A thousand little heartbreaks

Several months ago, I was laying in bed on a Friday night when I heard it: the wailing through the wall. This wasn’t just crying—this was the sound of a heart breaking under the crushing weight of grief. It was a whole apartment away but the walls weren’t thick enough to mute her pain. 

Earlier that day, I had heard what happened: a broken off engagement.

I laid there in bed and I cried with that girl through the wall. In her sobs I heard the brokenness, the fear of uncertainty, and the deep loss of a dream and a future. I wanted so badly to take away her pain. Exactly a year earlier, I had been laying in my same bed with her same heartbroken sobs. 

I wonder if someone had heard me through the wall.

...

Here’s the part about being a YSA (young single adult) that doesn’t get talked about enough:

For every couple that meets in their FHE group a week after getting home from their missions (we love that for them!) and for every picture of an engagement ring on your feed against the backdrop of provo canyon and a guy in a plaid button-up (classic)

...there is someone crying through the wall.

Why is that important to talk about? I’m not here to put a damper on anyone’s happiness. I’m just here to paint a more accurate picture of what dating is like as a young single adult. At least, more accurate than the picture fresh-off-the-mission Christine had 4 years ago.

...

Earlier this year, I went on a few dates with a guy I had admired from a distance for a long time. He asked me out and it was so fun getting to know each other more. We rode bikes, ate frozen custard, watercolor painted in the canyon, and texted about the goodness of cinnamon life cereal and new music rec's.

After our third date, I had that feeling I was always scared to feel because history showed it wouldn’t last— excitement. I was excited! I figured it was my turn to plan our next date so I texted him with an invite to go hiking together the next weekend.

A few hours went by with no reply… which was weird. Then a whole day… which was concerning enough to merit this text to my best friend: “Remind me next time I ask a guy to do something to throw my phone in a lake for 24 hours so I don’t have to worry about when he’ll freaking respond.” Then two days… when I did what any rational girl would do in the situation and convinced myself it was over while blasting “Riding Solo“ in my car.

While I did consider my friends’ suggestions of alternative possibilities like maybe he was busy, hadn’t seen the text, lost his phone, or took an impromptu backpacking trip to the Uintas with no service… my hunch was right. He wasn’t interested and we haven’t seen each other since.

On the surface I was taking it well but the reality was that I was grieving.

I was grieving another little heartbreak.

I was mourning the loss of another brief excitement and sitting with the reality of yet another disappointment. 

People told me dating would be fun (and it is!) but they didn’t tell me about this part:

the part where I grieve a thousand little heartbreaks.

Every mini cycle of grief sucks. It’s hard to let go of feelings you have for someone. It’s hard even finding someone you like enough to have feelings for.

Getting to know fellow humans from scratch is exhausting on its own but searching for a life partner at the same time?! Good grief. No one sees the behind-the-scenes hoping, anticipating, connecting, being vulnerable, more hoping and anticipating, and then the rejecting and being rejected until you’re back at square one wondering if it’s even worth it and left with only one viable option: to take a complete hiatus from the male species until further notice. 

Yet somewhere in that mess come the break-throughs. 

I’m going to share a couple of my personal dating break-throughs (NOT to give some kind of widespread dating advice - hate it when people do that) but just to go back in time and give fresh-off-the-mission Christine a little heads-up on what to expect from dating in her early 20's.

...

Break-through #1: Rejection isn’t as personal as you think.

Let’s take it back to homeboy I had been excited about. 48 hours without a response had me ruminating over what the silence meant; maybe if I had been more fun and lighthearted on our last date, maybe if I were thinner and more athletic, maybe if…

It didn’t take long for my best friend and honorary therapist, Anna, to catch on to this internal dialogue and call it out. As we sat at the kitchen table on hour 47 with no reply, she said: “Maybe instead of asking: What does this say about me and how he feels about me? you say: What does this say about him?”

