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Building Your Own Hero

What I love about the concept behind Jane McGonigal’s app Super Better is that you are able to choose your “quest” for wellness from a number of different categories. The only caveat then is that your quest line is specific to the area you choose to work on. For example, let’s say you want to work coping with anxiety. Your tasks for the day are specific to reducing anxiety (meditate for 30 mins, identify a coping skill, etc.). The app even links you to resources like Headspace, which is awesome. But let’s say you want to work on not binge eating at the same time, oh, and also start being more financially responsible. You can set up a couple different goals, but then you have like, 10 different tasks to complete that day. Also, you have a full time job, dishes in the sink, bills to pay, and a social life to maintain. Wellness starts to look more like an assignment than an investment. 

Back when I was getting my MSW, one of the common themes of any clinical assessment course is the notion of co-occurring disorders and how to treat them. “What is a co-occurring disorder,” you say? Simply put, it’s when a client is diagnosed with more than one mental health disorder. Co-occurring disorders are new normal in clinical interventions, because guess what, people aren’t paragraphs in the DSM. If you’re struggling with substance abuse, there’s a pretty big chance you started self-medicating to alleviate symptoms of another condition (social anxiety, PTSD, insomnia, chronic pain, take your pick). You might develop depression while dealing with another physical or mental illness. What this means for the mental health professionals of the world is that treatment plans MUST be specific to the client in order to help people overcome their illnesses. This is where the idea of holistic care really starts to get implemented in treatment of mental illness. 

But what if you don’t have a chronic mental/physical illness? Well, the same concept applies to self-care and wellness. Let’s say you are a habitual drinker and you want to drink less alcohol throughout the week. You decide not to change anything about your lifestyle, and just say “I’ll drink less.” So you go out with friends who you know will pressure you to drink, you spend just as much money as you would if were drinking, you make no effort to avoid stressors, you don’t identify a support system, and you eat the same grease-filled food that tempts you when you’re hungover. How long do you think you’ll go without drinking? You need to look at the big picture, and focus on a number of factors that contribute to meeting your goals. 

Okay, now that I’ve taken off my social worker hat, time to put my nerd hat back on, I find it much more comfortable (I imagine my social worker hat is probably a tight fitting, but adorable sun hat that does not fit my larger-than-normal head. My nerd hat is probably a drangonscale helmet. Much better). The great thing about modeling a wellness plan after character builds in video games is that most systems already have a built-in holistic approach, albeit tailored for taking out monsters and bosses, rather than taking note of healthy coping skills. Think about it, the most common stats in any game are HP, strength, intelligence, vitality, dexterity (or agility), and stamina, with a few variations. Who knew your Diablo 3 Demon Hunter could be your model for living your best life! 

When I wrote out my wellness plan, I decided to go with the character build from a good old favorite, Dark Souls. Dark Souls uses 10 stats: Health, Strength, Stamina, Vitality, Intelligence, Attunement, Poise, Dexterity, Luck, and Faith.  Obviously, I am not planning on finding the Lords of Cinder, or searching for Dranglaeic. But you do need strength to complete a longer workout, you need vitality to build up your defenses during a struggle, and you need poise when an unexpected event tries to knock you down. All of these stats can be redefined to fit your experience and work towards “leveling up.” How you decide to level up is up to you, and long as you level up! Because anyone who plays DS knows what a pain in the ass it is to go hollow. 

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Planning for the Journey

So last night, while leveling up my DS3 character, I had a thought. I will shamefully admit that it takes me more than a couple minutes to determine how I will level up. It seems sometimes that there are too many attributes to choose from. My internal monologue bounces around:

“Do I want to raise attunement and make my character able to cast spells? No that’s pointless, my character isn’t a spellcaster. How about stamina so I can have more successive hits? But does that matter, if my character doesn’t do enough damage per hit? Maybe I should level up strength instead.”

Then, in a moment of self-realization, I thought about just how much time I spend putting effort into improving my heroes in video games. I can’t be the only one who’s thought about this. Then, a more dismaying thought crossed my mind: I don’t spend half that time thinking about improving myself.

But in a game it’s just so damn easy! If you’ve ever played Fable, you know that in order to make your character lose weight, all you have to do is BUY CELERY and make your character eat it! Eat celery, boom, +5 skinny points, or whatever.

Or look at any other game. All you have to do is level up in order to get smarter, stronger, or more dexterous. Your Nord doesn’t have to do CrossFit for 90 days in order to slay a dragon. Your Wood Elf doesn’t have to work toward a yoga bod in order to gain more dexterity.

