I think advice means more when it comes from someone who’s been there.  During the most difficult times in my life, there have been many well-meaning folks offering care and concern, and I’m thankful for them. But the ones who touched my heart the most were those that I knew had been through the same or similar situations; the ones who could TRULY empathize. The ones who didn’t even have to say much, but could just give me a hug that meant, “I get it. No, really: I GET IT.“

I haven’t had a horrible life; I’ve got more blessings than I can count. Gratitude is part of my lifestyle. 

I haven’t had a perfect life either. I’ve been through some things. They build character. They teach lessons. They help to mold me into the person God wants me to become. 

So, since the whole idea behind the Tightrope Teaching blog is about seeking balance, I want to begin our journey together by telling you that I come from a place of significant imbalance. In many ways, it’s only when the pendulum of our lives swings to one extreme that we recognize the need for balance and begin seeking it. 

I’ll start with the eating disorders.

Stereotypes

I grew up as an active, happy kid. Both of my parents were physically fit and health conscious; we never drank soda or ate white bread, and I was only allowed to have sugary cereals (Cocoa Pebbles were my top choice) at maximum 4x per year, as a reward for a good report card in school. I do recall overhearing my mom talking with her friends about dieting even though she was already thin, but it didn’t strike me as abnormal.

Dancing was my sport of choice; by age 9 I was spending about 20 hours per week at the studio. However, my natural body type is not the ultra-thin/super-flexible “ballerina” body, but rather is more suited to modern dance (sturdy, solid, and muscular…but not terribly flexible). So I did have a bit of envy toward other girls who were thinner sometimes.

But now I’m going to defy your stereotype: dancing is not why I became anorexic and bulimic. Hearing my mom talk about diets is not why. I wasn’t bullied as a kid or teased and called fat. It was actually far simpler and stupider than that.

Boredom & Control

I clearly remember the summer I turned 15: I didn’t have a driver’s license yet, and my mom was at work all day. Being an only child and not living within walking distance to any of my friends, I was pretty bored during the day (mind you, this was also the late 90’s, so cell phones and internet really weren’t a thing). 

So I started exercising a lot and counting calories because I was bored. I would read the nutrition labels and carefully measure out serving sizes so that I knew exactly how many calories I was taking in. Then, I would challenge myself to eat a little less each day. By the end of the summer, I had worked myself down to 300 calories a day, and dropped an unhealthy amount of weight: I went from a size 8 to a size 0 in two months.  My mom was worried about me, but when she would ask why I wasn’t eating dinner, I would lie and tell her I had eaten before she got home. I wasn’t usually dishonest like that, but by then I had become obsessed with this secret control.

Most people who develop eating disorders do so because of some trauma or a situation that warps their self-perception. I, on the other hand, went from a healthy mental state to actually working myself into an unhealthy obsession simply because I was bored. (I told you it was stupid, right?)

My mom eventually made me go to a nutritionist who taught me about portion control, which just gave me more tools to micro-manage my food intake. When it got too difficult to avoid eating around others, I eventually developed a combination of bulimia and binge eating disorder (not pretty). Things in my life seemed fine on the surface: I had good friends, a steady boyfriend who treated me well, and good grades. But the eating disorders developed into an absolute obsession that I lost control of: instead, they now controlled me.

I struggled for about 10 years with food. Even once I stopped the bulimia and binge eating (both made me just feel like crap and I was worried about wearing the enamel off my teeth from stomach acid), I still thought about food and calories obsessively, all the time, every day. It was the first thing I woke up thinking about and the last thing on my mind before falling asleep: mentally adding up the calories of what I ate that day and then either congratulating myself for staying within “acceptable” self-defined limits, or shaming myself for going over them. I kept it a secret from everyone, even those closest to me. I hated it, but it became part of my normal. Talk about unbalanced. 

Healed

November 26, 2001: I was with my best friend around 11pm in the corner booth of a diner. It was our freshman year of college and I hadn’t seen her since the summer, but we were both home for Thanksgiving. I didn’t go to the diner that night expecting to meet Jesus, but that’s exactly what happened. 

He was personal, undeniable, and real. He was everything I didn’t know I’d been looking for.

The next day was filled with a lot of inexplicable and wonderful things happening in my mind and heart; for the sake of brevity though, I’ll skip to this part: it was around 3pm when I realized: “I have not THOUGHT about food or calories ONCE today!” I was shocked.

That may sound unimpressive or unremarkable to you, but if you have ever dealt with any kind of addiction or obsession, then you know that it becomes all-consuming. It occupies your every thought. It creeps in when you don’t want it. It holds you in its grip and won’t let you turn away.

I had been in bondage to those obsessive thoughts every day for 10 years. 

And now it was just gone. 

Gone. 

I know that’s not how healing from food obsession and disorders happens for most people, but it’s what happened to me. I experienced instant, permanent, miraculous healing.