And that was the moment my mind blew up.

That whole time, I had been anxiously waiting on homeboy’s every move (or lack of moves) to interpret it to mean something about: 

his feelings toward me,

my value as a dating prospect,

and if this was going to go anywhere.

When really the whole time I should’ve been asking myself:

How do you feel? 

What do you need?

What does this say about him?

After 3 fun dates and 2 days without a response, I felt inadequate, anxious, and discouraged. I shouldn’t have to feel that way. I needed to feel like my interest was reciprocated. I didn’t. Those 48 hours of waiting and the weak, impersonal reply I got at the end showed me that he wasn’t interested. 

And that was okay.

The rejection sure felt personal; (surely, I told myself, if x, y, or z were different about me, he’d be in love with me!)

…but it probably wasn’t that personal.

Interesting, right? Interesting how this system of finding a life partner can have you questioning your own “enough”ness. Keep in mind here— the goal is to find your life partner. And yet the system has you turned against yourself: questioning your own value, worth, beauty, and abilities; a system where rejection can feel like a picky editor returning your dating profile with the comment: “almost there, could you just fix ________?”

The reality was—getting rejected by homeboy was probably a lot less personal than I thought.  Maybe it was a timing thing! Maybe he was interested in someone else! Maybe he just wasn’t feeling it! And let’s just say—for purposes of covering all our hypothetical bases here—that he was the picky editor hung up on one thing about me:

Then I wouldn’t want to be with him anyway.

(He was also gluten-free which could have made for an inconvenient life of baking bread with no one to share it with… but I digress)

...

Story #2: A few months ago, I was interacting with a different guy I liked in some group settings with some hints from both ends that maybe there was something there which I realize is incredibly vague but necessary to preserve his anonymity since he actually follows me on social media and is probably reading this right now unlike gluten-free boy who doesn’t.

Anyways...

Long story short, this potential fling just died out. I wanted it to go somewhere and really wanted to get to know him better but several clues led me to the conclusion that he wasn’t interested.

I was driving in my car thinking about it one day, when the thought came: “Let yourself grieve it.” Another little heartbreak. Sure, it was small. We never even went on a date. I’m not even sure if he was ever interested to begin with. But it was important to me. I felt disappointed.

Let yourself grieve it.

Break-through #2: If we can celebrate all the cute love milestones happening in people’s lives (as we should!), then we can also grieve the thousand little heartbreaks happening through the wall. They may be less visible, but they are just as valid.

These screenshots are from a video I recorded in August 2019. It was two months after the hardest break-up of my life. I had spent my whole summer grieving, relying on the promise from my friends and family that every day would get better.

It was getting worse.

Here’s the thing about grief for me: it’s a release. It’s a safe space with unconditional permission to feel the sadness, disappointment, and loss. Letting myself grieve means sitting with my own pain and validating it— both the big stuff and the small stuff. It’s a practice I hope I can translate to my friendships and other relationships.

I want to sit with you and grieve with you through the wall.

So consider this an open invitation to all of my friends, friends of friends, or complete strangers— I’m here to listen. Please reach out whenever you’re hurting or whenever the dating game just becomes too much.

I’m here to grieve with you.

...

Break-through #3: Marriage isn’t an achievement or a destination and (spoiler alert) only like 0-50% within your control. 

My dad had a college friend who got married in her early 40’s to another one of their college friends after his divorce. She seemed like such a badass lady; a successful lawyer, sweet, cute, fun— I asked my dad “why do you think it took her so long to get married?” 

Without hesitation, he said: “Because she needed to marry my friend.”

IMAGINE if that girl had spent 20+ years feeling like there was something wrong with her because she was still single while everyone else was having babies and grand babies. 

Repeat after me: Marriage is not an achievement or a destination (and only like 0-50% within our control).

If we treat marriage like an end-all ticket to happiness, then we’re setting up all the YSA’s in the Church to feel like they can’t live a full, happy life until they’re married.

