Brave Girl Eating, take 3!

After my last post, I was unsure of how people (of the maybe three readers I have) would react. Luckily no one has yet. I just read another chapter, and in the midst of it (I can't pinpoint exactly when), I realized I was still reading as a student, rather than as a future teacher. It's hard to approach literature from such different angles! I have to consider that my students someday will only be a few years younger than I am now, as I'm studying to educate them. It blows my mind. So, as I was reading this chapter, Harriet Brown explained a small blip in her family's journey, when Kitty (her anorexic daughter) wanted to return to gymnastics, after seven weeks of recovery and re-feeding. As I mentioned, I did gymnastics for twelve years, and it contributed to my not-so-healthy eating habits. The emphasis on the body (especially in leotards) contributed to Harriet's decision to not let Kitty participate in the high school gymnastics team. Kitty lashed out, saying, "You want to take away the only thing I care about!" This is precisely how I felt when my mother pulled me out of gymnastics when I was 14. Like I said in my last post, I identified myself as a gymnast. First and foremost, I was a gymnast. Being pulled out is one of the hardest things I have ever dealt with. It may sound crazy, but when something dominates your life so much, and you are so dedicated to it, cutting it out of your life cold-turkey has devastating effects. I remember being so upset any time I looked at the clock and realized that gymnastics practice was being held at that moment and I wasn't there. I walked around in a daze, without a purpose for weeks and weeks on end. I think it was longer than that. You may think me petty to hold such a grudge against my mother for withdrawing me from an extra-curricular, but to this day, I don't know if I can honestly say I ever forgave her. It's too late to re-enroll- I'm way past my peak, but I still think about it all the time. What if I had continued? Where would I be now? Gymnastics was such an integral part of my life, that to ask myself those questions doesn't seem silly to me at all, but totally and completely valid. As I was saying- I've been reading as a student, but in my sudden realization of this, I tried to think as a teacher. While I think it would be dangerous to read this book in a high school setting (unleashing its horrors on impressionable teenage girls (and boys)), I think the way people identify themselves is an important theme in this book. While Kitty identified herself as a gymnast, students in her school identified her only as "an anorexic." Similarly, her doctors viewed her as a patient, and her friends as "recovering." Harriet's desperately tries to make it clear that her daughter, while all of those things, is none of those things. She is so much more. Only one and one's family can truly identify the parts that contribute to a person, and can recognize that the sum of the parts does not equal the whole. I think, if introduced to a high school classroom, that topic could be extensively explored in an introductory essay. Ask a student how they identify themselves. In one word. In one sentence... and then to explain that only knowing those things does not allow a person to know you completely, or even close to that. In all honesty, I think people enjoy writing and speaking about themselves. What does anyone know better, besides their own person and personality? This mentality allows for countless direction for one to take one's paper in (assuming I assign something like this one day, which I'd like to), and when someone knows their topic, inside and out, they generally take a passionate approach to it. I foresee good results!