Of Beasts and Breadcrumbs

When Hansel and Gretel found the witch’s gingerbread house in the woods, do you think they stopped worrying about their lost breadcrumbs?

Do you think there was even a moment of relief when they realized there was no way to go back, only on?

In August, 2020, I stepped off the path, but I left a breadcrumb trail.

When the COVID-19 lockdown started in March, my work schedule changed drastically, giving me more free time and flexibility than I had experienced since before high school. For most of my life, unproductive time has made me viscerally uncomfortable. As a high-achieving student and general busybody, I was more comfortable with a packed schedule. Too much free time made me crazy, so I filled vacation days with challenges, projects, long hikes, cleaning sprees, and a regular practice of trying to reinvent myself in a three-day weekend. I have always longed for the metamorphosis of the summer vacation: coming back to school suntanned and svelte, a whole, actualized version of yourself. I never quite grew out of that, even when summer vacations disappeared. Every bit of time to myself was an opportunity to change into something better (read: thinner, prettier). After all, so many of the stories I had loved growing up featured these kinds of transformations: from beast to beauty, hag to princess.

When faced with long months of extra time, the planner came out, and one of the first things to go on it was a fitness routine.

Like many others, I was under the impression that if I only had the time to exercise, I would be unstoppable. Hours in the gym or on the mat. Endless online classes. Hikes every weekend. Facing down the shapeless smear of my future, I found comfort in the idea that I would emerge from it stronger, smaller, sparkling, whole. What could possibly stand in the way of a grueling exercise plan when the world was crumbling around me?

I made it to July.

July was the last straw. I remember weighing myself for the first time in years the August after I graduated college and making a promise. The promise was to lose ten pounds. Four years later, coming on the anniversary, I had not lost ten pounds. It was like Cinderella picking the lentils out of the ashes: an endless, tedious task. I had been trying for four years to lose this crumby ten pounds, fighting it with everything I had, counting the calories, counting the minutes of exercise, timing and planning and coming at it from different angles, and here we were, on this treadmill of a path, having gotten nowhere closer to our destination.

In August, I stepped off the path. And I was immediately, hopelessly lost. For anyone who has spent most of their years on earth thinking about their bodies in this way, you may understand what I mean. Suddenly there were no rules. I could eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and exercise in the ways that I wanted to, if at all. Nothing had numbers anymore, or values. And I didn’t know which way was up.

The most upsetting thing about leaving that path and entering the lawless woods was that now I could see it from a better vantage point, for what it was. Habits and behaviors that were second nature suddenly seemed strange. Why did I spend so much time doing these strange motions alone in my living room to Lady Gaga? What would happen if I didn’t plan out the whole week’s meals in the context of macros? And why was I so afraid of bread? Once I stopped doing these things, welcomed bread back into my life, it amazed me how much I had restricted myself, and for so long. That I had been acting as my own wicked stepmother, assigning myself endless tasks, denying myself the love I needed. And for nothing! None of this had resulted in the magical transformation I had desired, so why keep it up? Why bend in servitude to things that don’t serve me?

Let me be clear: I did not magically lose the ten pounds once I abandoned my restrictions. I found the gingerbread house and went to town. For about two weeks straight I didn’t even walk around the block, ordered pizza three times, and spent a full day just eating buttered toast. After those two weeks, a witch appeared, ready to punish me for my gluttony by fattening me up and sticking me in a cooking pot. I was so afraid of her that I started to follow my shameful toast-crumb path back to where I had started, but I found that I really didn’t want to go back.

For months, I went back and forth along that breadcrumb path. I found that I still craved nutritious food, still loved long hikes and the occasional Lady Gaga dance party. But I didn’t return to the gingerbread house, and I didn’t step back onto the path, and I didn’t lose ten pounds (although mysteriously, I didn’t gain any either). And when the new year came, the annual tradition of swearing that this would be the year of transformation found me in the woods, and I ran. I lost the breadcrumbs, the gingerbread house, all of it.

Since the first of the year, I have been taking one tentative step at a time through the wilderness. I am learning to listen. To hear what my body needs, and when, and how much. I am finding ways to move through the world in a skin that feels like mine. I still drop the occasional crumb. I still look for gingerbread houses. I still fear the witch. But I am beginning to wonder if it would be so bad, after all, to stay a beast.