When I was in my late twenties, I attended six baby showers in the span of a few months. At each of them, I was the only single woman without kids. Over baby names and dirty-diaper games, I would inevitably field the question from the other women: “Do you want children?” My response was always something like,Ěý“Maybe? I’m not sure. One day?”

That wasĚýan easy thing to say in myĚýtwenties. Children were an idea looming in the back of my mind, but it was anĚýabstract kind of thought. I had plenty of time to figure out if I wanted to be a mom. I suppose I assumed that I would have kids one day. I played by the rules when I was young;Ěýcareer,Ěýmarriage, and children were the path set out for me by society.

As I entered my thirties, my close friends started to have babies. The notion of a ticking biological clock entered my head, and I became aware that my childbearing years were starting to dwindle. Yet it was just a niggle that would occasionally pop inĚýhere and there. My thoughts and attention were elsewhere: surviving and grieving a broken engagement, switching career paths, andĚýcompeting at the highest level of my sport.

I would occasionally pay attention to that nagging voice in the back of my head, but my answer was still, always, I don’t know. It was odd for me.ĚýI figured that I’d wake up one day and suddenly know definitively whether or not I wanted children. I envied friends of mine who were strong in their convictions one way or another. For me, the indecisiveness continued.

Two major factors heavily influenced my uncertainty around having children: my life as a competitive endurance athlete, and my ongoing recovery from an eating disorder.

Female athletes often face a difficult decision around motherhood, asĚýour prime athletic years generally also fallĚýwithin our prime childbearing years. While there are many stories of elite athletes who successfully take a break from their sport to have a child, it’sĚýa risky calculation that could potentially mean the end of a competitive career.

I entered the height of myĚýathletic career in my early thirties, competingĚýyear-round in obstacle-course racing, ultrarunning, and other endurance events. Having a child was not on the top of my priority list. I assumed I’d find a partner and end up turning my attention to that chapter of my life in my mid-thirties. ByĚýthen, I figured, I would be done with my most competitive years as an athlete and want to focus on something new.

During my early and mid-thirties, however, I was also in the throes of a twenty-year battle with anorexia nervosa, tiptoeing towardĚýrecoveryĚýbut still very much in denial. I hadn’t had a periodĚýinĚýover ten years, and there were so many incredibly loaded questions that came up for me when I thought about pregnancy and childbirth.ĚýWas I even fertile anymore? Would my body changing during pregnancy trigger my eating disorder? What if I passed the eating disorder on to my children?

Factoring in the eating disorder weighed heavily on my mind. My ex-fiancĂ© once told me he would never have kids with me until I “got it under control.” While those words stung, I have to admit, I agreed: If I couldn’t even take care of myself and my own body, how could I be expected to take care of a child? The last thing I ever wanted to do was to model an unhealthy relationship with food forĚýmy child.

Like many other women, I decided to try and buy myself more time. In my mid-thirties,ĚýI started to explore the option of freezing my eggs. It took several months to even get an appointment with a fertility doctor, and then he laid out the procedure and the chances that it would even work for me: one round would maybe yieldĚý15 to 20 eggsĚýmax, and the probability of successfully inseminating, implanting, and carrying one to term was around 5Ěýpercent. And one round would cost $20,000. Further complicating the whole process was the fact that I’d need to take at least a month off from running to avoid , a condition in whichĚýthe ovaryĚýtwists around the ligaments that holds it, cutting off blood flow.

I tried to schedule the egg-freezing procedure forĚýthe off-season, but it proved difficult with the limitedĚýavailability of appointments. Still, I forged ahead, calling specialty pharmacies, getting quotes on medication costs, and setting up ultrasounds. The day before I was supposed to start, I attended a mandatory class on how to self-inject the multiple fertility drugs needed to prime ovaries for egg extraction. There were about 15 women in the room, and I was the only one there without a partner by her side. I left the class in tears, feeling utterly alone. With races coming up in the next few months, I called the clinic and canceled the entire procedure. I wasn’t sure exactly why at the time, butĚýI couldn’t go through with it.

