Part 1 of My Story - Thank you for taking the time to read this, for allowing me to be vulnerable in a way that is generally very uncomfortable for me. I hope this blog highlights that you’re not alone. Your feelings and experiences are valid and justified, but it’s a burden you don’t have to bear alone.
Women in science. As a global community we span a swath of racial, ethnic, gender, cultural and socioeconomic identities. Diverse as we are, we have a commonality in that we tend to have an innate drive to perform our best, to continuously grow and improve as researchers, and – ultimately – many of us may likely be categorized as perfectionists. I know I am. The burden of this trait is an enormous weight to carry, and I am hoping to remove the glamorization of this trait and stigma associated with mental health issues that often accompany it. As frightening as it is to be vulnerable and open up on this scale, it’s absolutely necessary that we have these hard conversations.
I don’t think my perfectionism reached its full form until I was in grad school, but it definitely started before then. Growing up, I was never happy being in the middle of the pack in school or athletics. This feeling was only ever intensified in areas where I felt I didn’t fit the “mold”, so I would strive to overcome everyone’s expectations of me. This was, in a way, empowering. I thought I didn’t care what others thought, when actually the opposite was true. I cared so much about what they thought and how I could prove them wrong. I carried this attitude with me when I went to my undergrad. I competed as a scholarship cross country and 10k runner for an NCAA D1 school. Which, in and of itself, I felt was a big “F U” to the system because my short and muscular build always meant I was pinned as a competitor of a strength-based sport: gymnastics, sprinting, someone even guessed wrestling one time. My first semester of undergrad was rough. I was so exhausted from training, that I opted for sleep instead of my night classes, and social time when I should have been studying. As a consequence, my academics suffered and I vowed to never let that happen again. I kicked myself into high gear, I put my head down and focused on excelling in school and athletics. Despite running the fifth fastest time in school history for the 10k at the time, I spent four years having a male coach tell me that I needed to lose weight. “You’re good now, but think about how great you could be if you didn’t have to carry around that extra weight.” While I felt as though I let it slide off my back at the time, I really didn’t know how much that really planted a nasty little brainworm in my head that would always be there to tell me that I’m not good enough. Particularly when it came to males in positions of power.
Fast forward a couple of years. It’s 2:00am. I’ve been in a new city for less than six months undertaking my master’s degree in biomechanics and working as a research assistant in the lab. I’m studying for a final, reading my notes through tears. I haven’t eaten since a breakfast, because that feels like the only thing I can control. It’s the last week of my first semester of grad school and I’m sleeping on average 5 hours a night, waking up to run for at least an hour at 5:00am, spending my days in class or the lab, lifting and running again at 5:00pm for at least an hour and a half, then staying up to study or write until 11:00pm. I’d finally get to bed by midnight, only to be jolted awake by the 5:00am alarm the same day. Despite feeling broken and exhausted, day in and day out, I just had that mantra that had been planted in my head on repeat. “You’re good now, but think about how great you could be if you just…” If I just chose to forego sleep and practice more free-body diagrams or read more papers; if I ran 12 miles instead of 7; if I opted to work through lunch – which also doubled as a convenient excuse for not eating. I thought this was just the way grad school was. You should feel tired, you should feel less than, you should have to prove that you belong.
When I went home after finals, my mom looked at me and immediately knew I was not okay. Eyes heavy from continuous lack of sleep, a noticeable loss of mass, and an attempt of a strong façade to cover the shell of the outgoing girl that she left in June. When she asked how I was, I told her I was fine. Greeted with the all-knowing gaze and head-cock combination, the universal parent/guardian way of saying, “you’re lying”, I insisted I was fine and this was just the way grad school is. She encouraged me to talk, to open up to anyone and everyone around me, to get professional help. I did all but the latter, because I had a stigma associated with mental health issues in my own mind. The root of it? My perfectionism. Going to a mental health professional was an admission that I’m not perfect. So I refused to go to therapy, if only to seem like I was fine. I managed to scrape by for a while, to find pieces of joy in my days. I worked to reduce my disordered eating and exercise patterns, but used them as a crutch and sense of comfort when things felt out of my control. I “managed” for about two years.
