Anna Rae Gwarjanski Portfolio |
“Over these years, my body has not gotten firmer. Just the opposite in fact. But when I feel fattest and flabbiest and most repulsive, I try to remember that gravity speaks; also, that no one needs that plastic body perfection from women of age and substance. Also, that I do not live in my thighs or in my droopy butt. I live in joy and motion and cover-ups. I live in the nourishment of food and the sun and the warmth of the people who love me. I tell you, it feels like a small miracle, to have learned to eat, to taste and love what slips down my throat, padding me, filling me up, and it is the most radical thing I’ve ever done.” -Anne Lamott As I write this, I’m making dinner. On tonight’s menu is eggplant lasagna with Italian sausage tomato sauce and sharp cheddar cheese. I’ll probably have a glass of red wine with it and maybe some chocolate truffles afterward. The best part-- I won’t feel guilty about any of it. Once upon a time, this wasn’t the case. Today is the last day of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week. In October, I blogged about my struggles with mental illness, and I briefly went over my experiences with depression and bulimia. To say I was apprehensive to write that post is an understatement, but I am so glad I did. I got an incredible reaction from my readers; so many people reached out to tell me they supported me or they were dealing with the same thing and felt relief knowing they were not alone. I’m going to use this post to go a little more in depth into my eating disorder recovery. When I planned this originally a couple weeks ago, I wanted to write about where I’ve come from and how healthy and fit I am now. Unfortunately, I can’t do that. As most of you know, I blew my knee out last month, and I haven’t exercised since then. To top it off, I’ve been depressed and honestly haven’t been taking very good care of myself. My finished thesis is due next week, so my diet has consisted of a lot of late night McDonald’s, coffee, and popcorn, and I’ve been getting an average of three hours of sleep per night. I’m nowhere near the healthiest I’ve ever been. But you know what? That’s ok. I'm also nowhere near the unhealthiest I've ever been. While I’m not exactly about to sign up as a lingerie model, I no longer believe that my self-worth is determined by a number on the scale. Sports are a beautiful thing, but the blessings they bring come with sacrifices and trials. Like it or not, the burden of keeping a low body composition is part of elite swimming. Some people can handle that pressure healthfully; the sad truth is that I couldn't. I got the first of my many “fat talks” in high school (2007, I believe), and I was, in a way, honored to be noticed. It meant my coach thought that I had potential and cared enough to try to motivate me. I still remember that first one like it was last month: “Here’s the deal, Anna Rae. You’re fast. You’re strong. You’re one of the hardest workers on this team. But you’re big. Big doesn’t travel through the water well. If you toss a bowling ball and a broomstick under the water, which one’s going to go farther? The broomstick. You’ve got to look like the broomstick if you want to be successful in this sport.” And that's about how most of my fat talks went. Nice, but frank and firm (except that time I lost 25 pounds after a septoplasty, and one of my coaches told me I looked good and asked what I'd been doing. I told him I really hadn't eaten anything in two weeks, and he told me to "keep it up"). More than anything in the world, I wanted to be good at my sport and make my coaches, teammates, and parents proud of me. I’ve never been adept at verbally expressing myself, and I wanted my achievements in the pool to reflect the gratitude I felt towards them for accepting me and believing in me. However, because I tend to think ridiculously diametrically, I took it too far. My brain equated being skinny to performing well, then equated performing well to being loved, then equated being loved to having permission to love myself. I’m not very good at math, but I think that equation simplified to “only when you’re skinny are you allowed to be happy with who you are.” So, when I was 17, I made myself throw up for the first time. I realize my faulty logic now, but then it seemed like a sensible step. Unfortunately, in my mind, I never got small enough. Even though sometimes I wouldn’t eat for days on end, even though sometimes I made myself throw up six times a day, even though sometimes I abused laxatives (not a pretty thought, but eating disorders aren’t pretty*), I never looked like I had an eating disorder. I looked athletic. To be honest, in hindsight, I looked pretty good (even though at the time I thought I was morbidly obese… silly me). But that’s one of the reasons it took me so long to get help-- I didn’t think people would believe that I had a problem. After my senior year of high school, I walked on to Alabama’s swim team. I had an academic scholarship, but I needed an athletic scholarship too, so I put a lot of pressure on myself to have a good season. Once again, in my mind, I