House of cards...





In 2015 the senior awards ceremony was the Olivia Ghosh Show. A fantastic student who had earned the respect of teachers in all disciplines, she walked away from that assembly with a stunning array of medals, plaques, and awards. With a perfect transcript, a wagon full of trophies, and an acceptance letter from Columbia, Olivia had more external validation than she knew what to do with. Everything was perfect.

And yet….

Things weren’t perfect. Olivia’s post is all about the “yet.”

I will let Olivia tell her story, but I am struck by how many of our Superkids have struggled and continue to struggle. To the world, they project confidence, self-awareness, even joy. Behind the well-practiced smile, however, they are often engaged in intense struggles with loneliness, self-worth, and depression. Look back over the 650 blog posts. A good number fall into this category (see Natalie Schmidt, Rickey Leary, Emma Moore, Victoria Ralston, Molly Lavin for a few examples).

Olivia went to Columbia and decided to study physics, though she never lost her love for reading and writing. She was an RA, worked at the radio station hosting a pre-60s revival folk show, and did a bunch of physics research. She went abroad to Oxford for her junior year and had a great experience studying both physics and philosophy. Next up for Olivia is a PhD in Physics at Stanford, but she has chosen to defer for a year and take the time to travel and write and pick up odd jobs.

Worth noting: Olivia is part of the first sibling duo to contribute to the blog, as her sister Kyra wrote a piece several months ago.

Olivia’s piece was not easy for her to write. “My post is an attempt to challenge the power that the need to be perfect has held over me for a long time,” she said. “It is an intensely personal piece, and yet I think the emotions and thought-processes I write about will resonate widely with people, especially young women, especially in high school.”


- C.H.







Close your eyes and blow.

Make a wish.

Whether a birthday candle or a dandelion, I never had to think.

My wish was always the same growing up, a constant refrain: to be thin.

It was a reflex. Maybe at some point that wish morphed a bit into the more nebulous and broad “be happy,” but rest assured, the version of my happiest self that I envisioned was almost certainly thin.

Like most living organisms, my relationship with food has been the longest relationship in my life, perhaps second only to oxygen. The moment we take our first breath, we cry for food: sustenance and nourishment, a means to live and grow strong. But as we get older, this fundamental relationship with our life source is hijacked by all the signals and messages coming from the outside world about weight loss, “good” eating habits, health, and wellness. I don’t think I’m alone when I say that this longest relationship is also my most fraught, a source of anxiety, pain, panic, and self-loathing.

When I was in high school, those negative feelings could always be stuffed away in the dusty, shameful basement of my mind, so that the foyer remained a spotless trophy case to show off to any visitors. I have always taken great pride in my achievements. Like a purring cat, I love being praised. Sometimes, I even deserved the praise. I played varsity tennis and got straight As. One year, I almost got straight A+s, and half-jokingly complained to my English teacher that he had ruined my streak with the meager A on my report card. The operative word is “half.” I was a perfectionist at school. All seemed well. As much as it sounds like I’m gratuitously tooting my own horn here, let me assure you, reader, that I am engaging in a deliberate narrative strategy. And maybe I am tooting just a little bit, but indulge me please; these were some serious glory days.

What I’m neatly glossing over in this rose-colored description of high school is, of course, the sinister notion that none of my achievements mattered. Because in every photo of me that appeared about my winning History Day project, and every yearbook tennis team photo, and every homecoming and prom photo shoot, I was concerned with one thing. Did I look thin? And most of the time, I was convinced the answer was no. Until I started “forgetting” to eat lunch my sophomore year pre-tennis practice, and departing soccer practice for the gym to read my AP World History textbook while on a stationary bike. I told people it helped me remember the material better if I was exercising while consuming Peter Stearns. And hey, maybe it worked. How else can I explain my retaining the names of all the Chinese dynasties other than lightheadedness?

What did work is that I stopped thinking so much about my body other than to pat myself on the back for how small I could make myself. I was in control of all aspects of my life: academic, athletic, social, you name it. I felt thin, and so my happiness house-of-cards was built.

When I eventually did end up going to college, I moved across the country to a place where the sun don’t shine all the time and most of the year we avoid the outdoors, where I had no organized sports, where the gym on campus is a stinky windowless dungeon, and where there was a dessert buffet at every dining hall meal. Guess what. I gained weight. It’s not important how much or how quickly. No matter what the numbers were, every increment away from my previous self was a catastrophe, and I treated my feelings about my own body as a shameful secret. The house of cards crumbled, but I couldn’t let on. I had to continue to project confidence and self-respect, when inside I was full of hatred for everything that seemed to interfere with that “happy” (re: thin) version of my imagined self. Mostly I was full of hatred for myself. I projected confidence so well that even my own family didn’t realize how sensitive I was; how small comments about food or bodies that weren’t intended to sting, stung so, so much.

As with most things in life, I’m still working through this jumble of emotional baggage. I have come to realize that every form of disordered eating, whether it’s rebranded as intermittent fasting that allows you to “earn” food with starvation, or the more insidiously vague “clean” eating, is a problem. It is a fundamental attitude that has been drilled into us for our entire lives, that we must be smaller to be respected, that we must project self-love even when we are dying inside. That we must simultaneously be “well,” while wasting away. That if we are not trying to lose weight, we are being lazy and irresponsible. Take it from an almost-straight A+ student: that’s bullshit. And even if all seems well, sometimes it’s not.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The formidable force of change ...

Escaping the prison of perfection ...

My honest college essay...