I don’t know about you, but I’m personally not going to sit around like that waiting for my life to start.

...

So if I could go back in time and sit down for a chat with 20 year old Christine, I would tell her that first off, her husband is not waiting for her at FHE on Monday (thank goodness) and, more importantly, that she's about to grow in a thousand beautiful ways over the next thousand+ days... 

grieving a thousand little heartbreaks.

What an eating disorder taught me about social justice

“It is through our own transformed relationship with our bodies that we become champions for other bodies on our planet.”

—Sonya Renee-Taylor

I was a ballerina in high school. My coaches were my second parents and their studio was my second home. At Studio Roxander, I learned some of the most important lessons of my youth and starting in 2012, some of the most painful ones, too. It was the year I started my period and my body started changing. When you’re fifteen years old and spend 3-4 hours a day in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, you notice. You notice the extra tightness of your leotard, your chest that is suddenly fuller, curves around your thighs and hips that weren’t there before.

My idea of success as a dancer and by extension as a young woman was inextricably tied to the thin aesthetic promoted in ballet. When I pictured athleticism, grace, and discipline, I pictured thinness. When I pictured health, beauty, and respect, I pictured thinness. To me, it was all one and the same. That idea in my head wasn’t influenced by ballet singlehandedly; there were other factors but we’ll just call this thinness-promoting system: “diet culture.” At the time, 15 year old Christine didn’t know diet culture was to blame. When she saw changes in the studio mirror, she saw personal failure and she was determined to turn things around.

I was out to singlehandedly—by sheer grit and determination—lose weight and stop my period from coming back. There were a lot of sprints around my neighborhood at 1am, sit-ups on my bedroom floor and skipped breakfasts. There were a lot of days going to ballet hungry after eating only yogurt and vegetables for lunch and drives home planning how to avoid eating what my mom had made for dinner. Ironically but expectedly, as I fought to regain control, I started to lose it. A chaotic cycle of restricting and binging became my new normal.

In September of my senior year, the Nutcracker audition results came in. The star role of Sugar Plum Fairy had been decided between me and one of my friends I’d danced with for years. They chose her. My immediate thought was:

  If you were thinner, they would have chosen you. 

That Nutcracker season was spent trying to repair the physical damage I believed I had brought upon myself. If I had understood the cost I would pay in my pursuit of weight loss—the social anxiety it would ignite, the isolation and depression I would experience and the psychological and spiritual wounds it would inflict—I would have never embarked on the journey. But there was only one unshakeable thought on my mind:

If you were thinner, they would have chosen you. 

That December, one of my coaches pulled me aside and said “it’s like a light has gone out of you.” 

He was absolutely right.

A light had gone out and I had no idea how to get it back. My eating disorder and my own identity started to blur and I was losing myself in the process. I graduated high school and a few months later I was auditioning for the BYU ballet department. I made it onto the BYU Ballet Showcase Company and attributed it to the grace of God and the weight I had lost just prior to the audition (a week of salad, grapes, and rice cakes will do that for you). The next semester was psychological warfare for me. There was no reprieve from the exhausting, discriminatory dialogue in my head.

If you were thinner, 

you would get more attention.

If you looked like her,

you would be happier.

If you could just control yourself around food,

you wouldn't be such a failure.

You can’t see those disordered thoughts in this picture or the crippling shame and anxiety I felt on that photoshoot day. That's the isolating part about eating disorders and mental illness - oftentimes they're both invisible.

Here’s where I get to the awakening realization I had recently:

It was a narrative of discrimination and injustice.

The culture in ballet and the world at large that valued thinner bodies over larger ones was discriminating against those who fit in the latter group or (thanks to body dysmorphia) those who believed they fit into the latter group. That cultural reality coupled with her innate perfectionism led 15 year old Christine to try anything & everything to change the body she had in favor of one that she perceived as better, more acceptable, and more worthy.