couldn’t be fast unless I was thin, so I pushed myself to the brink. I was eating around 1500-2000 calories a day, which isn’t terribly low, but I was working out like a crazy person. The required sessions: lift weights 6-7 a.m., swim 7-8:30 a.m., swim 3:30-6 p.m., and then most days I would either run or attend a spin class on my own, sometimes both. Along with that, I started making myself throw up again that November (I had stopped when I came home for the summer between high school and college). To this day I have no idea how I managed it. I ended up fracturing both feet because of my exercise routine. I had an awesome season and swam really well at SEC’s, but my doctor almost had to put me in a wheelchair that March to let my feet heel (I was able to talk him out of it, thank goodness, because I promised for a month the only exercise I would do was water-jogging). That year (2010), I realized I had a problem and started seeing a therapist, but things were not all roses and butterflies. Eating disorders aren’t pretty, and recovering isn’t always pretty either. I stopped purging in January, but to make up for it, sometimes I restricted my calories to a daily intake that was barely survivable (I’m talking 300-600 calories total). That went on for about two years, on and off. In July 2012, I started purging again, and I told one of my roommates. She made me go to the doctor. The next day, my doctor said he wanted to hospitalize me. He had known about my eating disorder freshman year, but he had mistakenly thought I was healthy since. He ran some tests and said if I continued my path of self-destruction, my heart and kidneys were going to fail in the next few years. He told me my bones were already brittle like I was 60, and I was at risk for osteoporosis. Hospitalization panicked me. It meant I would have to tell my parents and coaches and give up this persona that I had crafted-- the successful, hard-working, athletic honors student. My doctor and I made a deal: I would take Prozac, the only antidepressant approved to treat bulimia, for the remainder of July. If that helped, I could avoid hospital treatment. It helped, but I can’t express enough how difficult it was. I read a post today by Siena Roberts. In it, she writes: “Recovery is a hard battle that you fight every day. It’s exhausting. In recovery, every damn day you must wake up and make a decision to rebel against the voice inside your head telling you to skip meals, purge, binge, etc. It is not glamorous, much like the eating disorder itself isn’t glamorous. But no one talks about that part of having an eating disorder. The part when you’re no longer dying but not quite living yet either.” I thank God everyday for my therapist, who so generously kept seeing me free of charge after she stopped working for the athletic department-- I genuinely believe she saved my life. I cried a lot. I leaned on my best friends. My roommates looked after me and reminded that the Lord said that I am wondrously and marvelously made, and that He makes all things new. And I won. And it made every single time I shook and hyperventilated and hugged my knees to my chest in the bathroom and repeated “My body is a Temple” and willed myself not to purge worth it. I am happy with the place I am in now, but in no way was this damage to my body worth it (I've changed my stance after my most recent injury). Although I’m not strict with what I eat or how I exercise anymore, I still feel the effects of the years I abused my body. I’m anemic. I have drastic temperature swings. I get hurt really easily (i.e., see past fractures, back injuries, hip surgery, and current knee issues). It took me more than a year out of recovery before my period became normal again. Fortunately, I don’t really have a desire to have kids, because I have a reduced chance of pregnancy. There’s a lot of forgiveness that happens in recovery. You learn to forgive the friends who weren’t sympathetic and called you vain and dramatic-- it scared them seeing a person with so much self-hatred and in so much pain. You learn to forgive the coaches who you used to think were calloused and a catalyst to your illness-- they really and truly just wanted you to swim your best; their job and your scholarship depended on it. Most importantly, you learn to forgive yourself. You learn that you didn’t “choose” this and that you aren’t stupid. You learn that mistakes are ok and being selfish is ok and radically loving yourself is more than ok, it’s necessary for survival in a world that’s constantly telling people that they’re not enough. You learn that you’re more than enough, just the way you are, without any need for improvement. I do still think that we must be constantly striving to better ourselves, but it has to come from a place of love and not from a place of hatred. In other words, I used to chase success because I was terrified of failure and disappointing people. Now, I’m graduating with my master’s degree in May and I eventually want my PhD because education makes me happy and because I love to learn and because it will help me make the sort of difference I’m trying to make on this earth, not