I grew up in a household where both of my parents had abandoned the religions they grew up with. I will say it was a very interesting experience.
However, there were a few religious customs that my parents clung onto with white knuckles. For example, we always made homemade challah bread and said prayers before dinner. But still, the most central cultural tradition to my life was Lent. My mother, who was raised Catholic, never explained Lent in a religious lens. It was an excuse, a reason, to give up something we enjoyed as repercussions for our sins throughout the year. In my house, we mostly gave up food.
I had an undiagnosed eating disorder. I say this to provide context for my life and to give a deeper understanding of how this religious event impacted me. This started when I was eight years old. I have never been formally diagnosed, but I grew up heavily restricting my eating. Seriously, the amount of times I send food photos to my mom to prove that I’m not lying when I say I’m eating has to mean something.
My parents cared, and still do care, very much about me. But there are some things in the world they couldn’t shield me from, and one of those was body image issues. The easiest way in my adolescent mind to fix those issues was to decrease the amount of food I was eating.Â
I want to be clear in that this religious event is not inherently evil. It’s not wrong by any means. But when I weaponized it in an attempt to hide my eating disorder, or make it feel “normal,” that is evil. It escalated every year. One year it was no chocolate, the next it was no candy or sweets. One year was no bagels, to cut down on my carbohydrate consumption. As someone with Jewish grandparents, who love bagels, that was a hard six weeks to swallow. Last year, I gave up meat for Lent. I did not eat much meat, so it was not a huge stretch, but I gave up an entire food group.
Clearly, this is not healthy by any means, but by the time I was 18, it was normal to give up absurd amounts of food for a religious celebration that had no religious meaning to me. It was just an excuse to restrict my diet and push the boundaries of what my body could handle in an unhealthy way.
As Lent approached this year, I realized it was the first year I would be away from my family for the beginning of the season. I realized I would not be expected to partake in the Fat Tuesday fasnachts binge that left me sick to my stomach or the Lent diet that led to me craving everything I couldn’t have. I didn’t have to sit and figure out what food, or food group, I would take out of my diet for the whole six week Lent period.
This year, I decided to not participate in Lent. In fact, I even went to Irving’s and got a super unhealthy pizza bagel because I knew it would make me happy.
I’m trying to use my college years to grow as a person, and grow beyond the struggles I’ve faced growing up. I’m trying my best to cut out the things that no longer bring me joy. Lent was the next thing on the chopping block in hopes of becoming a healthier person — both physically and mentally. I don’t think I’ll reintroduce Lent into my life again until I know I can move beyond it being a period where I starve myself in hopes of salvation. It’s so much more important to me to enjoy the time that I’m here and really feel like I’m living to the fullest.