I’ve been working with a student who’s going through some health issues, including severe long-term nausea and lack of appetite. At first, I found myself feeling simultaneously concerned and full of empathy and compassion for this student, as well as a little jealous. While I know from personal experience that nausea is terrible, sometimes it feels like almost anything would be worth it if I could just lose some weight. I felt bad for feeling this way, because I wanted to be able to focus solely on the student and not let my own feelings get in the way. I feel like I was able to succeed in the moment, but when reflecting on it later, it was difficult not to have a vague wish to have the same problem.
It brought me back to something I haven’t shared with anyone, because it’s seemed too ridiculous to share. Now that I’ve called my own attention to it, I plan to talk about it with my ED specialist, but I’m sharing it here first. When I was completely consumed by anorexia, I wanted so badly to lose weight that I felt willing to endure severe medical problems to accomplish it. I don’t just mean that I was willing to undergo complications rising from not eating; I mean that I was willing to have a terrible disease if only it would make me thinner. While I never actually quite wanted it, I thought many times about how losing a limb would make that terrible number go down. (That’s hard to admit, even to myself. It’s so ridiculous and wouldn’t even have made me ‘thinner’, but I was so focused on the number and it was getting harder and harder to lower it any other way…)
So I guess I’ve made some progress since then. What an accomplishment; I no longer wish for terrible things to happen to me… though some very inconvenient things like nausea have still been open for debate!
However, I met with this student again yesterday, and I feel like she and I both made a lot of progress in our respective struggles. She shared that she’s been struggling to gain weight and that she really wants to gain a significant amount of weight, and I was able to share some tips that I was unwilling to use myself when I was anorexic. Because she is dealing with medical issues rather than anorexia, those tips that I refused when in the worst part of my eating disorder can help her. She even shared her current weight, and while I felt a twinge of jealousy, I didn’t feel my insides twisting like they sometimes do in those sorts of situations. The number that she shared was too low for me (and for her), and I know it. While the thought that the number she shared would be better than my current weight certainly passed through my head, I was able to (mostly) dismiss it.
I’m going to continue to meet with this student, and I’m very much looking forward to it. I feel that I’m helping her, which is why I’m doing it, but I also feel that it’s good practice for me. I don’t need to tie myself in with others. I don’t need to compare myself to others. Her low weight is not an indictment of my weight.