I should also mention that making attempts to eat healthier and live a better lifestyle is not a new concept to me (one would hope so after 24 years). This is not my first rodeo. Since college, I have gone from gaining 50 pounds to losing 40 to gaining 70+ back.  Any time I have lost weight, the focus has been solely on weight loss. But like any game character, buffing your hero in only one skill tends to leave you vulnerable when it comes to your other attributes.

So, here’s the new plan: set course for a comprehensive journey towards living better in general, and focus on every aspect of health, whether it be mental, physical, emotional, even financial. This will be no easy task. In order to plan for the journey, I’m going have to set up my character (meaning me). Instead of setting off blindly down a path, every gamer knows they have to pick a class, a race, general build for their character (unless you’re the brave soul who starts off with a Deprived class. More power to ya, that ain’t me). 

For those of you who are thinking you’ve seen wellness and self-help strategies like this before, you’re not wrong. You’re perfectly obligated to tell me I’m ripping off the wonderful @emilyvgordon and Super You. If you’re into deep cuts, you can also tell me I’m ripping off Jane McGonigal and Super Better (lots of supers), because you’re not wrong. Confronting wellness goals like it’s a game is nothing new, but I’ll be taking their lovely ideas and taking a more comprehensive approach for the selfish reason of tailoring their approaches to better fit my experience. 

So, here we are, in the pre-planning stages of this journey. I’m sure it will be filled with lovely boss fights and probably some level farming, hopefully some loot will show up along the way. Without any further ado, let’s begin! 

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Notes on Fear

How to handle situations that scare you. (Words by Emily, drawings and lettering by Esme.)

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The Backstory

Where did it start?

The first time I remember binge eating was when I was 7 years old. There was a bag of Halloween candy atop a shelf in the guest room at my house in Franklin Lakes, New Jersey. I imagine my mom never intended us to find it. Candy was never really allowed in the house. If we were lucky, there'd be an occasional Skinny Cow in the freezer, which my sister and I relentlessly tried to get a hold of first. I can't remember ever enjoying vegetables as a child. It was always a struggle to finish my carrots that came with every dinner. I'd sneak them to my Golden Retriever when my mom's back was turned. Vegetables were always an incentive in the house, so the precedent was set: vegetables are an adversary to be vanquished to get to the ivory tower containing whatever savory goodness was on the plate. I'm sure this was never my mom's intention, to foster this adversarial relationship with healthy eating. She wasn't much for cooking when I was growing up, and never thought to present healthy food in a way that was appealing or creative to me or my siblings. Can you blame her, coming from a dysfunctional family background of nine in an Irish-Italian household? My grandma is probably delusional and self-centered enough to believe that the lectures she gave her children were proper nourishment, and the fried salami ends bought from the local butcher shop were an additional treat. What a prize.

Anyway, the incident with the Halloween candy was isolated, at least it seemed that way at the time. I remember thinking after that binge session that what I had done wasn't normal. All the adages of spoiling your dinner and getting a tummy ache and the countless euphemisms that people use instead of saying "hey kid, making that pattern of eating a habit will spike your insulin and fast track you to Type 2 Diabetes and a foot amputation" ran through my head. I had done a bad thing. But at the same time, it felt like a great thing, too. So much chocolate and sugar, what 7-year-old is self-aware enough to assess short-term reward against long-term consequences?  Not I. But it seemed inconsequential at the time. The metabolism of a fairly physically active 7-year-old is not going to shit the bed after one candy binge. I’d be fine, until the move happened.

After 3rd grade, my parents informed my siblings that we would be moving again, this time to Naperville, Illinois. In my 8 year stint on this planet, it would be my 6th move.  I don’t remember being particularly upset about it.  Making friends after every move never seemed terribly difficult during the other moves, so why would this time be any different? I was fairly popular in New Jersey. I remember walking around the soccer field during recess by myself, by choice. I remember a lunch supervisor coming up to me frequently asking me in a thick Polish accent “Olivia, where are your friends?” They were on the playground doing whatever it was that 8-year-olds in the early 2000’s did together, and no one was kicking me off the playground. I had spent all day in the classroom with them, and ate with them at lunch. I was good to be 20 minutes without them and spend some quality daydreaming time. Bitch, I have friends, I should’ve noted to the supervisor. It would’ve gone over great, I’m certain.  