Time ticked on. One relationship ended, another began. The longer my own indecision lasted, the more I realized that biology was going to end up making the decision for me.

It’s funny, most of the people in my life wouldn’t say I’m exactly the motherlyĚýtype. Frankly, I’ve never really liked kids that much. I don’t coo at babies. I hated babysitting when I was a teen. I’ve never even changed a diaper. I just don’t relate well to children—I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable around them.

SoĚýa few months ago, when I found myself 37 years old and recently single again, I could not have anticipated or prepared myself for the sudden wave of grief that came over me when I finally confronted the fact that my time may have run out. That maybe I wouldn’t ever have biological children, and that I wouldn’t have a say in it anymore.

Why was I grieving something so hard that I was never even sure I wanted? How do you mourn a life path that you never took? So many questions raced through my head.ĚýIf I was truly indifferent or undecided about having children all these years, why did I now suddenly feel a massive hole?

I sat with that and the feelings that came up with it. Honestly, I’m still sitting with them. I’m not so sure I’m grieving the loss of not having children, so much asĚýthe loss of it being my own choice. PerhapsĚýgrief is whatĚýhappens when we transition from one life phase to another.

Because I know that if I really wanted children, there are ways to do that: I could try a sperm donor, or I could consider adoption, both of which are wonderful options. And IĚýmay choose one of them at some point in the future.ĚýCall me selfish or old-fashioned, but I always wanted to raise children with a partner. I wanted it to be our decision, together. I have zero interest in doing it another way. Perhaps that lack of interest signals to me that the grief isn’t so much about children per seĚýbut the pervasive “what if” that one day, 20 years down the road, I will regret not taking that life path. By then it will be too late.

Our society values women more when they are mothers than when they aren’t. I’ve always had great admiration for working mothers who “do it all.” We areĚýtaught from a young age that an acceptable purpose in life is to raiseĚýa family and leave a legacy in the form of our genetic material. While my parents have never pressured me to have kids, I am aware that my sister and I are the last two of the Boone line, and our lineage will die with us. (My sister is child-free by choice.)

Lying in bed at night, I’ve started to ask myself questions like, Who will take care of me when I’m 90 years old? Who will grieve when I die? Who will pass my stories through generations? Let me tell you, that does nothing to help you fall asleep.

I told myself that those weren’t the right reasons for having children. I also couldn’t articulate reasons why I would want to have kids, other than being afraid I would regret not having them. But who instills that regret in me? I realize that I’ve internalized the overwhelming message from society that this is the life path I should take—that raising children is how to lead a valuable life. But is that really what I want?

There are a few things I do know. I have a lot of love to give—IĚýlove hard, and I love fiercely. Once I learned to take care of myself, I learned that I really like taking care of others. While children may be one avenue for that, it’s not the only way. It’s just the way that our society has normalized. I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that, like so many other things in my life, maybe the path that society has laid out is not the one for me. I’m sure that whichever path I take, and whether I decide to become a mother or not, there will be grief and loss. But there will also be joy and meaning, and that’s what I’ll hold on to.

The post What If I Run Out of Time to Decide About Kids? appeared first on şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Online.

In March, after sustaining my fourth stress fracture in the past three years, that it was time to take a step back and re-evaluate—to stop “fighting the water.” I’ve fought like hell these past few years to try and keep myself healthy and running like I love to do. And while I was tired of fighting for many reasons, internally I knew I had one big fight left in me. Because there was one thing that I hadn’t tackled head on in a very long time: my eating disorder.

