This weekend, I had a few moments to go into the garage and start emptying out the boxes that my Dad and grandmother sent to me from Florida.
Unpacking boxes is always a fraught proposition, because, if they’ve been sealed up long enough, you may be surprised by the memories hidden away inside.
Of course, the first few boxes that I opened were filled with those selfsame dusty memories: photo albums and year books from high school.
I spent a little bit of time going through each one, laughing at my horrible hairdos and how young everyone looked. But the nostalgia quickly became bittersweet as I started tagging people on Facebook and following up on my friends’ journeys over the last 9 years.
One thing that stuck out to me particularly was how, during senior year, I was voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” Succeed at what, exactly?
In many cases, I can say that I am a success—I successfully recovered from my eating disorder. I successfully got a job in marketing/copywriting at which I happen to excel. I successfully provide hope and help for hundreds, if not thousands, of people weekly all over the world with this blog and my podcast.
But what is “success,” really? I look at friends who finished their degrees and balanced their education with building the rest of their lives. Friends who have entered family businesses or started their own and still managed to keep in touch with the people who mattered—and even found time to add new people into their lives. Friends who married their high school or college sweethearts. Friends who are engaged. Friends who are starting families. Friends who are still close friends with the people they knew in high school—people who became their best man or their maid of honor, the godmother or father for their child. Friends who have withstood the test of time, distance, and life changes.
I know I missed out on a lot of that second kind of “success” because of my eating disorder and it related behaviors. Even in high school, I was so obsessed with being perfect that I chose to spend my weekends doing homework and my afternoons and evenings doubling up on cross country runs. I threw away a ton of opportunities to deepen my friendships over a meal of unsafe food. And when college came around, I was already on my way toward severing ties and becoming more and more ensconced in the strange, dark, lonely, narcissistic world that is EDNOS.
Eating disorders steal so much of your life away. They make you quit theatre when all you want to do is become an actress or a playwright. They make you cancel plans with a really sweet guy because you have to stay home and weigh and measure your meal at the right time. They make you climb into bed before 8 because you have to be up at 4:30 to workout and because there’s no point being awake after you’ve had your last “meal” anyway. They make you obsess about what your girlfriends might think of you, instead of thinking about all of the great things you could be doing with your girlfriends.
I know that you’re never too old to be “successful” and that relationships can be built and fostered at any time. But it still makes me sad to see the friendships that I let slip by and the relationships that could have been.
I just want to encourage you, no matter how old you are, no matter how many “successes” you’ve passed by because of your food or body issues, to find an opportunity to build, foster, or revive a relationship. Do it today. Sacrifice a workout or change your food schedule for one day. See how it feels to go to bed later or turn in a project without obsessing over every detail. Take a chance, fall in love, focus on someone else’s mind instead of your own body. Do it once, just to prove to yourself that you can.
Be the “Most Likely to Succeed” by making yourself a success. Don’t wait until you have “the perfect body” or you’ve figured out your “perfect career.” There’s so much more to success in this life than the things you think you can control.
That said, I’m going to go out and try to make my yearbook prediction come true. There’s no time like the present.
Stay hungry,
The post Most Likely to Succeed appeared first on In My Skinny Genes.
