Back when I was becoming old enough to drive, a friend shared a bit of wisdom from her father: If you're driving at night, don't stare into the headlights of an oncoming car or you'll steer your own car right into them.
I imagined a driver in the throes of a trance, her spiraling pupils fixed on those lights, powerless to avoid imminent disaster. On the berm stood Rod Serling, wearing a crisp suit, Brylcreemed hair and Muppet eyebrows, ready to narrate.
Over the years it has occurred to me that the inclination to stare at oncoming headlights was overstated, but the gist of the warning was still useful. I spent so many years fixated on the burning bright lights of what to eat and how not to eat, how much I weighed and how to change that, what other girls and women ate and weighed and how I compared to them in the eyes of others, that I drove myself deeper into the very problems I wanted to avoid.
I missed so much.
At its most consuming, The Food and Weight Thing (TFWT) can be both cause and symptom of a type of focus that shrinks the world to a marble. What all do we not see and do when we're obsessively counting calories, fighting with one of those doorknob exercise contraptions* or measuring the circumference of our upper thighs? What adventures do we forego as we build our identity around our problems?
I'm not much for regrets, and I tend to believe that the good stuff I have today comes from the particular stone-riddled path I chose to take myself from there to here. But it's hard not to stand in astonishment when I consider what a more outwardly focused way of living might have yielded.
For example, through the lens of TFWT, the cultivation of new friendships in high school was almost impossible because I presumed that my weight — 180 pounds at its highest — made befriending me a non-starter. My favorite form of small talk was self-deprecation, which was not the friend-magnet one might wish it to be. With so much weight-related chatter in my head, it never occurred to me to do the things one does to be a friend, much less look around for people who seemed to need one. I happened into a few fine friendships during that time, but the circle was smaller than I wished.
I brought the same myopia to the world at large, having traded in the great gift of curiosity we all have in childhood for a singular quest to fix myself. As a teenager and young woman, I might have been a voracious reader, a bad poet, a skill-building artist, a nature nerd, someone who paid attention to ideas — essentially, a nascent version of the person I eventually became. Instead I burrowed in my bedroom scouring fashion magazines for diet and exercise tips that were never going to work on someone who was already deeply addicted to sugar and processed food.
A world of splendor and wonder surrounded me. I viewed it through a pinhole.
Here's what I think about it all today.
Curiosity is a personal attribute imbued by nature, in varying amounts, but it is also a muscle that can be pumped up into a thing of glory. Outward focus is both a gift that one may receive through addiction recovery and a tool that helps sustain recovery. In the beginning, as we're setting down whatever it is that's messing us up — sugar, booze, gambling — we simply need to do something else with the energy we used to spend on the poison. As we persist, though, and practice using curiosity and outward focus, the world gets larger, better, juicier.
Ideally, this information would have been accessible to my younger self; people in my life surely tried to gently lead me in this direction at that time, but they were no match for my own stuck brain and a culture rich with confusing, contradictory messages for teen girls.
What matters today is remembering that the tendency to get stuck on "self" mode still lives within, but the cure is as easy as noticing that I'm stuck and then changing the channel. By a walk in the woods. By listening to a friend talk about their day. By writing a letter or reading a book or studying the birds or taking a class.
These are all things I love to do now, but the truth is that even if I didn't love them, it would be enough — it would be crucial — to try them. To keep pushing out and exploring new territory in order to rebuild that curiosity muscle that withered in adolescence.
My wonky old mental habits never completely vanished. I can still get stuck on food thoughts. I still catch myself staring into headlights sometimes, and seeing all the ways my perfectly flawed body falls short of the female ideal.
But newer habits, which connect me to the big, beautiful world, force these things back into the shadows, where they belong. That's about as good as it gets. That's plenty.
Notes
You remember these, right? Good golly.
About the illustration
I drew the little fantasy map specifically for this piece of “Thick Through the Middle” writing. If you find yourself inexplicably drawn to it, feel free to hop on over to the Etsy site and grab a print.
"What adventures do we forego as we build our identity around our problems?" Brilliant!
I love your writing.
Your illustration here is magnificent! So are your fantastic words!