I’m not dense: I’ve known for a long time that I’m the living, walking example of RED-S (also known as “the female athlete triad.”) I’ve known that probably a huge reason that my bones keep breaking is because I have a 20-year history with anorexia. But I wanted to be that person that could right the ship on my own. I’d been in and out of treatment so many times in my life, I wasn’t ready to admit that, in my mid-30’s, I was still battling it. There’s an awful sense of shame in feeling helpless to fix things when you pride yourself on being self-sufficient and able to do hard things. There’s a paralysis that comes with the cognitive dissonance of knowing what you need to do, but continually falling short of that.

But the hardest things to fix are the things that we don’t want to admit to ourselves. And I finally admitted to myself that I couldn’t do it on my own.

So in April, I took a leave of absence from work and headed to Seattle, where I’ve spent the last three months at , an eating disorder treatment facility.

I resisted more intensive treatment for so long because this isn’t my first rodeo—I was first diagnosed with anorexia nervosa at the age of 16. It started with a month-long hospitalization over Thanksgiving and Christmas in 1999 and spanned the rest of high school and college, with stints in various levels of treatment including a stay in a residential facility immediately post-college.

As a result of being in and out of treatment and being very visibly physically ill, I spent the vast majority of my youth as “the sick girl.” It’s a chapter in my life I haven’t talked about publicly, because it was an identity I was eager to shed. After my stay in residential treatment post-college, the disorder seemed to quiet. Finding myself in a solid state of recovery, I promised myself I’d move on. So I stopped talking about it. I went to law school, became an attorney, and buried the disorder in my past.

When I started racing and gaining attention for my athletic accomplishments, I didn’t talk about it during interviews. I didn’t mention it during my rise to dominance in obstacle racing. I didn’t tell interviewers who asked me about my athletic background that the reason I didn’t play sports in college was because I was too sick and weak to even walk up stairs, let alone play sports. I didn’t mention that my friends and family spent those years worried if I’d wake up in the morning. I didn’t want to “dwell in the past,” I told myself. In my mind, it was a chapter of my life that had passed, and one that maybe I would speak about when the time was “right,” but I could never figure out when that would be. I was racing strong, running strong, feeling strong, and, in my mind, I no longer identified with the disorder.

The reality is while I no longer defined my world around my eating disorder identity, for all of those years, I hadn’t let go of it fully. I hung on to disordered thoughts and eating habits. The only difference now was that I had sport to fixate on instead. And I was at the top of the obstacle racing world. I was a “normal” BMI, I was muscular, and I was winning every race, so it was easy to minimize my disordered relationship with food. It was easy to compartmentalize the thoughts and say, “Hush, I’ll deal with you later,” or to think that there actually wasn’t a problem because I was performing so well. It was OK to have a different diet or eating patterns because “I was an athlete.” It was OK to compare my body to other female athletes on the start line and to covet their abs, because that’s just “what women do.” It was acceptable to dehydrate myself and starve myself before cover shoots was part of the gig. As long as I was competing and winning, “just managing” with food didn’t seem like that big of a deal. I was getting away with it. So clearly, there was no problem.

Until there was.

While I had been able to fool myself, the body doesn’t forget so easily. It doesn’t forget the years of starvation and malnourishment. It doesn’t forget the magnitude of damage done to your growing bones: damage so bad, that I was diagnosed with osteopenia at age 16.
I was a ticking time bomb, which exploded with my first stress fracture (the !) in 2016. At the time I could write off one stress fracture as a fluke—it happens to all athletes. But the string of bone stress injuries that ensued are not so easy to write off.

Look, I’m not dumb. As I threw my hands in the air and proclaimed “I’m doing everything right” to avoid injury, I struggled with the growing internal self-flagellation for knowing that I wasn’t doing everything I could. I could do all the PT exercises, I could do the slow , I could take supplements, I could spend thousands of dollars on all the fancy recovery tools, but I knew one thing deep in my heart: there is no substitute for plentiful food and nourishment in order to prevent injuries.

