It Was Never About Mexico

On loneliness, food, control, and the decisions we make for the wrong reasons.

I have been thinking about Mexico lately. Not Mexico as a country. Mexico as a memory. Or maybe as a turning point in my life.

To be truthful, I remember very little about Mexico. At least not in the way I remember other periods of my life. I don't remember the order of events. I don't remember most of the people I met. I don't remember many of the places I visited. What I remember are feelings. I remember loneliness. I remember discomfort. I remember weight gain. I remember crying. I remember feeling trapped. Mexico exists in my memory like a collection of disconnected images and emotions that don't quite fit together. I guess the body kept the score long after the chronology disappeared.

Mexico was never a soul-led choice. It was a reasonable choice. The kind of choice that looks impressive on paper and earns approving nods from everyone around you. Monterrey was one of the best business schools available through my university exchange program. It promised adventure, prestige, a new language, a new culture, and career opportunities I believed would give me an advantage later in life. At twenty years old, it felt like the obvious choice. Looking back, I am not sure it was my choice at all. I think it was the choice my ambition made. The choice my ego made. The choice of a young woman who wanted to prove she could do hard things and become someone.

For years, I described my semester abroad in Monterrey as one of the worst experiences of my life. If I am honest, part of me still does. Yet something keeps bringing me back there lately. Maybe because I am writing about my relationship with control and my oh-so-called addictive behaviors. Maybe because food started to mean something different than fuel and nourishment to me and I experienced the beginning of my eating disorder there. Or maybe simply because I am finally old or wise enough to see things differently.

"You've put on so much weight. What happened?" These are the first words my mom told me when she came to visit me in Mexico with my dad. I hadn’t seen them for two months and her comment hurt. I felt stabbed multiple times by the only person that was supposed to support me no matter what.

I know that she was trying to hurt me. She was my mom. She loved me. How could she? Looking back, I can see that she was trying to help me. Until this day, my mom has always had an interesting way to show her girls support. And at twenty years old, I didn't see how her comment could in any way support me and make me feel love no matter what. All I heard was “You are fat. I don’t like that on you.”

The truth is that I had gained weight. Food had become the only thing that felt familiar in the massive mental chaos I entered when I decided to go to Mexico. It was supposed to be the most expansive time of my life where I was going to uncover a new culture, make new friends, and learn a new language. Instead, I spent my time in the past, reliving the days that led me to her unpleasant comment.

I had just broken up with my boyfriend. Not just any boyfriend, but the only man I had ever truly loved. I had pushed away the only friend I had in Mexico. I was six thousand miles away from home. I didn't feel connected to my classmates. I didn't feel connected to the city. I didn't feel connected to myself. Everything familiar had disappeared all at once except for food.

Since food was my currency. Let me tell you this. I never tasted in Mexican food. I was terrified of it. I refused to eat most of it because I thought it would make me gain weight. And it was far for the familiarity I would crave at that time of my life. Instead, I ate the same things every single day. Pasta. Tuna. Crackers. Chocolate. Over and over again. I inflated. At the time, it never occurred to me that my body might be responding to stress, loneliness, grief, fear, and isolation. It never occurred to me that there was a reason I kept reaching for the same foods. I thought I simply lacked discipline.

Maybe that is why Mexico feels so important today.

As I write this, I am starting to wonder if Mexico wasn't the beginning of my eating disorder. Maybe it was the beginning of something even deeper. I spent years focusing on my mom’s comment when the comment itself was never really the story. The story was what was happening underneath it.

Maybe it was the beginning of my relationship with control.

For years, I thought my eating disorder began with food. Today, I am not so sure. Food may have simply been the language through which something deeper expressed itself. What I was really trying to control wasn't my weight, my appetite, or my body. I was trying to control uncertainty. I was trying to control loneliness. I was trying to control grief. I was trying to control the discomfort of becoming someone new in a place where I no longer recognized myself.

Food just happened to be the easiest thing to manage.

Or at least, that is what I believed.

I can see myself trying to regain control of a life that felt completely out of control. I exercised more. I restricted more. I promised myself I would do better. I negotiated with food. I negotiated with my body. I started believing that if I could just become disciplined enough, I could solve whatever was wrong inside of me.

What I didn't understand at the time was that I wasn't trying to fix my body. I was trying to soothe my pain.

The irony is that the more disconnected I became from myself, the more I tried to control myself. I thought control would save me. What control actually did was teach me how to ignore myself.

That realization feels uncomfortable to write because discipline has given me so much in life. Discipline helped me build businesses. Discipline helped me breastfeed my children. Discipline helped me create routines, stay committed, and accomplish goals. I am deeply grateful for it.

But there is another side to discipline. There is a version of it that slowly turns into rigidity. A version that teaches the mind to override the body. A version that convinces us that every signal coming from within needs to be managed, corrected, optimized, or conquered.

I wonder if that training started in Mexico. I wonder if that was the first time I consciously decided that my mind needed to become stronger than my body.

What is funny is that when I left for Mexico, I thought I was making the most mature decision of my life. I wanted adventure. I wanted to prove that I could do it. I wanted to prove that I was independent. I wanted the experience. I wanted the status that came with studying abroad. I wanted to be the girl who could leave everything behind and thrive six thousand miles away from home.

As I write these words, I realize that Mexico may have been the first major decision I made entirely with my head. I never thought about it that way before. I always thought Mexico taught me about loneliness or resilience or independence. Now I am wondering if Mexico taught me something else entirely.

Maybe Mexico taught me what happens when I stop listening to myself. I don't think my intuition wanted Mexico. I think my ego wanted Mexico. I think the version of me who wanted to impress people wanted Mexico. I think the version of me who equated achievement with worthiness wanted Mexico.

The deeper part of me was probably terrified. The interesting thing is that I don't regret going. Not at all. At least not from where I stand today. In fact, I think it was one of the most important experiences of my life. Because after Mexico, something changed.

I started choosing differently. Mexico became the reference point. The place where I learned what misalignment feels like. The place where I learned that a decision can look perfect on paper and still be wrong for you. The place where I learned that growth is not always expansive.

Sometimes growth feels like contraction. Sometimes growth feels like becoming smaller before becoming bigger.

Twenty-year-old me thought Mexico was going to expand my world. Instead, it turned my world upside down. I lost myself there for a while. I became smaller, quieter, more disconnected from myself than I had ever been before.

Forty-one-year-old me can finally see that perhaps losing myself was exactly what allowed me to find myself again. Maybe Mexico wasn't meant to expand my world in the way I imagined. Maybe it was meant to expose the cracks in the version of me I had built up until then. Maybe it was meant to show me what happens when I abandon myself in pursuit of a life that looks right from the outside.

I still think Mexico was one of the hardest experiences of my life. I also think it changed the trajectory of my life. For a long time, I thought those two statements contradicted each other. Today, I think they belong together.