because I’m trying to impress anyone. I’m going to end this post the same way I ended my post on mental illness and medication: asking you to be kind to others and to be kind to yourself. As Roberts said in the article quoted above, “Eating disorders are not, and have never been, a choice. But recovery is a choice. A hard, but worth it, choice. Choose recovery.” It’s one of the biggest challenges you’ll ever face, but I promise you, it’ll be the one you’re most proud of. I hate to say it, but you’re going to gain weight at first. You’ve been starving your body so long that it’s going to hold onto every calorie it gets. But, I can also say that eventually the pendulum will settle. You’ll discover that you need to eat when you’re hungry, and that the meal is not over when you hate yourself, it’s over when you’re no longer hungry. It sounds so simple, but learning that was revolutionary for me. Listen to your body; it will tell you what it needs. Not that this was the point, but once I started eating enough, I actually lost weight and gained more muscle. I am overjoyed to report that not only am I now at a normal weight for my height and build, I am proud of the way I look (most days-- I'm only human). If you think you or someone you know has an eating disorder, this is a great site to visit. Be brave. Take that first step. *Side rant: please don’t ever glamorize eating disorders. There’s a romanticized image that people sometimes have of people with bulimia and anorexia--that they’re waif-like and delicate with an ethereal beauty--that is absolutely false. There’s nothing glamorous about wiping your mouth and bleaching the collars of your shirts because your vomit splashed back onto you or having to run to the bathroom an embarrassing amount of times during class because all the diet pills you took tore up your stomach or having a bald spot because your hair is falling out. You’re sick. Sick is not beautiful. Healthy and strong is beautiful.
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Well, it happened. To everyone who told me that my body is too frail and prone to injury to be playing rugby, now is your moment to hit me with all of your “I told you so’s.” I found out two weeks ago that I blew out my knee-- torn ACL, torn MCL, torn meniscus. I officially hurt myself too badly for my body to repair naturally. I cried for about three days straight. “But Anna Rae, it’s just a club sport! You’ve only been playing for five months. Why are you so devastated?” I know a lot of people think that with my injury history, deciding to play one of the most physical sports was not my smartest move. But rugby is special, and these five months I’ve been playing have been some of my happiest. There had been a void in my life since I retired from athletics and became a “swammer.” I didn’t know it then, but when my now big sister on the rugby team saw me lifting in the aquatic center weight room and asked me to come out and try this sport, she lit in me a new passion that has helped me through my tough, final year of grad school, gave me friends who let me vent my feelings as I was recovering from the heartbreaking end of my first serious relationship, and provided me with a reason to work out and be fit again. Rugby granted me newfound motivation, a strong support system, and a sense of true belonging. Don’t get me wrong, swimming at an elite level was a huge blessing, and I would not change any of it, and everyday I am thankful for the opportunities it afforded me. But, even though I was a good swimmer, I never felt like it was what my body was naturally meant to do. The typical swimming body is long and lean. I was always the “fat” swimmer, even though my average body composition when I swam was 16-18 percent body fat (a healthy average for women is normally 18-24 percent). I have huge muscles, and I needed the biggest suit sizes to stuff my quads and ass in. What can I say, my father was a college linebacker. Genetics made me a sturdy girl. My first rugby practice was August 24, 2015. Right away, I felt it-- that elusive sense of belonging I’ve been chasing my whole life. The girls were so welcoming, and although I didn’t understand anything about the game, they patiently explained the drills and told me they were so excited for me to be there. The first game I played in was on October 3, 2015. In rugby, my racehorse-resembling-hindquarters were an advantage. My bulk made me hard to tackle, but my booty gave me the awesome power to sprint and chase people down. My broad shoulders, made even stronger in the pool, allowed me to drive and stabilize scrums and latch on and win rucks. Even though half the time during that first game, my teammates were directing me and dragging me into the correct position, they voted me “Bitch of the Pitch” (the women’s rugby version of the game’s MVP). During that tournament, I fell in love with rugby’s culture of physicality, of camaraderie, and the pure joie de vivre that surrounds the players before, during, and after the game. I was so relieved that, after 23 years, I had finally found something that my body felt created for. I fit in. It was an incredible