That's the Tea sis #1 : why my first year of college was the hardest of my life

First off, I would like to recognize and thank my wonderful family, roommate, friends, coaches, teammates, professionals and athletic trainers who helped me get through this year. I'd also like to preface this piece by emphasizing that this year was the *hardest* of my life, not the *worst*. An intermediate hike, a challenging assignment or a tough practice might be *hard*, but it doesn't mean it is the *worst*. Often times, the most challenging tasks or times we endure wind up being the most transforming, rewarding, and character-building. While it is difficult, if not impossible, to appreciate this when we are at our lowest, it is so worth it to reflect on the transformation we undergo, whatever it may be.

My first year of college was the hardest of my life, without a doubt. And while I am known for being sunshine-y-Motivation-with-Maru, life isn't always rainbows and unicorns for me. I'd been toying with the idea of opening a blog site for a while, and I think that now is the time to share this story. I am also known for being excessively chatty and talkative, so I'm going to try to give y'all the condensed version.

I have run competitively since the 7th grade and have struggled with body image and eating since I was a sophomore in high school. I do not fit the dictionary-definiton of what a distance runner typically looks like, which has driven me to disordered eating habits and severe body insecurities. I have also lost my period for great spans of time due to an imbalance between my diet and my training, a condition known as athletic ammenhorea. I am very passionate about positive body image, healthy eating, and self-love as is evident on my Instagram account, Motivation with Maru, but I don't always practice what I preach. I learned the hard way about what true self-care and self-love are and how they were the missing ingredients in my life during my first year of college. In order to best explain this, we need to rewind a bit...

After meeting with a nutritionist in the spring of my senior year, I had the best most positive sports season of my life. Following her helpful meal plan that distanced me from my binge eating habits, I began to run farther, faster, and ward off tiresome injuries that usually struck me during track season, plus, I was eating SO. MUCH. I was eating more than I ever thought I needed, consuming either a snack or a meal nearly every two hours. I was flabbergasted that I could eat so much food while also maintaining a healthy weight and feeling so energetic! I felt fantastic and feisty, I was badass and felt beautiful. Underneath all of this though, I was showing signs of anxiety, as was brought to my attention when a school advisor kept me back after a Student Council meeting and told me that he could "see the stress seeping out of me." I had always been a bit high-strung and joked about being "a soccer mom" due to being extra organized, but I had never coined the term "anxiety" to be the root cause of it all.

Speaking of the "root cause", I worked at a cafe last summer with a pressed-juice by the same name. As I unknowingly trained through tendinitis, a condition that would take me away from the sport I loved from August through December, I became increasingly frustrated towards my training and emotionally-ate my way through the summer and started to consistently gain weight and return to my bingeing ways. My coworkers would laugh with me as I ate scraps from the bakery, and I would smile when people would say things like "There's Mary, always snacking" or "your face looks rounder". I was not feeling very fantastic, feisty or badass, let alone feeling beautiful. My relationship with food was getting more and more toxic as my body continued to break down to the point where I was cross-training everyday before coming to college.

College proved to be an even greater challenge for me than the summer of 2018, especially when it came to eating. I grew up under a roof where cereal and crackers were labeled as "treats" and desserts were few and far between, so having a full college buffet at my fingertips was akin to locking a kid in a candy store. My portions quickly grew to extremes as did the frequency with which I ate. I would feel extremely anxious prior to meals and would obsessively check the online dining hall menu and memorize a "healthy" meal that I would plan to get in order to feel in control, only to feel intense waves of shame when I carried my stack of dishes to the dish-drop-off when I "failed" to stick to my plan. I would either "behave" at meal time and eat something "normal" and "good", or I would fall off the deep end and eat until I felt sick. I had no middle ground, I was either in control or I binged.

In tandem with my struggles in the dining hall, my injuries were not healing as quickly as I wanted. After months of physical therapy and elliptical-ing, I was able to run in early January, but was sidelined by another injury in early March and was not making much headway with my mindset towards eating. I was not feeling very fantastic, feisty or badass, let alone feeling beautifulWhile I dealt with my newfound hip issue in March, I started to feel more and more self-conscious about my curvier body and started to dislike it as my clothes became tighter. I suddenly could no longer go bra-less like I once had and began to develop constellations of stretch marks on my outer thighs and chest that seemed to duplicate daily. I would scroll through VSCO, Instagram, and Pinterest and admire summery photos of girls laughing in bikinis, unknowingly smushing my own self-confidence that I used to be known for. I was staying up late, only doing work in my room, and skipping meals because I was mortified that people would judge me for what I put on my plate, only to eat candy bars from the vending machine in my dorm when I got hungry later on. For all who know me, this is very unlike the early-to-bed-early-to-rise chipper and social Mary Richardson that was somewhere deep inside of me throughout all of this.

In an effort to motivate myself I would watch old races videos that documented meets I had participated in and watch myself run in bittersweet admiration for the figure and fitness I once had. These viewing sessions never affected me positively, let alone motivated me. What hurt me all the more was that I knew that the seemingly "happier" and "smaller" Mary Richardson in the race videos was struggling even then and felt "big" and "out of place" amongst her competitors though in my eyes now she looked so attractive and fast. I began to envy my past self, past body and past accomplishments. I began to envy those around me who have the ability to eat intuitively and not panic in the dining hall like I do. Fantastic, feisty, badass, and beautiful were no longer words in my vocabulary.

By this point in early spring, I was the heaviest I'd ever been in my life, seeing both a therapist and an on-campus physician trying to help manage my weight and my binge eating disorder, all the while struggling with anxiety and symptoms of depression. I was very unhappy and very frustrated. I was desperate to run. Desperate to obtain self love. I was so fed up with feeling crappy about myself and making decisions that only increased said crappy feeling that I knew I needed a way out. (Continued in That's the Tea Sis #2)

I would like to conclude this piece by saying that I appreciate, admire, and LOVE people of all shapes and sizes, as should all of us. I am in no way fat-shaming or saying that the results of gaining weight make one unattractive or unhappy, or that losing weight makes one more attractive or happier. The factors that led me to feel so poorly were my injuries that kept me from running, my anxiety and insecurities, my unhealthy eating habits, and my overall relationship with food. Weight gain was a result of all of this, the physical affect. If I had gained weight while loving myself, eating happily and healthily, and was still able to run, I would not categorize my personal weight gain in a negative way. Everyone's journey with their own body is sacred and special to them, please respect mine.