earlier so that I could sit in the computer lab and search for homes where an adolescent can live on her own (I always thought that living on my own was the answer to my prayers!)
And then of course there was a boy. He was a firefighter, did not go to my school and actually showed interest in me. I was not used to this. I was deprived of romance and even though I had no interest in him, I craved his touch, his kisses and his text messages as if I had been trekking through the desert for years and he was a fresh spring of water.
But I never slept with him. I must have had some kind of moral code, because this would continue in university. We would do everything but as soon as it came to the actual act, I became dismissive. That did not please the twenty-year-old-playboy -firefighter, and suddenly his attention turned elsewhere. He went back to his ex-girlfriend— an easy get— fake tanned, a bit chubby and dumb as rocks.
My ego was absolutely shattered. My heart cracked open—like someone took a hammer to a glass jar and just let it shatter. Even though I had spent years not eating or enjoying life in order to be at the top of my class and in order to look like I was perfect—even though I made myself better than anyone else—I was once again still not good enough. My carefully curated Kate Moss-esque figure and resume quickly became crumpled trash in the midst of a “normie” high school girl. So I officially gave up.
I literally just stopped caring. I threw my hands up and started eating everything that I was missing out on for years. I stopped studying too. I took my tests after spending the night binging a television series (and binging copious amounts of snacks!). I would skip my classes the day that a major paper was due so that I could get it done the second before it was due.
I gained more than twice the amount of weight that I weighed in high school. My parents were shocked when they saw me, they had me workout with a personal trainer, as if that was the issue—I simply had to move more not eat less. However , the judgements only made me eat more. Still not good enough.
I reached out to some of the family friends I had grown up with so that I could have some semblance of a social life. And they helped. Invited me out. Made me laugh. But now everything felt fake.
I was avoiding everyone from high school who knew me as the “anorexic girl “— the one who would only wear high heels and dresses or skirts instead of the jeans and sneakers of everyone around me— because I used to be better than everyone around me (or at least I believed I was).
Now I was ashamed. Now high heels would pinch my chunky toes and instead of flaunting my slender legs in skirts, I hid my giant slabs of meat in sweatpants and size thirty-two jeans. I avoided posting pictures of myself. I used to be so beautiful. I used to take immense pleasure in hearing my father tell his friends, “isn’t my daughter so hot?” He stopped saying that…
Essentially the high school “breakup” did not just end a relationship—it ended me. Once we had met, once I had tasted the attention I had been yearning for; I had built my whole senior year around him: I had started eating again (but not too much and of course I would never let myself go to sleep without working off every calorie I had eaten that day), late-night texts so that he could get more attention than my studies did, and fantasies about life together.
College was supposed to be freedom. Instead it felt like punishment. Instead of being lithe and studious, I was just studying myself—how to numb out, how to fake smiles, how to avoid anyone who might matter. I “slutted” around, but obviously nothing stuck. Every kiss tasted like betrayal. Every “I like you” sounded like a lie, because why would anyone like an over-two-hundred-pound girl? I drank too much and I slept too much (making up for sleeping only a few hours every night in high school).
The worst part? I blamed him. For years. Like if he had never cheated, I would have gone to Yale, had a perfect GPA and had a perfect boyfriend. But It took recovering from my upcoming disability for me to realize: heartbreak does not ruin college. It does not ruin life. You do. You ruin it when you stop showing up. When you decide you are too broken to try. When you treat every new person like a ticking bomb.
Do not let one bad love story become the whole plot. Because the truth is, the boy who broke me? He is probably still in his mom’s basement, playing Fortnite. And I am here—yes, I do not like my current situation but I am surviving—writing this, breathing, alive and planning for a future. That is the real win.
Essentially this entire experience taught me that everything happens for a reason— as corny as it may sound. Because honestly? The real damage was not the “breakup”—it was how I let it define me. I let one boy’s cowardice rewrite my future. I let shame decide my friends and my life.
It is not something that I should look back on and regret, because what is really the point of that?! If I was never made to feel like I was not good enough and thus never imploded, I would not have gone through the whole process of finding my voice and who I am, that means that I would not have started with the Twitter account full of snarky comments and controversial statements (seriously— people would constantly accuse me of either being a federal agent or a man pretending to run a girl’s account) and that would not have led me to meet the someone three thousand miles away— the man of my dreams. Maybe he is that perfect boyfriend I had envisioned finding in college.
Kat’s Musings 