E-book teaser

Doing deep healing work has brought me to understand that the root of my issues, my anxiety and depression, is a childhood wound of not feeling important, not feeling enough.  This did not come from any sort of mistreatment or neglect; it came from birth order and circumstance. Growing up, both of my parents worked full time, my dad going to an office and my mom running a business from home.  When my next sister was born, I was four and a half. I loved playing with her and helping my mom feed her.  I can also remember around this time starting to feel like all that attention that for all of my life up until then was starting to decrease, understandably so.  My next sister was born when I was about six and a half and the attention I received from my parents decreased even more.  Of course, my parents were extremely busy with an infant and a two and half year old, managing the house and working full time. It is understandable that as the oldest, I would not receive the same attention I once did.  But as a six-year-old it was something I didn’t truly understand.  I knew babies needed more help but I also felt that I still needed attention and help. Maybe it came from a place of jealousy or just simply not understanding why things were changing. I started to feel like maybe I wasn’t special, maybe I was being replaced by my new sisters, maybe I just wasn’t enough to make my mom and dad happy.

Once there was four of us, I did what I could to help my parents as much as possible. I would watch my sisters after school if my mom had to run errands and I would help keep an eye on them at night when she would make dinner. I liked being the responsible older sister, I felt like It was my job to look out for them but deep down I was also craving the attention my sisters received. I have watched old home videos and in so many of them I can see how desperate for attention I was. I was always saying "mom, mom look at me." I just wanted to feel special. As an adult, I know 100% that my mom thought and still thinks I am very special. I know that she always loved me equally and will love me forever. I just felt invisible at times as a child, lost in the busy daily life that was going on around me.

There is a lot more between here in the story but this is just a teaser..

At the end of junior year of high school, I started going to the gym with one of my friends.  I had never given much thought to diet and exercise before that.  I was lucky enough to not have to worry about it until junior year when I noticed I was getting a little bit heavier than I had been.  Once I started going to the gym, weight began to fall off me since I was going from basically no physical exercise to hitting the elliptical a few times a week. I kept this up through the summer and I really did enjoy how I felt and looked, it was healthy at that point. Right before the start of senior year I was hit with a gnarly sinus infection that had me in bed and not really eating for about two weeks. From this, I lost probably about 5-8 pounds, nothing crazy but it was noticeable.  I started the school year a few days late and I can remember walking in and people going nuts about how skinny I looked.  I was getting that attention, that feeling of being special and important that I had always wanted.  I felt like I did something good and it was a feeling that I wanted to keep.  I realized that this new attention was from being skinny and that was from working out and from limiting food so I told myself I had to keep that going.

I started obsessing over how much I worked out and what I ate.  I decided that I would become vegetarian “just because I wanted to try” but more because I thought it would make me skinnier.  I obsessively measured the things that I ate and if I felt I ate too much I would add more time at the gym.  There were times I would wake up super early before school to work out because my friends wanted to do something after school and I was freaked out about missing a workout.  Slowly hanging out with family and friends became too hard to navigate into my schedule so I started to withdraw.  I didn’t want anything to get in the way of my routine. I couldn’t risk missing workouts. I became afraid of eating out or eating late at night.  I felt like this identity of being pretty and skinny was the only value that I had, it was the only thing I felt like I was good at.  Two other events happened my senior year that spiraled me into an even worse place, one was getting denied from my dream college and the other was my grandfather being diagnosed with and passing away from cancer.