By now, I hope all my chipmunks are feeling optimistic. That your capacity to get your shit together is inversely proportional to these dwindling pages, and you’re running a white-gloved finger around that mental dust buildup like Mary fucking Poppins. Simons are probably working their twelve steps and then inventing new deep-breathing exercises because they just can’t help themselves, but still. Progress.
We’re almost ready to find out what the other side has to offer, but—and I want to be completely honest with you—we haven’t quite hit rock bottom yet on the Deep Shit Ravine. For that, I’ve been preparing a special guided tour. I’m going to tell you about a time when I had to get my shit together on an intensely deep psychological level—one that made quitting my job and filling out a chart on my refrigerator look mighty shallow by comparison.
And I hope it will speak to any reader—Simon or otherwise—who’s gone through something similar.
In order to tell this story properly I have to get a bit more serious, which means pressing Pause on the naughty puns and scatological humor for, like, four pages. Will you indulge me? I promise we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled tomfoolery in no time.
Pinky swear.
I was what you might call a chubby kid. I was also smart and funny and capable of memorizing “We Didn’t Start the Fire” in its entirety, but my classmates mostly focused on the chubby thing. There was a lot of snickering and at least one beach field trip that left permanent scars on my fragile young psyche. By the time high school rolled around, I wanted nothing more than to waltz into my freshman year with a new lease on life and new size-four acid-washed Palmetto’s.
So, like any budding Simon, I got motivated and got to work.
At thirteen years old, dieting via strict calorie control was the easiest thing in the world; my metabolism hadn’t yet taken early retirement and the pounds melted away. But obsessive calorie counting eventually (some might say “predictably”) led me down the path to outright anorexia—a slowly peeled orange for lunch, dinner measured out in half-cup increments of rice and chicken. In fact, I only ate dinner at all to keep up appearances around my family. If I could avoid ingesting food back then, I did.
You might say I had excellent willpower.
Eventually I was officially thin and confident about my body for the first time I could remember, but once an overachiever, always an overachiever. What if I could crack the code and return to enjoying tasty food in my mouth, but not gain back any weight? Brilliant! Surely I was the first person to think of swallowing dinner and then regurgitating it like a mama bird minus the hungry chicks.
Soon it was “Look at me, eating this cheeseburger. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along [while I throw it up in the bathroom or sometimes by the side of the road during my daily jog].” Graduating from anorexia to bulimia kept me skinny, but no matter how good I felt about my body, by this time my body itself felt pretty gross.
I had a sore throat, puffy eyes, and permanent cotton mouth. Because I wasn’t actually digesting any nutrients, I was anemic, which meant I had to take nasty iron pills that caused me to burp uncontrollably all day. I’d transformed from a chubby kid into an emaciated 100-pound teen with a very attractive belching habit. (In a doubly ironic twist, the iron pills made me nauseous unless taken with food.)
But the gory details of an eating disorder aren’t the point here. It’s how I found my way out of it that I hope can help people with similar problems, as well as in a more general context.
Anyone who has endured self-harming behavior of any kind will recognize the feeling of knowing that what you’re doing is unhealthy and untenable, but also feeling powerless to change it. All day, every day, one Oh shit moment on top of another. Your brain becomes so cluttered, you can’t even locate joy, let alone access it. It’s buried real, real deep.
At sixteen years old, I didn’t really understand the concept of hiring a professional to fix what was wrong with me, nor did I have the means to do so. But I knew I needed help. I decided my best chance to put a stop to my behavior was to tell my mother what was going on with me—confess to my problem, and be held accountable to her, instead of to myself. It was the Who Raised You? strategy in its purest form.
The first small, manageable chunk of this plan would be saying the words: I need help.
I picked a night when we’d be alone in the house, sat down across from her on the living room couch, and spit those motherfuckers out. It was a scary, panicky moment of commitment, and then… it was over. All that clutter that I’d piled and stacked and coated with dust for YEARS came tumbling out, released by a three-word key.
The conversation that followed was as rational as any I’d been having in my own head, but it somehow felt more real. Talking to another human usually does. And just as I’d hoped, taking my mother into my confidence added a level of accountability that I’d been sorely lacking, and it was the thing that ultimately motivated me to get well. It’s like how people behave differently when they know they’re on camera—I’d turned the lens of someone else’s concern and judgment onto myself, and when I was tempted to regress, I remembered that she was watching. I thought about how sad and disappointed she would be to know I was harming myself, and I thought about how happy she would be to know I was getting better.
So yes, mental decluttering is usually a solo mission—but it doesn’t have to be. If you’re struggling to the point that no combination of strategy, focus, and commitment can keep the shitstorm at bay, it’s perfectly okay to bring in reinforcements.
Some of them hold prescription pads; others just hold your best interests close to their hearts.