Logically, I knew all of this, but making myself do it proved much harder. I spent the past year telling myself I’d make changes. I told myself that I’d rather be in a much larger body and competing healthy, than in a smaller body and be broken standing on the sidelines. That “looking the part” of an athlete doesn’t mean shit if you are too injured to even get to the start line. I knew these things. And at times, I thought I was succeeding in changing things.

But with the two weeks before Barkley this year, I hit bottom. With sport taken from me, I looked around at all the things that had propped up my “management” of the eating disorder, and realized my disorder was all I had left.

I had spent the past 20 years starving. Literally. Not just physically, but emotionally. I was tired of fighting, and so fucking tired of being hungry.

When I called up my parents to tell them I was checking into treatment, I wasn’t prepared for the flood of emotions that came with this decision, this time with the motivation coming solely from myself. ĚýI’ve been able to do some really hard things in my life, so I felt a sense of shame that I couldn’t fix this on my own. I felt guilty for taking a leave of absence from work and forcing my co-workers to shoulder my workload. I felt guilty for telling my sponsors I was disappearing from racing and competing for awhile. I questioned whether I actually needed treatment given that (a) everyone seems to have a fucked-up relationship with their food and body, and (b) I’d been “managing it” for so long.

The truth is that I’ve been “managing” a delusion: I’ve excelled at white-knuckling my way through the world of eating disorders, and I probably could have done so for the rest of my life. But it would have been a miserable, hollow, existence. More than just sport, the disorder had taken a toll on every aspect of my life: my relationships, my ability to connect, and hell—even my ability to feel my feelings. I had a sense that there was more that could be had from life, and I needed to take a leap of faith to do it—one that required stepping out of my life for the short term in order to re-engage in it fully in the long term.

I went into treatment thinking that my main goal was to re-learn how to feed and nourish myself in order stem the constant bone injuries. While that was an important part, for sure, what I learned was that I really needed to give space to everything else other than the food. Engaging in the disorder had enabled me to tunnel vision my life to avoid dealing with other things that were bigger and scarier: fears over the loss of sport, the loss of relevancy, grief over past relationships, the need and want for connection to others but going about it in ways would never satisfy that need…the list goes on.

Sometimes what you get isn’t always what you thought you needed. And at Opal, I started learned everything beyond just how to feed myself. I learned how to re-establish trust with my hunger after 20 years of ignoring it, and how to re-establish trust with my body after 20 years of mistrusting it. I learned that I can connect to others without the veneer of accomplishments, achievements or admiration.

I learned that it’s OK to want to compete and win as long as you have otherĚýmeans to fill you up when that doesn’t happen. I learned that it’s OKĚýto be sad and grieve when I can’t engage in my sport how I’d like to, but that I can survive and thrive without it. And most importantly, I learned that it’s OKĚý(and wonderful!) to feel my feelings.

While this post is about eating disorders, it’s also really not—it’s really about learning to live again. Because, as cliché as the saying is, eating disorders are never really about the food. But considering I have suffered from an eating disorder for over half of my life and considering I’m letting this out in the public now, I figured I might as well talk about a few things eating disorder-related that you will likely hear me speak and write about going forward.

There Is No Stereotypical Eating Disorder

I’m pausing to address this, because I know I know what you are all thinking: BUT WHAT ABOUT THE POP-TARTS? Shockingly, yes, even in the depths of my disorder, I ate the Pop-Tarts. And still do. My eating disorder doesn’t look like what many people would typically think of for a competitive athlete. As opposed to elimination of foods, my issues have always been eating “appropriate” amounts. I’ve been petrified of the feeling of fullness, and I couldn’t sit down to a full meal. I’ve spent the past twenty years of my life in a constant state of physical hunger and a constant mistrust of my body, which is an exhausting place to be (Note: this is particularly compounded by that has taught us to not trust our hunger cues, and to do whatever we can to not listen to them. Since when did having an appetite become a bad thing?)