Enter 9-year-old Olivia, fresh meat at Elmwood Elementary School. The classroom was set up in clusters of 4 connected desks, which was different from the conversational rows I was used to at my old school. Everyone in Naperville knew each other by then.  They had broken off into their respective friend groups, for the most part. As far as these 9-year-olds were concerned, they were who they were going to be for the rest of their lives, quarter life crisis be damned. Hopefully some of them got the chance to backpack around Europe before settling into their mediocre corporate lives and Spongebob themed 3-piece suits. If I got stuck in one of those clusters with kids who had no interest in expanding their friend circle, I’d resign to drawing forest animals and Pokemon and daydreaming that dragons were real. So, needless to say, I was not quite the chameleon that I needed to be to merge into the blonde, N’Sync listening, Lip Smackers wearing fembots-in-training that made up the majority of Naperville girls.

Nothing about this account so far could possibly imply that I was bullied (spoiler alert: I was). First, I was bullied for being different. Being bullied for being fat would come later. I needed to be alienated first. I didn’t watch Spongebob, which in case you didn’t know, was the gold standard for Naperville kids in the early 2000’s. I preferred Backstreet Boys, but N’Sync was the preferred boy band of my classmates. I was a Crip in a Blood world. I liked fantasy and science fiction. My sister introduced me to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and all bets were off. I was set down the path of nerdom, but as any nerd knows, the adventure is much harder if you’re solo questing. To translate that last sentence for the non-nerds: I had no real friends. I had playdates with other kids, but nothing really stuck. But the names stuck, “weirdo, freak, lesbo, gross, fat, ugly bitch,” to name a few of the commonplace ones (oh, but by 8th grade I developed really big tits, so at least I had that going for me. I remember my guy friend reporting to me that even though I was the notorious goth weirdo, the wrestling team loved my boobs. Aw, thanks guys, self-worth attribute +1).

By the end of 4th grade, I had descended far down the social totem pole, but not so far that I had lost the desperate ambition to climb back up. After all, walking around alone at recess loses its luster when it’s involuntary. So I let the popular girls continue to make their digs, and I would take it. We’re all friends, right? Well, those friends didn’t call to my house for play dates, and they sure as hell never referenced to me as “friend.” So, I sat at home, lost in my computer games or buried in my books. The satisfied feeling you get from laughing  and talking with friends wasn’t there. Something needed to fill the void. But what? Somewhere in my developing brain, with so few long-term memories and subconscious cues to choose from, the answer revealed itself: sugar, chocolate, potato chips, potato-and-chocolate chip cookies (thank God Pinterest wasn’t a thing yet).

And so it started. There was just one small problem. My mom is an Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher style (no offense to Robert Downey Jr.).  By Iron Lady, I mean she is a seasoned Ironman Triathlon participant. The picture of health, from what I remember, save the Chardonnay obsession. That meant no unhealthy food in the house. Only low-fat, low-sugar sweets. So how does a 10-year-old looking for a salt and sugar fix compensate if there’s not a potato chip or candy bar in sight? Why, she eats 10 lower-sugar snacks in one sitting, hoping to get the same resolve of course. I started eating everything and anything remotely sweet. If there were no Kudos bars or Skinny Cow ice cream sandwiches to be found, balls of white bread dipped Hershey’s in chocolate syrup would suffice (I wish I were joking). Oh, also, a few chocolatey Cliff Bars would do in a pinch (you know, the ones that are supposed to replace an entire fucking meal).

But that short-term comfort only lasted so long, and I happened to be the only one who ignorantly saw the temporary benefit of it. My mom and I played a years-long game of hide-and-seek, but my mom and I used objects as our playing pieces. My mom’s pieces were the hidden snacks, and my pieces were the hidden wrappers. We’d find our usual hiding places for both, and yelling would ensue once we found each other. I must’ve felt like I was fighting a battle on both fronts. On one end, I used by binge eating Guerilla tactics to combat the feelings of isolation from my peers, and stealth tactics to hide food from my mom. I don’t think it would be crazy to interpret this as a pretty shitty setup for my relationship with food as a whole, no?

So, I guess that’s where my binge-eating story begins. But where does it end? I guess the more important question is “how does it end,” or even “does it end?” I guess you can’t start a solid story without a solid beginning, so that’s what this will be. It’s time to start this journey with a reference point, which is what I suppose this long and psychoanalytic account will serve as. But I’m not crazy about the idea of doing this alone. And as every seasoned nerd knows, solo questing is harder than going at it with a party.