Uneducated and Unwell

I became a Christian when I was around 21 years old. I started attending church when I was 19. I had just come home from living in Scottsdale, AZ for nearly a year while I attended culinary school. During that time in Arizona, my social anxiety kept me from making friends and going out, which led to self-isolation and loneliness, in turn fueling my always lurking depression.

I can look back and give these things names but at the time I had did not have words or awareness let alone diagnoses or treatment plans. I just knew I was sad and lonely.

And fat. Always fat.

I moved home after my Grandma died. She was 92 and the first person I ever really knew to pass away. This gave me a sense of mortality for the first time in my life and I decided it made no sense to live so far from my family. Also, I missed my dog. Completely true. If I were to give percentages to reason for me to quit culinary school and move home, it would be as follows:

20% my grandma dying
20% finding value in family
20% I was running out of money
3,000% I missed my dog

I remember sleeping a lot when I returned home. Like, A LOT alot. I had no job and no college classes. So I slept until noon most days. When I awoke I watched TV. I knew what was on every channel from noon to midnight. That was my schedule.

12pm – 12am: Watch TV
12am – 12pm: Sleep

There were bathroom breaks, an occasional shower and meals but I don’t remember leaving the house. I don’t remember seeing friends. I didn’t go for walks. I stopped responding to the calls and texts from the few friends I had made while out in Arizona.

To this day I can’t remember what got me off the couch other than an intrinsic understanding that how I was living was not ‘normal’ and kind of embarrassing. I had to breakup with the couch. Was it comfortable? Yes. Did it support me through a dark time? Absolutely. But it wasn’t a healthy relationship. We were seeing too much of each other and frankly, I had become way too co-dependent on it.

I enrolled in courses at the community college which would start after the New Year. It was the same New Year that I started my New Year’s Resolution diet.

I was uneducated and unwell.