I’ve always loved food. From my time as an infant chugging watered down apple juice to my senior year of high school scarfing down burgers and chocolate milkshakes with friends, food was always there for me. It was my refuge, my comfort, my support, my friend. If I wanted to celebrate, I ate. If I was stressed, I ate. If I was bored, I ate. Happy, sad, angry, indifferent, anxious – food was the answer. I loved it like a dear friend, and nothing made me happier than sitting down to a meal with loved ones or my favorite TV show. Verily, upon being asked about my idea of Nirvana, heaven, or any kind of magnificent afterlife, my answer was this: to swim for eternity in a pool of those cheap, plastic wrapped convenience store blueberry muffins, covered with frosting. Pure bliss!
On graduating high school, I took a gap year and traveled to many far corners of the world – India, New Zealand, and Japan. As always, food was there to quell the difficulties of living in a very foreign place. In India, I would In buy entire boxes of traditional sweets to myself and eat them all in one sitting, cooped up in my dark windowless basement of a room. In New Zealand, I woke up on more than one occasion very literally covered in quinoa, in my hair and on my clothes, from the previous night’s drunken binge. I ate my way through Japan’s unique cuisine and arrived home in the States the summer before college, ready to be back in a controlled environment of dorms and classrooms and peers who spoke the same language. Yes, college was going to have challenges of its own but I could do it. I had food.
By the time I arrived at school in the fall of 2014, my stomach was a bit more finicky than I was used to. Dairy and gluten didn’t go down as easily, but it was nothing major. Just remnants of the “Delhi Belly” I had picked up in India. I could eat half a pizza, get a slight stomach ache and sleep it off. I figured that my body was rebalancing itself after so many months of travel and I would reach an equilibrium again. As such, I continued to engage in the usual college eating habits, following every meal in the dining hall with a peanut butter and Nutella sandwich, and ending nights out with doughnuts from 7/11 or late night grilled cheese-tater-tot-bacon extravaganzas. Sure, it made my stomach feel a little weird, but I needed the support. Homesickness, heartbreak, and writing research paper upon research paper called for junk food and wine nights. My body took it in stride and I wasn’t worried.
About halfway through my sophomore year, I took another big trip to Mexico. By that point, my digestive system had been slowly but surely weakening. My days of eating half a pizza and sleeping it off were not so successful but I had decided that it was all in my head. I was getting older. I was under a lot of stress. I’d always had a stomach of steel, why would that be different now? I could go to Mexico, no problem.
But, after two weeks of holiday hedonism in Mexico, chugging Corona, smoking cigarettes, and eating rice and beans at many roadside food stalls, I arrived back at school and something was definitely off. The slight discomfort and brain frog that came from overindulging transformed into straight up pain. The body that had always cooperated was now rebelling against me and I couldn’t figure out why. Sure, I had been to a couple of countries notorious for leaving visitors with digestive issues. Okay, I engaged in a few bad habits like smoking and drinking multiple nights a week. But could it really be that serious?
I again decided that it was just in my head. I would get through the school year, go home for the summer and eat a lot of vegetables. Maybe I would go paleo. These issues would resolve themselves when I had the time to take care of them. In the meantime, I rode out my sophomore year on a wave of caffeine and nicotine. Food hurt my stomach, and these things suppressed my appetite so I didn’t have to eat. When I needed food I would eat a bag of Tostitos or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on gluten free bread – the only things that didn’t send my stomach into a rollercoaster of sharp pains and bloating.
Things did not go to plan. By the time I got home for the summer, my stomach was in complete disarray. Even healthy foods like raw vegetables and whole grains would send me reeling. I tried to go paleo. It hurt. I tried to go vegetarian. It also hurt. My digestive system was deteriorating and suddenly there was no recourse. No amount of bone broth or cruciferous vegetables were getting me anywhere. And yet, I still refused to admit that something was wrong. I had taken for granted how easy it was to exist in the world with the ability to eat anything without a second thought, and was in no way ready to let that go.
