I don’t have a good memory, but I will never forget the day a licensed dietician told me that I couldn’t play soccer. For the entire summer. Instead, I was to spend that time gorging on fatty foods while avoiding physical activity of any kind.  In what world does that qualify as sound medical advice, you ask? Probably only in America, but irony aside, there was reason for that bizarre doctor's appointment in my freshman year of high school.  

Because I was a pre-pubertal fifteen year old who weighed a measly 90 pounds, the doctors at Mercy Children’s Hospital didn’t believe my current food intake (three small meals a day plus a snack) could support my individual soccer training (three hours every weekday) and a future growth spurt. Previous visits to the hospital revealed that I had lost around 15 pounds and my blood pressure and heart rate had nosedived in the span of a year. The official diagnosis was anorexia. 

The strangest thing of all was that I dreaded playing soccer with anyone but myself ever since playing in a town league with decidedly abusive teammates. So when I made the jump to an elite club the winter before my diagnosis, the fear of failure would eat me alive on the way to practices. That fear was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Two months later, at the urging of my mom, I quit the team and started therapy. The anxiety had simply become too much to bear. 

So why did I keep practicing? Why try if I clearly hated the end goal? I could point to several factors—visions of college soccer grandeur, or a belief that willpower was king—but the real reason, as in most cases, lay deep in my childhood, when I was diagnosed with ADHD as a missionary kid living in Guatemala, Central America. There wasn’t a time I didn’t struggle with focus. Either I was too scatterbrained to succeed, or, as in the case of my soccer obsession, tunnel vision and perfectionism led me into a ditch. 

Breaking a habit is difficult, but changing a lifestyle is nearly impossible. I seemed to make this realization when I started crying halfway into my first supplementary meal, my tears mingling with the pasta and pesto I shoveled into my mouth. Over time, though, reluctance turned into indulgence, and indulgence into habit. Then COVID-19 struck, and I almost threw out my work ethic with the proverbial bath water. Out of the ditch and into the grave. 

Seemingly without purpose, or the order that a daily routine brings, I was lost, floating along the ever-changing current of my emotions. Only my love of reading and writing remained constant. So I focused on those. Then the summer of 2020 happened, and I was bitten by the journalism bug. 

Some months later, I started my school newspaper, The Talon, and was later named its student editor. We published four issues during the 2020-2021 school year. Now, as we prepare for a new year, our team has nearly doubled, allowing us to publish twice as frequently. Additionally, I got a job, started an internship at a local newspaper, and have maintained a healthy weight for some time now. It wasn’t easy to reach this point; it took reconciling my polarities of focus into a single, unified purpose. I’m by no means perfect, but it will do for now.