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eating disorder
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2021-09-13
Mental Health in the Eyes of a Pandemic
For years, I believed there was something wrong with me that wasn’t similar to anyone else. This “something” wasn’t easy to figure out. The pandemic consisted of trends, exercise, masks, and heavy cleaning. In high school, girls consistently made fun of me for my body, weight, and the way I looked. The bullying wouldn’t stop- I was fifteen. My mom took everything to the police. Things were dealt with. Things were okay, until they weren’t. On April 5th, 2020, while doing a heavy clean of some junk drawers, I found the red folder of printed screenshots. Sorrow began to creep up my spine as I began to cry. I couldn’t understand why people ever thought this was okay. I stopped eating. How does this happen? By choice? No, not really. By coincidence? Not that either. I kept my eating disorder hidden. I never told the doctors, friends, employers, and most regretfully, I hid it from my family. Beginning from April 5th, 2020, to approximately September of 2021, I was not okay. Within the duration of starving myself out, burning 800 calories a day at the gym, making myself throw up after every time I ate, and weighing myself four times a day, I didn’t see anything wrong with my lifestyle. It was June 11th, 2021, when I was at the doctor’s office. She asks, “Do you have any questions or concerns?” I didn’t. Well, I did. Words of anger went in and throughout my brain. I had been battling an eating disorder for well over a year and I wasn’t ready to admit it. I was always the perfect, angelic, do-no-wrong child in my family- I couldn’t let them know about this but, I also couldn’t stand to hate myself for another day. It came out… “I think I have an eating disorder”, I said as tears ran down my face. For the next few months, I was monitored. It was the hardest battle I’ve had to face. I came face to face with my parents and explained everything. They sobbed as they couldn’t understand why their first-born child refused to understand how beautiful she is. My heart shattered into a million pieces. Soon after that doctor’s appointment, I was on the road to recovery. Many people hate covid because they felt robbed of love, opportunity, and most importantly, time. If anything, Covid-19 saved my life. I finally ridded of those demon in which lived inside my precious thoughts. There’s no more “I look fat” or “I can’t eat that”. This wasn’t something that was wrong with just me- it affects millions. Covid taught me that there is no room for negativity in this world. Time moves too fast. The presence of eating disorders during the pandemic can help historians understand the impact of cyberbullying, food scarcity due to supply chain issues, etc. I don’t believe that researchers realize how many adults and children were affected by mental illness due to persistent lockdowns, isolation periods, restricted visitation, and new introductions to a virtual society. My experience offers intel to how mental and physical illnesses were underestimated throughout the entirety of the pandemic. Whether it be an eating disorder or a cancer patient, it’s difficult to watch because it seems like covid-19 patients are prioritized everywhere even if they choose not to be vaccinated. It’s a hard thing to watch in terms of priority because cancer patients, heart disease patients, etc. have less room in hospitals because people choose to not be vaccinated. With that being said, being vaccinated has no 100% guarantee of not being hospitalized but it lowers the rates substantially. -
2021-06
Lasting pandemic effects of overexercising
This page from my bullet journal displays the workout I conducted each day during the month of June, 2021. The viewer should note three pertinent pieces of information to understand the necessity of this piece for the archive: the bullet journal itself, the exercise habits, and the timeline between the beginning of the pandemic to the actual entry. Primarily, I picked up the hobby of bullet journaling itself during March of 2020. I wanted a method to record my own habits – such as exercise, eating, music taste, and TV shows - in a scrapbook type format during the pandemic. Truthfully, the entire book would contribute to the archive, due to the personal detail and day-to-day routine recorded. Secondly, the workout tracker shows a slight addiction to exercise, with runs or walks every day, in addition to tens of thousands of steps I already took. These overexercising habits began for me during quarantine, with time and stress on my hands, and no healthy ways of coping. Finally, the reader should also acknowledge that I wrote this entry in June of 2021, a full 15 months after the start of lockdown in the US. That timeline shows that lingering effects of the pandemic remain, perhaps even grow with time. This artifact expresses more about my experience with the pandemic than I can articulate due to one central reason: learning self-love through exercise. Though I’d always struggled with having time on my hands, the pandemic left me feeling more uneasy with loneliness and boredom. Without a healthy way to deal with my emotions, I turned to exercise for the release and endorphins that I needed. Before I knew it, a casual workout each day led to apple watch addiction, calorie counting obsession, and cycles of binge eating and overcompensating through exercise, etc. While this sounds like my own personal journey, quarantine kickstarted and exacerbated these issues for adolescents all over the nation. With the recent introduction of tiktok “What I eat in a day” videos and Chloe Ting’s workout videos, people grew obsessive about wellness and moving their bodies. I learned so much about my body and my brain through this struggle with overexercise and obsession – and I feel grateful for that. Still though, I notice these effects in myself and others. This small contribution of a workout tracker speaks volumes about habits of teenagers after months of loneliness and free time – whether teenagers obtained an obsession with appearance, food, or exercising. And if those issues did not resurrect for some, I’d argue that the pandemic brought many other mental health challenges to surface for my age group. While this submission does little to express my emotions or challenges surrounding my exercise routine, it conveys the lingering effects of mental health tolls and body challenges from the pandemic.