I’ve felt lost a bit this past year.
I’ve always been incredibly good at tying my identity to certain things - at planning my life out around scheduled race seasons. I thrive on structure. For the better part of a decade, my life was dictated by the regular cadence of an obstacle racing season: build up throughout the spring and summer with the sole pursuit of a world championship in the fall. Inextricably intertwined with that was the disorder that consumed the rest of my life: protect the eating disorder at all costs. Stay the thinnest in the room. Use food as a way to occupy every moment to where I didn’t have to zoom out, I didn’t have to feel. My identity, on the outside, was “Queen of Pain” - the one who could gut out arduous races through horrific conditions. My identity, on the inside, was to hide and protect the eating disorder at all costs.
When I finally reached a breaking point (both physically and mentally), entered eating disorder treatment, and aired my dirty laundry to the world, my identity became one of a person in recovery. For that first year or two in recovery, it was all-consuming. Not by choice, but because to reach a solid state of recovery, it necessarily HAS to be the sole focus.
This past year, I started to feel pretty solid in my recovery. I was no longer white-knuckling just to make it through. Food didn’t dictate my life, and the good days outnumbered the hard. The voices quieted.
Around the same time, I reached a place with racing where I still love being out there, but I don’t necessarily have the “compete to win at all costs” mentality anymore. I frankly don’t know if I want to drive my body into the ground anymore solely to prove to myself (or others?) that I’m a “badass.”
You could say I’m doing pretty well, right?
Right?
Right.
Then why does it feel so foreign to me? Sometimes, I’m not exactly sure I know how to live without trying to fix something, or struggle through something, or inflict pain upon myself. That’s been my life for the past 20+ years. Frankly, it’s all I know.
Last year at World’s Toughest Mudder, seven of my dearest friends and I sat around talking about how we came into that particular event - a 24-hour sufferfest starting in 2011 that’s really just a contest in who can best ward off hypothermia. Predictably, all of us were trying to solve and/or run from pretty fucked up shit in our lives at the time. Obstacle racing gave us an outlet, a community. Over the course of the next 10 years, we had grown, changed, gotten married/divorced, had babies, worked through the tough things in our lives. We were different people than when we started. Maybe that little event helped us get us there - helped us all work through whatever it was we weren’t facing at that time in our lives.
Perhaps sometimes an event or a community or a pursuit comes into our lives and serves a purpose. And sometimes it stops calling to us in the way it once did. It came into our lives when we needed it, and when we no longer need it, we hold onto those cherished memories and bid farewell, thanking it for the important role it played.
We transition. And transitions are hard because they involve loss.
As strange as it sounds, the eating disorder served a purpose for me. It protected me. But, thanks to hard work I recovery, I no longer need it like I used to, so it became time for me to thank it and say goodbye.1
The chaotic racing schedule and the absolute pursuit of being the best at a sport served a purpose for me for so many years. It also protected me - protected me from failed relationships, from facing my own insecurities, from the feeling that I was irretrievably broken. I still enjoy racing, but I don’t *need* it like I used to, so my relationship to it has changed.2
We don’t celebrate these transitions enough, which are a normal and natural part of being a human. Especially in the day of social media, where everyone seems to have a “brand,” we often feel tied to holding on to how many people have seen us, even if we have grown beyond that.
Maybe I don’t need the identity of pain anymore. Maybe it’s ok to look around and say “hey, life is pretty good. There’s nothing to be fixed so stop creating that struggle.”
I think I’ll keep repeating that until I believe it.
Thanks for joining me here on this Substack. I have no idea where I’m going with it, but perhaps that’s all part of the transition.
mental health disorders and addictions are clearly not as easy as that, but I do recognize that the eating disorder was a tool that I had. I have better tools now, which is what recovery is all about.
Um, ok this is me convincing myself this is the case. More to come on the feelings around aging as an athlete and the “comedown” off of being an elite athlete. I got a WHOLE world to process there.
Onward Amelia! Enjoyed this.
Along for the ride, wherever it goes. Life is Good!