my lifelong teammate

When I was sixteen, I’d cry every Sunday before going back to school on Monday. But I had amazing friends at school, had all A’s, and loved my classes. 

When I was seventeen, I threw up before and after every cheerleading performance and first date. But we won state, I was cheerleading co-captain, and the dates went well. 

When I was eighteen, my mom took me to a therapist before moving far away from college, who told me I was too high functioning to need anxiety medication. I still went to college three thousand miles away, in sunny Southern California.

When I was nearly eighteen, I passed out in my front yard when my first college boyfriend broke up with me over the phone. But I learned my own standards and leaned on my friends. 

When I was nineteen and twenty, I’d convince myself the walls were closing in on me in the university’s library archives room, where I spent much of my time as an English major, and I’d have to excuse myself to the bathroom mid-lectures in fear of fainting to strip off my shirt, lay my bare skin on the cold tile floor, and prop my legs up against the stall door while my vision blurred in and out. But I maintained great grades, worked two jobs, and juggled a full social schedule.

When I was twenty, I moved home during COVID. Anything I ate made me feel sick to my stomach–so much so, that I stopped eating altogether. I’d eat four frozen dumplings, once a day, and a scoop of ice cream at night. I dropped to my sixteen year-old weight. But I was dating a new boy, going to the beach every day, and learning how to surf.

When I was twenty-one, the food situation resolved, but I started having chronic diarrhea. I never had a normal bowel movement. For the next three years, I had diarrhea every day. But I had moved to a new state with two of my best friends, and we were finishing school online. I was making unforgettable memories.

When I was twenty-two, I’d graduated college and couldn’t find a job. I would walk to the park for fresh air and find myself wishing someone would attack me and I’d have to go to the hospital–because it would be a break, and no one would judge me for it. The thoughts scared me. But I was living with a friend in her Chicago studio apartment. I was traveling to places I’d never been before. 

When I was twenty-three, I stopped writing, which had been my lifelong passion. I lost interest in things I’d loved my whole life. I started getting more sick more often, my body felt tired, and I had no motivation. I was panicking about going to work every day. 

I tried to talk to a psychiatrist, but she misdiagnosed me and prescribed meds I knew I didn’t need. It sent me into a spiral. But I had finally landed a job in my field. I was living in a new city. My serious boyfriend moved across the country for me.

I’m twenty-four. I stopped being able to drink even one glass of alcohol without getting sick. I threw up my whole birthday because I’d had one drink the night before. My body can’t handle caffeine anymore, either. The GI issues got worse, and every day at work, I was running to the restroom and experiencing severe discomfort. 

But I was fine! I was fine, I was fine, I was fine.

My body ached. I was exhausted at night, but couldn’t sleep. I started carrying Zofran everywhere I went; I’d gotten so used to feeling nauseous. I traveled to see my brother and sister-in-law a few states away, and I woke up in the morning to vomiting and tremors. I went home for Thanksgiving and was carsick the whole ride home.

I was not fine.

I have not been fine. My body has been begging, screaming at me, to listen, and I haven’t. I ignored my body as much as I could. I avoided her like the plague. I told her to stop being such a whiny bitch and shut up, quiet down. I pushed her aside, told her to stop getting in the way, that I didn’t need her. I asked her to be invisible. To leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone.

Yes, beautiful things were going on all around me. In many ways, my life was unfolding exactly as I had imagined. I had a beautiful life, people who loved me, and so much to be grateful for. All of that is true, all of it was always true.

But so was the fact that my body was deteriorating. She screamed at me to pay attention. I screamed back at her even louder–no.

But I kept feeling worse, forcing me to finally pay attention. And when me and my body called a truce, the understanding that I was not okay was made clear. I had flipped the light switch on inside of my brain. It was there the whole time, and I just wandered around in the dark, tripping over what I couldn’t see.

I went to the doctor and had some tests run. It took me six months to actually complete the first order of lab work, because I was so afraid of needles. I did, in fact, faint when I finally went to the lab. But I started seeing answers.

A lot of things were normal, but some things weren’t. I wanted specific hormone tests, but my OBGYN and GP didn’t have the ability to run them, so I jumped from one doctor to another, requesting referrals, waiting months for appointments with specialists.