feeling. Backing up a little: When I first joined UA’s swim team, I was a walk-on. I made a lot of goals my freshman year, both short-term and long-term. Short-term: I wanted to make the SEC team and earn an athletic scholarship by my sophomore year. Long-term: By my senior year, I wanted to have made it to NCAA’s and place in the top 16, earning All-American honors. By the end of my freshman year, I seemed to be on track. I had made huge cuts in every event I swam-- in the 200 fly, one of my best events that year, I had dropped over 10 seconds from my best time coming into college; 200 IM, I had dropped almost 5 seconds and gotten an NCAA B cut; and in my other events (100 fly, 100 free, 100 back, 100 breast, 50 free) I had dropped over a second in each. I made finals at SEC's. I earned my scholarship. I qualified for summer nationals. However, while training for summer nationals, I pulled my quadratus lumborum, one of the main muscles in the back, and like dominoes, so began the list of injuries that would plague me for the rest of my college career. I still swam at nationals, but it was terrible. And, because I didn’t give myself time off to heal, I ended up pulling all the muscles on the right side of my back, which led to a muscle imbalance, which led to scoliosis, which led to a dislocated sacrum. My goals had to be put on hold. It took me two years to rebuild my back, but I was finally healthy coming into my senior year. I was eating right, in shape, training fast, and I had started to dream again about going to NCAA’s. So, when I found out I had torn my hip labrum in October 2013, I lost my mind a little bit. I was depressed and constantly hurting, but I still wanted to finish my senior year swimming. My doctors told me I couldn’t mess my hip up anymore than I already had, so they gave me the green light to keep competing if I thought I could handle the pain. I knew I could, and I did, but I didn’t realize how pain can mess with your head and decision-making skills. They gave me cortisone shots, and I was constantly on muscle relaxers and heavy pain killers. I don’t regret continuing to swim, but it was a rough year. And, needless to say, I didn’t meet any of the goals I had set four years earlier. I didn’t even get close. I had hip surgery in April 2014 to repair my torn labrum and a couple of other torn ligaments. After that, I pretty much gave up completely on making goals.
Now, fast forward to two years later. Like I said, I discovered I was a talented rugger. Thanks to the tutelage of my coaches and teammates, I improved pretty quickly over the course of one semester. I feel dumb for admitting this, but ever since I can remember, I always wanted to compete in the Olympics, and rugby is making its Olympic debut this summer. I obviously didn’t expect to qualify this year, but I figured if I caught on and improved so much in a semester, in four years of hard training, who knew where I could be. I secretly started dreaming about playing for a really good women’s club team, then maybe getting recruited for the national team, then in 2020… who knows. I wanted it so badly, but because of my goal-making history, I was scared to let myself be so boldly ambitious. Like I said, now I feel stupid for even writing that. I don’t know if I’ll keep playing after I come back from my surgery. My dad says I’m already probably going to have severe arthritis when I’m older, and based on my injury history, I’ll most likely get hurt again. But I still want to. It’s hard to give up something that has given me so much joy. Even if I don’t ever achieve the dreams that had started to unfold, I'll still always love rugby. The sport and the culture that surrounds it is addicting. I’m in a better place now than when I first found out I messed up my knee. Half the girls on UA’s rugby team have torn their ACL’s. I know it’s possible to come back. But I’m still a little discouraged and frustrated. I love sports. I love competing. I love being fit. Rugby gives me all the good feelings. I guess I don’t have to make this decision right now, but I don’t know if I can let go of that. I don’t know what’s best for me-- to keep playing and wear down my body, or to stop and wear down my mind. Anyway, that’s where I’m at. It’s my tendency to end my musings with something positive, but I’m not feeling all that positive right now. However, I know that whatever happens, it’s all in God’s plan. A lot of people have things worse than me. I’m giving swim lessons to a kid who has struggled with leukemia on and off for the last six years. All in all, I’m incredibly lucky, and I know complaining never makes anything better. But, I’m only human-- I sometimes wish The Big Man Upstairs would let me take a peek at the next chapter, just to let me have a little drop of hope or encouragement. I have my surgery consultation with Dr. Cain in Birmingham next week, so I’ll know more about my options then. Meh. We’ll see. |
About the AuthorConfessions of a failed southern lady. I've got messy hair and a thirsty heart. Writer, photographer, career wanderer. Archives
May 2023
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