Eating Disorders Come in All Sizes, and Health Comes in All Sizes

At Opal, I was surrounded by amazing people of all shapes and sizes, all struggling with disordered relationships with food. I connected with fellow clients who had similar restrictive behaviors as myself, but whose bodies looked entirely different. Opal follows the principles of “” and intuitive eating (caveat: not early in one’s recovery, but as the ultimate goal). I’ll admit that I initially resisted both concepts, but over my time there, I learned to confront my own internalized oppression and judgments around food, weight, and body size. I finally understood that body size is not as simple as the “calories in, calories out” model diet culture has told us our entire lives. Someone isn’t in a larger body because they “lack willpower” or they are lazy. Fat shaming and fat phobia are real. and (which I have, and benefit from) are real. I’ve become passionate about fighting and speaking out about thin privilege and fat phobia because, regardless of what size of body you are in, it hurts us all (I’m briefly touching on these here, but these concepts deserve a much more robust piece for a future date).

While I Have Faith I’ll Get There, I’m Not Recovered

I want to believe in full recovery—in a life completely free of any eating disordered thoughts. There are many stories that tell me this is possible. I’m currently in the stage where I have the thoughts—I note the thoughts without judgment—but I don’t act on them. Over time, the thoughts are getting quieter, but I know it’s not a quick fix. I’ve spent 20 years dealing with them—full recovery doesn’t happen in a few months. And while my time at Opal has ended, I’m well-aware that my journey has only just begun.

So why talk about this now? It’s a question I’ve asked myself, and one I’ve weighed heavily before writing about this. I could have easily stayed silent about what I’ve been doing the past few months. There’s value in protecting my recovery from the greater masses, as the peanut gallery can sometimes be exceptionally harsh.

But when I balance the factors, I’m confident this is stand I’m ready to take. For so long, I’ve prided myself on sharing my vulnerability in talking about injury and sport. But it’s been a selective vulnerability, and hiding my disorder has left me in a paralyzing state of cognitive dissonance, which has affected how I’ve been able to engage with the world. It’s led me to even feel MORE disconnected when I share selectively and don’t address the elephant that has been crowding my room for many years.

I’m aware that I’ve held judgments around the idea of “sharing my story.” I’m aware that phrase makes me cringe, as I’ve previously thought sharing could be construed as attention-seeking. And the last thing I’ve ever wanted was sympathy, or to proclaim that I’m somehow different. I’m not different: my story is all too common.

Thankfully, many brave women and men, both in and out of the athletic world, have stepped up to speak about their struggles (a special shout out to , who unknowingly influenced me to seek treatment at Opal after she about her disorder last year). But the vast majority of these voices speak about their eating disorder struggles in the past—once they have “beaten it,”Ěýor once they have recovered.

No one likes to talk about it when they are face down in the arena.

While I’m not quite face down in the arena anymore, I am slowly picking myself up and dusting myself off. And I think it’s important that we have these conversations at all stages of the fight. Disorder and shame thrive in the darkness and silence, so I’m thrusting my disorder and shame into the light where it has no place left to hide.

I have a lot of unknowns going forwards: the unknown of where my body size is going to land when continue to nourish it well, the unknown of how people will relate to or receive this, and, the scariest thing to face—the unknown of whether I’ve damaged by body so badly from so many years of starvation that, even with proper nourishment, I may still not be able to stem the bone injuries. But, for the first time in many years, I feel wholly aligned: my head, my heart, and my soul. And that, to me, is freedom.

For those of you out there who have paved the path and gave me the hope and courage to tackle recovery again, thank you. For those of you out there currently struggling and wondering if there is more to life, I see you. I wondered the same thing. I believe it now. And I’m holding space for you.

So this is me: flawed, disordered, and dealing with a mental illness for the past 20 years. I’m not ashamed anymore. I’m not afraid anymore. And, most importantly, I’m not starving anymore.

Instead, I’m full of hope.

This piece was on Amelia Boone’s blog.

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