#24: The Little Lies We Tell Ourselves

"Once I just get through this period, it'll be fine...After ____ is over, I can rest."

TW: This piece includes mentions of eating disorders.

I sat there with my legs, trembling like the last of autumn leaves clinging onto their mother branch. Well, I wasn’t exactly sitting, but rather in a wall sit (sitting on an imaginary chair at 90º with my back against the wall) with a 40% of my body weight laid across my quads in weight plates. I was 14-years-old, in the chilly icebox of our ice rink training facility, where I was in the midst of an annual fitness test (read: competition) with my fellow skaters. The previous record time for a wall sit with 40% of your body weight was around the 1:30 mark. I was nearing 4 minutes, well beyond the “winning” benchmark, yet I refused to move. I wanted to sit there until my body gave out before my mind did.

If you’re a figure skater, you know that there’s no calling in sick or injured to a day of practice, but my mother had to call my coaches the next morning; because my knees buckled as I tried to get out of bed, as my quads gave out on me and refused to hold my body upright - a clear tantrum about the previous day’s activities.

---

Entering college as a 17-year-old with a chip on her shoulder with something to prove, having chosen a “normal” life over life as an aspiring Olympic athlete, I continued living life with this mindset. Freshman year, when no internships were allowed, I nabbed an internship in the fashion department at Teen Vogue, and banked on the whole, ask for forgiveness and not permission thing, when telling my advisor that I had already accepted this internship. In order to make this internship and the others in all the college years to come, I stacked my course schedule to have a full-time course load fit into two days per week. Tuesday and Fridays were my college student days, and then Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, I’d be working full days as an intern.