After grad school, I worked as a biomechanist in a lab that I was unhappy with, due to an extremely toxic work environment. The nature of the job meant it was filled with men in positions of power that treated me as though I was beneath them as a human being – whether that was a consequence of my age or my gender, I can never be sure. While we are making considerable strides in the direction of diversity and inclusivity in science, lab spaces across disciplines are largely male dominated. That compounded with the fact that my lab was associated with the military meant disparities between males and females were even more stark. I constantly felt like I had to prove that I belonged, battling with things all women in science deal with – how to act so we aren’t received as too soft or too emotional or too “bitchy” or “know it alls”. When voicing these concerns to leadership towards the end of my time in the lab, I was gaslighted and my experiences were invalidated. But I had a ticket out, I was set to start my PhD in Sydney, Australia and I had put my notice in a month before my end date.
The start of the pandemic resulted in me diving head first into one of the darkest places I have ever been, not so unlike many people. All of my plans, my academic and professional goals that I had in place were all totally derailed. A week before I was supposed to move, Australia closed its borders to international travel. I could no longer get on the flight I had purchased tickets for, move into the apartment I had put a security deposit on, or start my PhD as intended. As a perfectionist, I plan ahead and try to be prepared for anything and everything. But who can plan for a global pandemic? With almost nothing else in the world I could control, I refused to acknowledge all of the emotions I was feeling and directed all of my energy towards training for a marathon and working. I absolutely knew that the marathon wasn’t going to happen, because it was supposed to be in the country that just shut me out. Nonetheless, I started to obsessively train. I woke up at 4:00am to run, would start work as soon as I got back, and would do a home workout and run again in the afternoon. I had massively high volumes of training while compulsively weighing out my food so I could eat the absolute minimum possible to function. The consequences to my body were devastating. I lost hair, my face was sunken in and dull, I could hardly keep my eyes open during the “work day”, and I would plan takeout meals a week in advance – fantasizing about what I would get, but also planning out my day so I wouldn’t eat “too many” calories. I worked in the hours that weren’t consumed by training, finding ways to write or analyze data in new ways. Anything I could do to keep myself from actually confronting all of my internalized turmoil that I wasn’t allowing myself to feel. The ever-present voice of “you’re good, but think about how great you could be if you just…” had never been stronger. All so I could protect myself from having to mourn the life I was hoping to be living in Sydney, to avoid acceptance of what had happened, to not feel emotions. Partially because experiencing and expressing emotions as women can feel like we are playing in to the stereotypes that society depicts women as – because we’re told that having emotions means we’re fragile, we’re volatile. We’re unfit to work in a male-dominated field like science. Additionally, for me, and so many other scientists like me, it’s the fear that accompanies the fact that emotions are uncontrollable in nature. If I felt them instead of numbed them out with controlling my training, food and/or work, I felt like a failure.
It took months of suffering at this magnitude, but I finally reached out for professional help. I was tired of the hold my eating disorder had on me. I was exhausted by no longer feeling like I had control over my thoughts or actions – it was like my autonomy was totally stripped from me. I was tired of the constant body checking, the seemingly compulsive desire to weigh my food, of being anxious about social interactions, only eating food if it was prepared by me or bringing my own food to social engagements. I am grateful that I was able to catch myself, with the help of others around me, before in-patient care was necessary. I also recognize that I am one of the lucky ones. Anorexia specifically has the highest death rate of any psychiatric illness. Compounding on that is the fact that eating disorders are often a physical manifestation of a greater mental health problem, including anxiety and depression. Understanding that depression and my psychological desire for perfection was a root cause for my eating disorder helped me take actionable steps towards recovery. I hope no one waits as long as I did. I should have started getting professional help three years before I did, back during my Master’s Degree. My perfectionist mindset got in the way, telling me that getting help was accepting that something was “wrong”. I have learned so much about how I got here, from personal traits and societal pressures. I’ve also learned how to recognize when I go down that path again, and how to help myself and others who may be experiencing a similar situation.
In Crisis?
USA: Text MHA to 741741, or Call 800-273-8255
Australia: Call 000 or Lifeline at 13 11 14, beyondblue at 1300 22 4636
UK: Call 116 123, text SHOUT to 85258
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