Here's something I never would have expected about gaining weight: It's incredibly selfish. Actually, I would imagine that a lot of people on any type of diet feel selfish, but because I can only speak from my perspective, that is what I am going to do.
I think in life in general I'm probably more selfish than I want to be, but I try not to be a selfish person. I am a huge people-pleaser, so 99 percent of the time I'd much rather everyone else get their way, no matter how inconvenient it is or how unhappy it might make me. So when I started having to follow a strict weight-gain meal plan, I was incredibly uncomfortable with how selfish it required me to be, but I also think I made some mistakes in trying to please everyone else around me.
When I got out of the hospital, everything had to revolve around me. I had to stick to a fairly rigid schedule, if a meal got too late it usually resulted in me staying up all night just to fit in all of my food for that day. I remember the day I got out of the hospital, my dad was leading a Christmas parade in our neighborhood. I was so excited to be home in time to participate, and I volunteered to dress in the Rudolph costume my parents owned and ride in the back of my dad's truck to wave at all the kids. But I was out grocery shopping with my mom that evening and it took longer than expected, so the kids didn't get to see Rudolph because she was hiding in the passenger seat chomping on a Clif bar. I thought once I got used to my schedule things like that wouldn't happen, but it turned out that nearly everything my family or friends wanted to do was a constant "No" from me. Other theatre people are probably familiar with that joke, "I can't, I have rehearsal." Well this was literally, "I can't, I have to eat."
At first, I also was not supposed to move much, so I had to be pushed in a wheelchair pretty much everywhere I went. Most of the previous semester my roommate was wheelchair-bound, and although I was of course happy to help her get wherever she needed to go I also remembered that pushing a wheelchair is significantly more strenuous than walking on your own, so I felt so guilty making people push me.
Once I got back to school and settled into more of a routine and less of trying-to-celebrate-the-holidays mayhem, the everything revolving around me issue got a little better, but even now the feelings of selfishness haven't completely disappeared. At school, not only was I trying to schedule meetings and friends around my classes, but around eating too. People always wanted to work on group projects or rehearse for scenes right after class, but I needed at least half an hour to eat something substantial. I turned down almost every invitation to socialize because unless something was planned days in advance, it caused me way too much stress to figure out how to schedule in cooking and eating around being spontaneous.
Now, I have been able to go back to a little bit of flexibility, but there are still times that I feel incredibly self-centered. At camps I have more than once made Ashley entertain the kids on her own so I could have a few extra minutes to eat. I hardly ever walk our dog because I have to eat something right when I get home, which is often just about the time he needs to go out. I went to a buffet with my friends the other day and felt horrible making them all sit there and watch me finish eating long after they were done and ready to leave.
But I'm not writing this to make you all think I'm a bad person. I'm writing this for anyone else who feels like they have no choice but to make the world revolve around them, whether it's for an illness or a strict diet or something else. The bad news is, I don't have much advice for how to feel less selfish. What I can say is that it gets easier if you allow yourself to accept the fact that you have to make everything about you, for a while anyway.
For a long time, even though I felt selfish, I tried my very hardest to fight it. I was always thinking about how I could appease people in every area where I had some sort of control. This is just one tiny example, but I think it proves my point. Until probably the end of March, I would bend over backwards to make sure that I had dinner with my parents as many times as possible. I planned my day around family dinner at 7. But I am the least punctual person on Earth, so it was not uncommon for me to be making lunch at 3 o'clock and then have to figure out where to put my afternoon snack so that I could still be ready for dinner. And then sometimes dinner would be ready at 6:45, and sometimes it was eight or nine o'clock before my mom started to cook. Ashley would never join us for dinner, she always did her own thing, and to be honest I was really jealous. How much easier she has it, I'd think, but there was no way I could do that. I didn't want to hurt my parents' feelings or let anyone down if I all of a sudden just stopped showing up for dinner.
I'm not at all proud of how I started to be more selfish, but one day I got in a terrible fight with my dad because I had asked him to make a dinner that he used to love making for us as kids. I had hit a stalling point in my weight gain and needed to increase my calories again, and I thought he'd be so excited because this was a very high-calorie food and because he usually loves cooking his few "specialties" for us. I don't want to go too much into the details of the argument because I know I was feeling extremely sensitive, and I'm sure I didn't interpret what was said correctly. But, out of anger (again, not proud of this) I ended up staying to myself for the next couple days, which meant eating completely on my own schedule and making my own dinners. Of course I got over what happened, but I realized that it was a million times less stressful to be selfish about my dinner. If I was ready to eat with my parents or wanted what my mom made, great, but if not, that was fine too. I stopped freaking out every time an outing took longer than I thought it would, and sometimes I even didn't set an alarm in the morning to make sure I started breakfast early enough! I didn't have to stress about feeling bad if I asked my mom what was for dinner so I could make my meal plan and she didn't know yet, or feel like a jerk if I started eating before my parents sat at the table. It seems so stupid that such a little thing made a big difference, but it truly did. I made some other changes around this time too, but this was when I finally started to gain at my goal pace. Yeah, it was selfish, and of course I wanted to spend that time with my mom and dad, but getting back to health was my top priority and this was one change that taught me that being selfish might make that goal easier.
So I'm not saying to go out and try to be a selfish person. I very much am not encouraging anyone to do that. What I hope you take away from this is, if you are recovering from some kind of illness, or dealing with an eating disorder, or trying to follow an important diet, you are probably going to have to accept that sometimes you need to be selfish. You deserve to be selfish, because you are dealing with something really difficult or scary or uncomfortable, and the truth is that the people who really love you want you to take care of yourself before you worry about pleasing them. It's not like you're going to be selfish all the time; maybe let the person who pushed you in a wheelchair all day choose the movie you'll watch later or empty the dishwasher since you weren't around to help do the dinner dishes. But know that if there are certain things that you need to be selfish about, accept it. When you don't have a choice, feeling bad or trying to please other people is only going to cause stress for everyone. I certainly don't like being consciously selfish, but I have come to terms with it. It helps to put myself in other people's shoes. If one of my friends was on a high-calorie diet, of course I'd much rather sit at a restaurant with them for an extra fifteen minutes then them be silently stressing all night that they didn't eat enough, or when my sister eats dinner at midnight because she slept in so long I'm just grateful that she feels well enough to eat at all. Moral of the story, I guess, is that in order to just keep eating, you might have to learn to be selfish sometimes. Just know that you're not the only one, and that hopefully you can look forward to the day where you'll get to support someone else who needs to be selfish.