I was tagged

So Rebecca over at Adventures in Applied Math tagged me for this meme. I’m finally getting around to doing it.

Here are the rules:

• I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.
• Each player writes eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Okay, so eight random facts/habits about myself. What to share? I feel like it should be something I haven’t shared yet…but maybe I’ll allow myself a little detail on things I’ve only mentioned in passing. I tend to be a pretty open person, so expect some of these to be pretty personal!

1. Last summer I was diagnosed with skin cancer. It was on my face, so I had to get a special surgery called Mohs surgery. Actually, I could really write a lot about this, so I think maybe I’ll write a separate post on it.
2. As a kid and teenager I was a very competitive athlete. I trained over 20 hours per week from when I was about 10 until I was 17, when I decided to stop competing in the sport.
3. Perhaps the largest reason I stopped competing at 17 was because I had been bulimic for many months, and I thought that if I stopped competing and removed myself from the pressure of the sport, I might be able to get better more easily. It took me another three years to finally rid myself of the bulimia, so sometimes I wondered about whether stopping competing was really the right thing. But I think, these days, that it was helpful for me to start learning how to be much easier on myself. I think about the way the thoughts in my mind went back then, and I seem like a stranger to myself.
4. I have gained weight steadily since I stopped being bulimic, at about 20 pounds a year. Or maybe it was 30 for the first two and then not much this last year. Anyhow, I’ve been bulimia-free for 3 years and I weigh 60 pounds more than I did when I was a competitive, eating-disordered athlete. I am definitely overweight now, but I try to work out and exercise. I am scared of becoming too concerned about my physical appearance again, because I still have those feelings sometimes. At the same time I want to lose at least 20 lbs before I try to get pregnant, because I know that being overweight leads to more complications in pregnancy.
5. My parents are getting a divorce, right now. They just sold their house last week. I am really happy for my mom, for whom the relationship hadn’t been working for over a decade. I am sad for my dad, who may have been a bit clueless about how my mom was feeling, and is now kind of surprised, and definitely lonely.
6. Husband and I have a lot of credit card debt. This was really hard for me to accept when we first got into it, because I had grown up in a very comfortable upper middle class family, and we had always paid all our balances in full each month. I had been raised to respect money and savings and not to spend money I didn’t have, and I felt ashamed that we had gotten into this debt. Over time, I’ve learned to deal with it and accept it as a function of the stage of our lives we were in at the time – we are both trying to follow our dreams for what we will do with our lives, but neither of our dream pursuits make much money at this early stage of the career.
7. I adopted Fluffy when I lived in the dorms. At the time I had a walk-through double, and my roommate said it was ok. Cats are most definitely not allowed in the dorms, but I had met someone else who kept a cat, and I longed for a cat quite strongly. So I went to the ASPCA and adopted Fluffy, who was three years old at the time. I had been deciding between her and another cat, and when I picked her up again, she put her paws on either side of my neck and cuddled her head against me, and I was won over. To this day she sometimes gives me these “cat hugs.” I adore her!
8. I am a very picky eater. When I was a kid, my mom told me that she had been a picky eater too, and that her family told her having me was her punishment for being so hard to feed (jokingly). I live in the very multicultural NYC, but I won’t eat Indian, Ethiopian, Thai, or sushi. Or nuts. Or any seafood. And the list could go on…

Now I am supposed to tag people, but I don’t really want to. If you are reading my blog and you want to do this meme too, consider yourself tagged!