So I went to Russia. As had been my pattern, I figured that a change of environment would solve all of my problems, and my study abroad semester in Moscow the fall of my junior year would be no different. A semester of actor training at the Moscow Art Theatre would heal all of my ails and I would arrive back in the States a new woman.
I was right on one level – by the time the semester was over and I arrived home for winter break, I was a new woman, but not the one that I had expected to be. Three months of non-stop acting classes, movement classes, rehearsals, cultural excursions, and Moscow Mule benders had rendered my already exhausted body broken, beaten, and disheveled. There was not a single food that I could eat without it coming up the other way. My body rejected any and all food, and for the first time in my life, I could no longer rely on it as my crutch. There was no way around it – something was deeply wrong, and no amount of denial was going to change that.
Having always been a type A person, even in my fragile condition, I went into full-on fix-it mode. I was going to get an A+ on health just like I got A’s in my classes, and soon enough everything would be back to normal. I went back to school with a plan to heal and was sure that within a few months I would be better, ready to engage in all of my usual activities again. However, once I was back for winter quarter, it became very apparent that this wasn’t going to work. I had no energy. I could barely get out of bed and only left my apartment to go to class. I had an incessant dull ache in the pit of my stomach and lost more and more and more weight until I was a skeleton. Terrified of my own body, I kept turning to the only thing I knew: pushing it to do better. I tried every healing protocol out there, I restricted my diet more and more, I went weeks at a time eating only pureed cooked carrots and chicken breast, and yet nothing worked. When a new diet didn’t work, I figured it was because I wasn’t trying hard enough. I wasn’t depriving myself enough. It wasn’t the diet that was wrong, it was my body that was wrong for not adapting to it.
And then I reached my lowest point. Laying on my bedroom floor in the middle of the night, curled up in a breathless ball of pain and tears, the little voice inside of me that had been trying to tell me what it knew finally spoke up. After years of denial and pushing my body past its limits, it was clear that doing what I had always done had gotten me here in the first place. My push, push, push mentality was obviously not working and I had to find another way. The place of food in my life wasn’t going to be the same and I wasn’t going to get better overnight. There was no “right” way to heal, and thus began a very slow process of acceptance that the only path to healing involves time, patience, and a whole lot of resilience. I had to completely re-evaluate my relationship to food in the midst of my college career, surrounded by peers who could still easily spend a night out drinking or pick up a bag of Cheetos on the fly.
The last year and a half has been a painstaking but transformative process of taking my health into my own hands. I’ve had to leave behind the trends, the fads, and what all of the health experts said were the path to healing. Even more difficult, however, has been the emotional aspect of it all. Letting go of the person I’ve always been, tuning out the choices of those around me, and staring straight ahead into the abyss of a body whose functions are out of my control is a challenge that I never expected to face. Indeed, I don’t think anyone could possibly plan for such a detour. I have been lucky enough to be surrounded by a large support network, and after wandering the pathless woods for what felt like an eternity, I’ve begun to find some footing (albeit shaky). Gradually, one day at a time, I’m discovering what my body and my body alone can and cannot take. When it comes to digestive issues like this, there is no linear path to health and no rulebook on what will work. Each body is different and the food choices that will or won’t work for that body can be radically individual.
I am doing eons better than I was a year ago, but there is still a long road ahead. The healing process didn’t take 3 months. It didn’t take 6 months. It has been over a year and I’m still learning something new every day about the food that my body does and doesn’t want, and my diet is constantly changing and evolving. Anymore, I don’t think about the day when everything will be better forever. Instead, I wake up every morning, re-forgive my body, re-accept its limitations, and re-learn how to live a life of chronic pain and digestive issues. Maybe I will reach dazzling health one day. Maybe I won’t. All I can do is live today and put one puzzle piece back together at a time, celebrating even the tiniest step forward and having grace with even the hugest step back. Every twist and turn – it’s part of the process.
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