Over the past few weeks, a lot has changed.
At the beginning of August, I wrote the hardest exams of my life: my licensing exams. It was five days of misery that every future ND must go through, but I had never before come up against the sheer limits of my knowledge in this way before. It was definitely rattling. After all, I thought I was smart.
We waited 6 agonizing weeks for our results and I just found out to my utter relief that I passed. There is no bigger comfort to me knowing that I will never have to write those exams again, that my student life is officially over.
Of course, now I have to face the prospect of paying back a small mortgage’s worth of student loans while self-employed. Yikes.
Something big I noticed, though, after my body and mind settled a little in the post-exam fallout. It definitely took a few weeks to get my mojo back, especially in the gym, but now that the dust is settled I’m noticing something interesting with respect to food.
I notice that I can stop eating when I want to. I can eat half of something tasty/chocolaty, and actually be able to heed the signals my body sends to me as to when it’s had enough. It’s bizarre and refreshing. It might be temporary as it has been before, but I’m paying attention to it and I like it.
I often credit my disordered eating in part to trying to escape a situation I felt stuck in. I have been sick and tired of being a student for a long time, and I ate a lot when traveling to school or sitting in class. I didn’t know what else to do to deal with my emotions and discomfort about being in a place I was no longer happy to be in, so I stuffed those emotions down my throat. I looked to food to provide some happiness that was missing in my life; to temporarily solve my problems.
Maybe I don’t have to anymore. At least it’s something I’m mulling over.
Journey to Well(Enough) 