I saw an endocrinologist, who ran tests I’d been asking for for months. Results are filtering in, some still pending. But I found out that I have high cortisol and high testosterone. We’re running more tests to scan for Cushing’s Syndrome, a disease characterized by too much cortisol in the body, which wreaks havoc on all your other systems.

It’s very possible I don’t have Cushing’s. It’s a rare and serious disease, and in many ways, I don’t match the typical presentation. Maybe I’ve just been in a state of fight, flight, or freeze for years, my body stuck in a never-ending episode of panic. 

I grew up deeply embedded in a fundamentalist, evangelical Christian community. Since I was a young child, I have worried about things like holiness, heaven and hell, sin and obedience. I chose to be baptized so I wouldn’t be damned to hell when I was ten. I was worrying about the length of my shorts and the shape of my body at eleven. I started asking questions about why women weren’t allowed to serve or speak at twelve.

Aside from religion, I was breaking up fights between girls at school and coming home in tears in fourth grade. I had panic attacks in fifth grade math and seventh grade science because I couldn’t understand for the life of me how numbers worked (a continuing problem). I was overwhelmed, constantly, from the moment I left the womb–and maybe even before.

Maybe my anxiety was learned or created; maybe it’s wired in my genes. But one thing I do know–I needed help. I was suffering, internally and externally, my entire life, and besides a few trips to the school counselor as a kid, I never received therapy, or medicine, or lab work, or any other number of ways to address what I was experiencing. I just spent a lot of time praying. Nothing ever changed.

Now I’m the only one in control of my life, and I’m forcing things to change. I’ve been in therapy for the last seven months. It has been such a release, such a cathartic experience, to have someone see every part of me without judgment and help me walk through such a confusing time.

I recently started taking a low dose of Lexapro, and on the very first day of swallowing that grain-of-rice-sized pill, the diarrhea I’d experienced for three years stopped. I had my first normal poop in three years. I’ve had normal movements every day since.

I can’t explain the life-changing, revolutionary nature of how simple, small acts of healthcare have changed my life in such a short amount of time. If I could go back to myself as a teenager and shake her, force this little pill down her throat, and save her these years of bodily pain and emotional suffering, I would do it in a heartbeat. 

But there are still ways that this prolonged state of stress has affected my body, things that can’t be quickly fixed.

As the lab result for high-cortisol came through my email yesterday, I felt my eyes sting. I went to the restroom in my office, looked at myself in the mirror, and cried. For the first time in years, I felt true compassion for my body. I was wrong, I said to her. You are not lazy. I have been pushing you so hard, and you’ve been shutting down. You poor thing, you have been suffering. I am so sorry I ignored you. I’m going to help you now.

I believed, for a lot of my life, that suffering was a sign of trial, something to push through and celebrate. Suffering meant divine testing, it meant something I could use in a future testimony, it meant God allowing a way for him to show himself to others through my life. I thought when I was suffering that it was normal, that everyone else felt worse, that complaining about it was annoying, that I was whiny, that I was lazy, that I needed to pull myself together, that it was all in my head, that it all being in my head meant I wasn’t really experiencing it. I believed that I wasn’t my body, but the soul inside it–that my body was just a meaningless shell that held my eternal soul. In thinking this, I completely ignored the way our bodies entirely shape our human experiences: through size, race, ability; through our gut microbiomes and mental health; through the mental and physical traumas they endure; through their sleep and rest and rebuilding; through their ability to release endorphins, dopamine, serotonin; through their sensory experiences, through kissing, touching, hearing, tasting, seeing.

I grew up separating pieces of myself, turning off my body cues and listening only to my inner world, not my outer one. I developed a rich, deep inner life. But I didn’t learn to care for my body through diet, exercise, and stress relief. I did the bare minimum for my body while nourishing my spirit, only to find years later that my body had been needing much, much more from me.

It’s a slow process but also an overnight shift of my worldview and my self-perception. 

I am on her side now, and even in her struggles, I know she is on mine. I won’t hate her for being fatigued. I won’t ignore her when she cries. I will feed her, hold her, tend to her, take her to doctors who will help her feel good every day instead of feeling sick. 

My body and I, we’re on the same team. I’m sorry it took me so long to realize it.