22 years later, food is important to me, but in a totally different way: I love to eat, cook, and Food Network TV competitions are my favorite TV! Learning about food and health is important to me now so that I can keep my family and myself healthy, and help my children develop good habits.  I eat in a balanced way and never shame myself.

Control and perfection in the classroom

For me, having an eating disorder (or 3) was never about “feeling fat”; it was about control. Psychoanalyzing myself now, I think that the tumult of adolescence (when even your own body and emotions are not entirely within your control) makes us crave control.

Maybe you’ve never struggled with eating disorders or obsessive thoughts, but there may be some area of your life that is out of balance. And unfortunately, this job lends itself particularly well to imbalance.

Teaching is a profession that will consume you 24/7 if you let it. The work literally never stops.

There is always more planning to be done, more you can do to be creative or differentiate, more professional development, more events and committees you can get involved in…You can work nights, weekends, and summers if you really want to. So how do we stop ourselves? How do we erect healthy personal boundaries without sacrificing quality in our work? Where’s the balance?

3 Steps to a Healthier Balance

• Give the students more control. Teacher-centered vs student-centered classrooms: which one does yours look like more often? I will admit that when I have a vision for something and the way I want it to be, it can be very, very difficult to give up that control in the name of student agency and choice. I worry that they won’t “do” it right. But the truth is, if they are actively engaged in learning in a way that makes sense to them and fuels their curiosity to learn more, that is the right way to do it. And it’s better than perfectly-planned lessons that fall on sleeping ears.

• Learn when to let go. Then there are the students who throw off your growth metrics, right? You can be an acrobat and bend over backward for them, doing literally everything possible to help them succeed, but if they don’t accept the help, don’t do the work, or just don’t show up to class, it’s just not going to happen. It’s out of your hands. You can’t control them. You can lead a horse to water… So at some point, you have to decide when you will say “I’ve done my part” and just let that horse do what he’s going to do (or not do).

• Say NO. This is hard to do, especially as a new employee. You want to demonstrate that you are willing to help, reliable and valuable as a team player, and invested in your community. You want to do these things either because of enthusiasm, establishing job security, or both; I get that.

I’m not telling you to say NO to everything; I’m saying don’t say YES to everything.

Recognize that you are human: you need sleep and time to recharge and nurture your personal relationships outside of school.

Choose a short list of essentials that are important for you to say “yes” to, and politely decline the rest.

Here’s a real-life example of balancing things out by saying “no”: I spent most of my career teaching in one school and was well-established. When our family moved cross country and I was all of a sudden in a brand new place and brand new school, it was like first-year teaching all over again (translation: a lot of late nights and extra work).

In addition to all my regular classroom teacher duties, I volunteered to be a student club advisor and also joined a district committee for developing new writing curriculum. I wanted to show that I was “all in.” Most days I got home from work around 5 or 5:30, and by the end of the school year, the need to spend more time with my husband and kids had really come to the forefront of my heart.

So year #2 in the new school, I began with a commitment to strike a better balance.

The committee had been paused and I didn’t volunteer for a new one, even when given the chance.

I declined the club advisor role for year 2 so that I could have more planning time for my own classroom during the workday.

I made a personal commitment to my husband and myself that unless there was a specific meeting scheduled after school, I would leave each day by 3:30pm.

I am still a team player at my school and actively strive to do my best work; but I have deliberately chosen to set certain boundaries on my most precious resource (time), so that I can prioritize the people who are most precious to me.

Here’s the thing you ultimately have to learn about life in order to have any hope of having a balanced perspective on it: MOST things are outside of your control, and that’s OK. You will be OK.

The only things we CAN control (and must accept responsibility for) are our own words, actions, and emotions. Outside of that, no thing and no one is reliably within our control. The sooner you accept this, the sooner you can relax about life and breathe a little easier. I’m not saying it’s easy to give up that wheel; trust me, I have a Type-A driver personality much of the time! For me, this is one of the most comforting things about faith: I KNOW that I can’t control most things, even the things that are the most important to me. BUT IT’S OK because I know that God IS in control of everything, and He is SO MUCH BETTER AT IT than I am!

I think God knew I needed this lesson about control and so He gave me twins as my first born. People would often ask me, “How do you do it with two??” My answer was always, “You just do it.” But part of that success is not worrying about things like matching socks (our house is sort of infamous in my family for this…if it’s clean and it fits, off we go)! I said yes to enjoying time with my babies and no to worrying about matching socks. Seems simple and maybe like it couldn’t make that much of an impact, but it really had a way of clarifying my mind and perspective in a larger way.

So choose your essentials, and give your whole self to them. Let go of your need to control every thing, and you will be be so liberated by it. There is wisdom and power in focusing ourselves on doing a few things exceptionally well vs doing many things kind of well. Find your direction, and walk confidently in it.