On the car ride home from our family ski vacation in Vermont I listened to almost the entire audiobook It Was Me All Along by Andie Mitchell, a memoir about a girl who grows up fat and gets skinny her senior year of college. She was 260 by the time she started losing weight, I'm lucky never to have gotten that big. (but she's really pretty, unlike me. Sometimes very fat girls with pretty faces are preferable to average fat girls with ugly faces. There are somethings hard work cannot fix.) Listening to it, I cried for all the sad parts of my life it reminded me of. And I also felt inspired to make a change in my life, too. Bulimia was awful, but I'm finally done with that now. I throw up occasionally, but EDs don't consume my thoughts the way they used to.
I bought myself a fitbit with my Christmas money. I love it, and it gives me a much better way of tracking my daily calorie burn. It gives stats for how much you're burning with active exercise and how many steps you take, plus how much you've burned just by being alive. It's actually really helpful for getting a realistic picture of how much I should be eating. (Not that I can stick to an intake plan, I feel I have very little rational control over what and how much I eat.) My goal is to take 10,000 steps each day. I've met this goal maybe 5 times in the 15 days I've had the thing. Though I must add that for a whole week I was skiing for a few hours each day which isn't tracked as steps but is actually a high calorie-burning sport. There's a lot of lunging and pushing your weight and lugging around heavy equipment.
My skiing has gotten technically much better. My turns are sharper, I hold my skis parallel most of the time, I ski more fearlessly down steep pitches. To my humiliation my aunt and cousins kept pointing out my improvement, which to me felt like they were emphasizing how embarrassingly terrible I had been at skiing only a few years ago and through my entire childhood. I've always been the slowest and most timid of our group, always requiring someone to stay back with me and make sure I actually came down the mountain instead of standing frozen in fear half way down the slope. This trip was refreshing, it felt good to keep up with my group, plus I had a new appreciation of how lucky I am to have the resources to participate in this sport.
There was one moment where I reverted to old ways and scared myself into some serious self-reflection. I followed my braver siblings and cousins down an experts-only black diamond trail that was mostly ice covered by mounds of powder. I made it down about half way before I lost footing and freaked out. Blind terror took over and I froze where I was, unable to keep linking turns and escape this section of the trail. I just kept looking down and slipping inch by inch, making my eyes swell with tears and my calves burn from holding my weight at that odd angle. Eventually I sat and removed my skis, sliding down while whimpering and repeating a mantra of "help me, help me, help me" inside my head. My dad waited only 50 yards down the hill and shouted to urge me down. I shook my head vigorously "no" and cried even harder. As soon as I somehow made it down the black diamond, I flew down the easiest trail I could get to and back to the connection trail to our condo. The entire time I was ski-skating my way across the flat trail that connects the chairlifts to the resort housing I fought violent sobs and too-loud-for-public wails that kept bursting out of me.
By the time I made it back to the beginner slopes I was calm again and the snow had stopped. All morning and while I was on the difficult trails it had been snowing and gusts of wind whipped up the mountain to blind the skiers. Now that I was away from the challenge the sky was clear and I wanted to stay outside. I rode the chair alone, looking behind me to see mountains far in the distance. Vermont is so beautiful, a true treasure to our country. I took pictures and began to contemplate the complete terror that had just gripped me. When I got stuck up there, I lost total control of myself, my thoughts and my actions. I didn't do anything rationally, I just freaked out and panicked. Is that a panic attack? I skied back to the difficult mountain, stopping on the empty connection trail to smoke my travel-size piece. High and in rapture with the gorgeous scenery, I had a wonderful lift ride up and a near perfect ski to the bottom. The sun was setting and the sky turned beautiful colors. At one point I was skiing through golden patches of trail created by the sun sinking perfectly into the notch where two mountains meet. That last run was heaven, true bliss.
An update on my life (besides last week's vacation):
-graduated from college! (Dec 15, 2014)
-went home to PA on Dec 19, been here ever since (except for week in VT)
-still not sure what I'll do with my degree/life
Hope to post again tomorrow, I'm trying to get back into more exercise and be more conscious of my nutrition. Maybe I'll get a hike in? One can only hope.
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