What's up babes, I'm back! I'm now two months from graduation, which is by far the weirdest milestone I've reached because I've been working towards it for seven years. Horrifying.
I've gotten myself to a much healthier place in the couple of years since I last wrote (more on that in a minute!), including getting myself on Habitica and taking on in-app challenges. This month, one of those challenges is to write and publish a blog post every week, so here I am, back on my bullshit.
Before we start, CONTENT WARNINGS! In this post, I'm going to be talking about body weight, medication, food, and general health issues.
I haven't written here in almost three years due to a spicy combination of horrible jobs, school, pandemic, and the delicious assortment of disabilities and mental illnesses that make things difficult for me at the best of times. But if you look at 2019 me and 2022 me, they're two totally different creatures.
Back in 2019 when I last wrote, I was Going Through It™. One of my partners had just broken up with me a couple of months prior, I was getting ready to transfer to a new college, and I was just starting at a new job that turned out to be one of my top three worst jobs ever. Instead of making progress towards my weight gain goal of 100 pounds, I dropped from 85 to 78, the least I'd weighed since high school. My job, as a counselor at a local day camp, turned out to be so horrible that on several occasions I cried in the gross, pee-covered bathrooms. I was stressed and depressed.
And then, school! School was great! Despite my previous post about financial aid, I was able to afford the cost of attendance at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, and I was finally somewhere with academic and social support. I met people I felt comfortable with, took classes I was excited about, and almost everything was great.
And then, winter. I got a pinched nerve and was suddenly limited in my mobility and range of motion; I started PT and used a wheelchair when I went to places where I would otherwise have to walk a lot. And just as I was recovering from that, COVID hit. The school closed down and went remote in March of 2020, and I moved home with my mom and my brother, where I spent the next 15 months. Just as I had gotten fully settled into my new routine, it was upended yet again.
But - and this is the wild part - COVID, despite being objectively horrible, turned out to be exactly what I needed. There was no choice involved; I was in my house with little to do except read and rest. So I did. I finished my semester, took a summer class to stay ahead of the game, and then I was off.
It turned out that being home, in an incredibly static environment, highlighted the things I was struggling with better than anything else could and provided some solutions. I started sleeping ten hours a night and eating well and regularly; my twenty-pound weight gain, out of reach for eight years, came to me without my even noticing. One morning I realized I had cellulite and stretch marks and fat where none had been before, and I was ecstatic. Around my birthday, we cleaned out the attic and found old packages of my high school antidepressants, and I realized I needed them; I called my doctor the next day and asked to go back on sertraline. The rest and lack of physical exertion healed my pinched nerve and reduced the strain on my knees and back. As the pandemic continued, I took the time to address my other health issues, one at a time.
In Judaism, every seventh year is a sh'mita year, a year when we let the fields lie fallow and reduce our workload. It's a religiously mandated year of rest, a Shabbat for the earth. Technically, our sh'mita year is this year, but for me, sh'mita was the pandemic. I finally rested and got healthy in ways I had never been able to manage before.
So what does this mean? What's the takeaway?
I don't know. We don't live in a world where most people can afford to just take a year off; I was very lucky. However, that year proved to me that I needed rest. And you do too.
The world is changing, and not in necessarily wonderful ways. But we have the power to push back against the system, to say that we need and deserve rest. It's time we did.
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