Discrimination. 

I didn’t see it as discrimination then. It took me 4 years after that Nutcracker season in high school to confront this injustice that no one seemed to talk about.

In 2018, I was sitting in group therapy with nine other women my age listening to their stories when I noticed this common pattern:

a growing girl’s body —>

comparison —>

external and internal discrimination —>

shame —>

disordered efforts to meet an ideal —>

falling into the clutches of an eating disorder —>

rock bottom.

I realized that I wasn’t the only one. The injustice was shared. The discrimination was rampant. Something had to be done.

I started to find the courage to talk about it through other people. In November 2018, my dear friend Kyle came out as gay in a beautiful blog post entitled “God doesn’t make mistakes.” His story began with feeling out of place and ashamed in a culture that struggled to understand and accept LGBTQ+ people. When I read it, I cried. I felt so deeply his shame. I felt so keenly his sense of isolation and never being enough. In a way, our stories were the same; we had both experienced discrimination, whether directly or perceived, against the bodies we had and tried to change them into versions society would deem more acceptable and worthy. When I read Kyle's story, I longed to one day have the courage to do what he did: to speak up about my struggle and advocate for other bodies.

Over time, I learned that this desire to advocate for other bodies had a name: 

Social Justice.

“Many of the ills of the world can actually be solved through radical self-love. Racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia, ageism, fatphobia are algorithms created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body. A radical self-love world is a world free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies.”

—Sonya Renee-Taylor

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed when a white police officer knelt on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. This moment sparked what some say is the biggest civil rights movement in history. I found out about George Floyd on social media. I saw several of the eating disorder therapists and activists I follow expressing their concern, anger, and grief, pausing posting their own content for weeks to come. Then I noticed some of my LGBTQ+ and vocal ally friends marching in protests... then minority friends speaking out, including Latino and Asian friends. This isn’t to say that my white friends were silent but my ED, LGBTQ+, and minority friends seemed to be some of the first and some of the most vocal.

Why?

As I've pondered it, the conclusion I’ve come to is this:

Because for them, Black Lives Matter was a social justice issue. And they know all too well what that’s like.

Each of them had been personally affected by an “algorithm created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body.” Whether it was racism, homophobia, or fatphobia, they had all personally known discrimination. They were not born into the kind of privilege that would have spared them the personal experience of social injustice.

They lived it.

And they weren’t about to sit back and watch it happen to someone else. 

I have so much to learn and I am so imperfect. My story of discrimination is a subtle, privileged one in a vast sea of stories of people who have been marginalized because of their body size, color, ethnicity, age, sex, or ability. In his recent conference talk, the prophet of my Church, Russell M. Nelson, pleaded: “I call upon our members everywhere to lead out in abandoning attitudes and actions of prejudice. I plead with you to promote respect for all of God’s children.” 

Lead out. 

What a beautiful call to action.

God loves all of His children—that’s one thing I know for sure.

What if we lived in a world that sees people through His perfectly compassionate and omnipotent eyes?

What if we lived in a world that celebrates the diversity He so beautifully and intentionally designed?

What if we lived in a world that actively acknowledges and seeks to root out the harmful, implicit bias we all experience because we aren't God and we have limited life backgrounds and experiences?

What if all of God's children enjoyed the same, basic human rights regardless of the body they exist in? 

What if we lived in a world "free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies”?

I don’t have one single answer but I do have a few ideas:

Black Lives Matter

LGBTQ+ lives matter

Women and minorities matter

Diet culture and fatphobia can go to hell

& the core message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ:

Love one another as Jesus loves you.

Since fifteen year old Christine wasn’t able to be a champion for her own body, I’m going to try my very best to be a champion for other bodies on this planet.

At the end of the day, it’s not just a social justice issue—it’s a human issue.

It’s a loving your neighbor issue.

And that’s worth the fight.

ps. #VOTE2020